A street-walking cheetah with a heart full of napalm
A love letter to the lyrics of Search And Destroy by The Stooges
For a man who communicates more in grunts than words Iggy Pop was a hell of a writer.
Watch his live performances or listen to his records and it’s his animalism you remember. The screams, the moves. Those uniquely expressive bodily contortions coined an entire language on their own — a kind of twisted, instinctual poetry that squeezed itself out on to the stage every night, forcibly, like some sort of id toothpaste. He is rock and roll’s Caliban, its deviant psyche taken human form.
If that was all he’d done it would be enough.
But it wasn’t.
When he was a kid he’d watched Howdy Doody. You could write a letter and they’d read it out on the show. Each week they’d remind you how to make the cut — “25 words or less”. It was a creative constraint Iggy would remember. Years later, still living in Ann Arbor and starting to write lyrics to accompany the dropout headfuck howl his band were improvising in the garage whenever they weren’t too stoned not to, that advice was always there. 25 words or less.
“Keep it short,” as he says in Jim Jarmusch’s documentary Gimme Danger, “and none of it will be wrong”.
And it wasn’t.
Not that right had to mean clinical. Iggy’s words are like those moves — you feel them before you understand them. Ambiguous, but effective. They hit you in the gut before they make their way to your brain.
Down on the street where the faces shine, he sang in 1970 and it’s pure Friday night illicit energy.
Deep in the night I’m lost in love and it’s exhilarating, dangerous surrender.
The song — Down On The Street, from Funhouse — is as exciting as it is unsettling. Where a thousand eyes look at you, he sings. Are they looking out of hunger, or lust, or fear? It’s not clear. But boy do you feel it.
In Down On The Street he’s exposed, out in the open. On the wrong side of the tracks, mainlining urban anxiety. Years later in 77 he was mainlining almost everything else, still on the street but cocooned as he travelled through what The Passenger calls the city’s ripped backside. Working with Bowie managed to both arrest and exacerbate his natural tendency towards self-destruction. Down On The Street had been a warm-up for a riot, a way to force connection through violence, but the self-absorbed strut of, say, Nightclubbing, isn’t interested in connection. No one else gets a look in. The words are disco synthetic, coke-vacant. Glassy-eyed and assured.
Nightclubbing, we’re nightclubbing, we’re what’s happening he sings, like a robot, unimpeachable. In 1977, Iggy was still out on the street, and acting like he owned it.
Somewhere between Down On The Street and Nightclubbing, chronologically, lyrically, spiritually, was Search and Destroy.
In it The Stooges’ squall had a new urgency. Drums and bass are AWOL, the force of their sound whipped out of earshot by the bluster and swirl of James Williamson’s guitar hurricane. Iggy’s at a higher pitch, the only bit of the audible range Williamson and producer Bowie had left him. The music fills the space like the water filling a room in a sinking ship; Iggy grabs on and occupies the thin strip of air at the top. He sounds urgent, desperate, but forceful and — still, despite his delinquent state — stylish.
His words are some of the best he ever wrote.
I’m a street-walking cheetah with a heart full of napalm
It is perfect Iggy. A street-walking cheetah pretty much describes his look at the time — emaciated, lithe, hungry look in his eye:
More than that, it is perfect because it when Iggy is on the prowl he is both predator and prey. Streetwalker is slang for prostitute. He is always half victim, half threat. That there’s no distinction is just as it should be — Iggy exists at the inflection point of ‘punk’, the moment it switches meaning, morphing from a generational or sexual insult, to a musical or stylistic label. He inhabits both worlds willingly. It’s a point often missed by every headbangin’ bro chanting nowIwannabeyourdog at the climax of Iggy’s gigs that rock has no more powerful representation of masculine self-abasement.
But it’s A heart full of napalm that best makes Iggy into the walking, human IED we know him to be. That explosive power wrapped not around his chest but inside it. He is uncontrollable. Any surge of emotion can flick the switch; the human heart can’t be shut off.
Where does it come from, this raw power?
I’m a runaway son of the nuclear A-bomb
He’s the product of a broken home, an America torn apart but too easily comforted by mutually assured destruction. Nothing for it but to take on the challenge for himself. He answers to no one, but he is damn sure someone will be made to answer to him. He knows he is the chickens coming home to roost that Malcolm X warned America about, only this time it’s the revenge of the middle-class dropout.
I am the world’s forgotten boy
The one who searches and destroys
I think Iggy’s power comes from pain, the pain of being wilfully misunderstood and discarded. It makes for an endlessly renewable energy source. For all its threat, Search And Destroy is a cry for help, albeit one with a hair-trigger, push-the-button deathwish lust in there too, just to confuse anyone too straight to understand:
Honey gotta help me please
Somebody gotta save my soul
Baby detonate for me
The second verse takes this deathwish sado-masochist love-and-rockets thing as far as it will go.
Look out honey, ’cause I’m using technology
Ain’t got time to make no apology
He’s a missile now — laser-focused and in a hurry. But this isn’t macho warmongering. It is full-assault Cold War anxiety. Self-immolation beckons.
Soul radiation in the dead of night
Love in the middle of a fire fight
Once again you feel these lines before you understand them. But boy do they roll off the tongue.
Back to the chorus.
Honey gotta strike me blind
Somebody gotta save my soul
Baby penetrate my mind
He needs release. Oh and that last line. Four words to subvert gender norms and intellectualise lust quicker than you can say rock around the clock. I can think of few writers who can say so much with so little.
He keeps it short. None of it is ever wrong.
And it still sounds transgressive. That gender switch is something not even the most camp of glam rockers would have dared attempt in 1972, and few would today. (Kurt Cobain’s Rape Me perhaps?) Iggy willingly makes himself vulnerable. It’s a paradoxical show of power. Half victim, half threat. A true punk play.
One of the first things I read about Iggy was the story of his army draft medical. It was at the height of Vietnam. The process involved a naked inspection where he deliberately gave himself an erection. The officers — reactionary, straight, real men’s men — found it repulsive. They refused to draft him. Pretending to get turned on got him thrown out.
When you scare people more than their judgement scares you, their fear becomes your weapon.
Iggy’s power is to not give a fuck. It is an inspiration to us all.
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