Word: playing
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...French is perfect/So is her butt." The ageing rocker wannabes, perhaps more mortified than most--both by the low, low volume of their evening of youth recaptured and by their own girlfriends' imperfect French and butt--begin yelling. And yelling quite audibly, since Iggy is after all singing acoustic. "Play some music" and "Please don't suck" and so on. So if there's one constant in Iggy Pop a.k.a. James Newell Osterberg's career, it's that he pisses off his audience. Bit more interesting when he did by stabbing himself with glass, though. Or rolling in peanut butter...
...Even harder to tell how to take what happens next: Iggy and his flunkies play "Raw Power," letting loose enthusiasm genuine and copious. Hard to criticize Iggy performing one of his great songs, and performing it pretty well. And there's the problem, I think. When Iggy was in the Stooges--before they became VH-1 "Behind the Music" material--the Stooges meant something. Sure they were a buncha high school drop-out glue-sniffing losers who made a hellacious garage noise with instruments they could barely play, but they had something to say. Basically: "screw you, I am human...
...lousy and thrusts every single great song they perform through a meat grinder which turns'em into generic hard rock, but still: "Raw Power," "Search and Destroy," "I Wanna Be Your Dog," "No Fun," "T.V. Eye," "Lust for Life," "The Passenger," "I Got a Right"--I'd watch him play these songs dead, they're so good...
...messed-up self; and for his audience, it was an authentic encounter with another; it was art . As the great Lester Bangs put it waaay back in 1970, the Stooges facilitated mass psychic liberation from the conditions of our own messed up lives. If they couldn't play their instruments, that was because anyone should be, could be on-stage and that was a/the point. And now he's a performer with an act and we're his consumer. Anyone who climbs on stage gets thrown off by security, which uses a really scary looking behind-the-head grip that...
...mind while doing their thing: "this is way too much fun, I can't believe they're actually paying me to do it!" Singer Gene seemed to be having an equally good time. When the rest of the band stepped off stage "to take a leak," leaving him to play a lighter-waving ballad, he barely managed to keep a straight face through the second verse. Though the band's musical mix of grungy alt-rock and bouncy hoe-down country would have made for a decent concert by itself, it was their presence and stage antics that made...