Nasty, brutish and surprisingly resilient

It looks like something out of a fairy tale—the quaint, forest-sequestered cottage on the edge of Miami’s colorful Little Haiti neighborhood, with a walkway so long and winding it’d confound Hansel and Gretel. But there’s no dainty Disney princess waltzing around inside. You’ve stumbled upon the current lair of one of rockdom’s grumpiest ogres, notorious Stooges leader Iggy Pop. There’s no warm and fuzzy welcome mat at his door—in fact, you’d be well advised to get your trespassing ass off his private property. Now. “I don’t do a gate, but there’s this big hedge, which sets a certain tone—it’s a hint,” growls Iggy in his unmistakable Big Bad Wolf voice.

Iggy has a fable or two of his own to relate. As he tells it, only two brave souls have ever dared to breach the perimeter, one a yuppie real-estate shill, and the other “this young black man in a poorly fitting white dress shirt and slacks … [He] stopped in front of my drive, and then determinedly walked right up to my door and knocked. And I thought ‘Wellll… OK,’ and said hello. He had a gigantic scar, must’ve been a knife scar, the length of his throat, so he’d been around. And he was selling magazines, door-to-door, as they used to back in the day.

“And I would never, ever give somebody like that the time of day,” continues the artist born James Osterberg, who—at 59—has been around a bit himself. “But ya know what? My heart went out to him. He told me he was just out of prison and he was being rehabbed and he was doing this and could I help him out.” In a moment of weakness, Iggy paid cash for a subscription to Art And Architecture, then watched his mailbox for the mag, month after month. “And I started to think ‘That sonofabitch!’ But then it came, ya know? And I said ‘Yes!’ And now I think of that guy every month when I get my Art And Architecture—it kinda restored my faith.”

Faith that—judging by The Weirdness, Iggy’s fanged, feral new slugfest with the original Stooges (guitarist Ron Asheton and his drumming brother Scott)—has been in unusually short supply.

STILL ANGRY

This iconoclast should be content. In his rakish 38-year career, he presaged the punk movement with stellar Stooges albums like Fun House (1970) and Raw Power (1973); was rescued from heroin addiction by David Bowie, who presided over his two landmark ’77 solo sets The Idiot and Lust For Life; and went on to become an in-demand character actor in films like Cry-Baby, Dead Man and the TV series The Adventures Of Pete & Pete. (His next gig? A voiceover as the revolutionary uncle in an animated adaptation of graphic novel Persepolis).

But Iggy still doesn’t sound at ease on record. The Steve Albini-produced Weirdness reads like a study in antisocial misanthropy. The album’s scruffy, squealing mix—thanks to the low-budget Shure mic Iggy chose over a pricey Neumann—puts his blunt vocals up front and in your face. “I should believe in human nature, but I don’t,” the singer snaps over stadium-huge drums in “You Can’t Have Friends.” And the deeper you descend into this ogre’s den, the darker it gets. “I’m the kinda guy who don’t pick up the phone,” Iggy drawls in the stomping “Free & Freaky,” which defends his curious habit of “walking all alone in a bathrobe in the park” (i.e., the woodsy expanse behind his cottage. He explains: “It’s my own park and I’ll do what the hell I want.”). Over the handclap percussion and ragged Asheton riff of “Greedy Awful People,” he sneers at conservative society and admits, “I can’t live among my class.” But he reserves his harshest barbs for the deceptively shout-a-long “My Idea Of Fun,” which builds verses like “I hate mankind” into the walloping chorus of “My idea of fun / Is killing everyone.”

Other Weirdness cuts may be less strident: “ATM” marvels at the royalties its composer continues to receive for such oft-covered classics as “Tonight,” “China Girl,” “Real Wild Child” and the enduring “Lust For Life”; “The End Of Christianity” celebrates his relationship with Nina, a woman he met at a Miami Beach pizza parlor a few years back. “I’m trying to think—No, I don’t have anything positive on there, they’re all negative, those lyrics,” cackles Iggy, kicking off his boots and curling his wiry, muscular frame into a booth in the café of his Hollywood hotel. The magazine hawker aside, Iggy has judged today’s self-centered civilization and found it wanting. “So the songs mean what they say, and nobody, I mean nobody, is nice.”