Of course, we’re used to hearing Iggy mellow out at this point- his last two solo efforts were a record of jazzy chansons and a low-key covers album featuring songs by the Beatles, Serge Gainsbourg, and Cole Porter. Forty years removed from the kamikaze death-trip fantasies of Raw Power, Ready to Die is the sound of Iggy admitting, “I’m too old for this shit.” And he’s come armed with not one, but three acoustic ballads to prove it. But where the latter reeked of forced misanthropy, there’s a cheeky nonchalance to his voice here that acknowledges the absurdity of such idle threats coming from a reasonably content 66 year old. Over the shake-appealing shimmy of “Gun” (essentially, a prettied-up “Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell”), Iggy sings, “If I had a fucking gun/ I could shoot at everyone,” a seemingly throwaway, suddenly topical line that recycles one of the more odious lyrics from The Weirdness (“my idea of fun/ is killing everyone”). But, unlike The Weirdness, the palpable lack of menace feels intentional, and more true to a band that, in the wake of Asheton’s death and their own advancing ages, has good reason to question its own mortality. All those years working in Silicon Valley haven't diminished Williamson's fiery fretwork (see: the “Gimme Danger”-styled grind of “Burn”), but Iggy's delivery is too wry to exude rage, the songs rarely rise above a mid-tempo chug, and Mackay's jovial sax blurts are way more roadhouse than Funhouse. And the tame, contained nature of even its most petulant tracks is all the more disappointing given that this band can still absolutely slay onstage. That's not to say Ready to Die matches the live-wire abandon of its 1973 antecedent- not even close. And the band's name reassumes its "Iggy &" prefix, signaling another change in direction: Where the evil alchemy of the band's first two albums proved impossible to recapture on The Weirdness, Raw Power's more playful, darkly humorous trash-canned rock 'n' rolla provides the Stooges v4.0 with a more easily pliable template to work from. This is the iteration of the Stooges that has been touring steadily since 2010, with Mike Watt replacing Asheton on bass (as he did for the late Dave Alexander in 2007) and honorary fifth Stooge Steve Mackay on sax. Conveniently enough, their post-reunion narrative can simply mimic that of their first phase: after the group fell apart following the commercial failure of 1970’s Funhouse, Iggy shrewdly reassembled the Stooges for 1973’s Raw Power, by recruiting James Williamson and demoting Ron Asheton to the bassist position. But where the allergic reaction to The Weirdness and the untimely 2009 passing of Ron Asheton would seemingly discourage surviving Stooges Iggy Pop and Ron’s drummer-brother Scott Asheton from extending their discography, this band has survived bad reviews and the loss of a founding member before.
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