the day i discovered iggy pop

There should come a time in every teenager’s life when nothing makes sense anymore. The things that you held as truths in your youth should be exposed as bull shit. It’s a short leap from realizing Santa is make-believe to realizing God is make-believe to realizing all of society is full of shit. You should realize the preacher is full of shit, the tv newsman is full of shit, the politicians are all full of shit, your teachers are full of shit and even your parents are full of shit. And all the sudden this entire life that we humans are living on this planet shouldn’t make any fucking sense anymore. What have we been doing all this time? Nothing has a purpose. And by 1984, that is exactly where I was, but to compound all of that, Rock was dead as well. Rock music had sold out. It had gone Mtv on my ass.

So, I wandered aimlessly through my high school days (daze) like a plastic bag floating aimlessly along the expressway. I stayed up late watching TV all night and then slept during my classes all day. Days passed, weeks, maybe months… Then one night, there it was: on Cinemax, a teen movie called Repoman. I didn’t even actually watch the movie all the way through — it was horrid — but the music caught me off guard… the music shocked my ass back to life. This was the first time in weeks, months — maybe even years, that I had this feeling that maybe Rock wasn’t really dead after all. Maybe it had just been hiding or hibernating somewhere underground.

The title track from this movie in particular, just simply kicked my dick off. It was by some guy I had vaguely heard of, some guy named Iggy Pop. Sonically, lyrically, and in every other way, the song “Repoman” perfectly summed up what life was like for me at that moment.

It started off with two drumsticks smacking together calling a meeting of some sort to order. Then, immediately interrupting the senses, is a frantic, escalating minute-long guitar intro by former Sex Pistol Steve Jones. As this guitar freak-out grabs you, you almost don’t notice the rhythm section — which happens to be the rhythm section from Blondie in bass player Nigel Harrison and drummer Clem Burke. Burke’s work is especially inspired as, throughout the song, he haphazardly and sporadically throws in this clanking sound of a far-off but impending anvil, as if it is coming from inside a smoky steel mill. Also he mixes the crashing sounds of a car wreck throughout the song here and there. Then, after being introduced to the rhythm section, just as you are realizing this is going to be a crazy ass burner of a ride — something akin to getting the shit beat out of you by a gang of bullies who show no signs of letting up — in comes this raw, frenetic deep baritone voice with:

I was riding on a concrete slab
Down the river of a useless flab (land),
it was such a beautiful day,
I heard a witch doctor Say,
“I’ll turn you into a toadstool”

Da fuck is this?!?

It’s Iggy Fucking Pop, that’s what da fuck this is!

And with that opening stanza, I’m smacked with a bolt of lightning. I sat there on the living room sofa, just wide-eyed and slack jawed. What else could I do? For what better metaphor for the state of total disillusionment and disenfranchisement of America during the 80s could there be than this? Immediately I recognized Reagan in the line about the “witch doctor” spewing his voodoo economics. And the “useless flab” was America, or else it was the flab of skin that hung from Reagan’s neck — one or the other, I wasn’t sure, but either way, it was the perfect metaphor. Then “Riding on a concrete slab down the river” connoted corporate corruption and pollution and an obvious reference to Reagan’s massive corporate deregulation that was running rampant and allowing corporate plants and factories to pollute our air, water and land… Reagan was turning our beautiful American land into a toadstool (a poisonous fungus… toadstool disease) and Iggy Pop was calling him out for it!

From there, the lyrics spewed out like prophecy. Not understanding all of the words or meanings at first, I had to catch words and phrases in bits and pieces like a “sermonette, a TV cook” and “divinity throws you a curve” as I realized that Iggy was depicting a portrait of America in the mid-1980s as if he was an updated Nelson Algren.

Iggy was describing the two extremes of people who called themselves Americans. In a single phrase he was describing both the disillusioned mainstream Americans who fist-pumped the flag of the country with God on our side, the land that was founded on freedom of religion, those who “Amen-ed” the Right-wing televangelists that dominated the late-night TV screens and who worshipped our corporations, while at the same time Iggy was describing the lost, frustrated Americans, the “alcoholic at the bar” in which “every insult goes too far” and their disenfranchisement with our corporate government, a disenfranchisement that began with the Vietnam War — the war in which America completely lost its “moral” superiority in the world, that moment in history where it should have been obvious to an entire generation that the United States was no longer a country with God on our side. We’d been hood-winked folks and now we were all left “looking for the joke with a microscope”.

Iggy rages on and comes to the furious stanza that begins “I was pissing on the desert sands”. Desert sands is a reference to America’s involvement in the Middle East and the oil crisis that the country was in the midst of as corporate oil companies sought to increasingly pollute our environment (as well as the minds of the American people). Further evidence of this comes from the wistful lines “Things will never be the same” which sadly announces that the American dream is dead. And then the line “I run this gas and oasis” which further pounds the references to corporate oil company control even deeper. But beyond blaming the politicians and the clergy and the corporations, Iggy casts his last accusation to the people who allowed this to happen as he makes a sharp turn and points his arrow directly at himself — who is also myself, and every washed-out dude in America — and he perfectly encapsulates our entire existence, our entire point of view, our entire mind frame when he sings “I was a teenage dinosaur”…” using my head as an ashtray.” My sentiments exactly Mr. Pop. Egg-zactly! We may be pawns in the game, but who’s fault is that?

Okay then, so what now? Now that we’ve admitted all this bull shit and we’ve copped to our involvement in it, what can we do? What can any of us do? Toward the end of the song, if you have somehow survived this sonic and lyrical onslaught into its last stanza, Iggy proposes his resolve to all this bull shit. In brilliant ambiguity, Iggy proclaims that now he is the Repoman — and that he is now the one looking for the joke with a microscope as well. And it is this line that I am left pondering as the song dissolves into dissonant, nightmarish guitar licks wrapped in echoes.

Wait. What?

There were a few ways to interpret this ending. There was the glass is half empty interpretation or the glass is half full interpretation. Think about what a Repoman does. He repossesses something that someone has bought (or bought into)… something that someone can’t actually afford. So, is Iggy being critical of the Baby Boomers who have bought into this corporate way of existence for America? Is he expressing that these old fucks are a lost cause and now it is time for the youth of America to take back or “repossess” our country? Is it up to us to take back the old weird, American way? Or… or is he just saying it’s all a lost cause and let’s just ride it out for whatever worth it has left — then junk it? Like Slim Pickens riding the H-bomb into oblivion in Dr. Strangelove, we might as well whoop up some hell on our way out. Either way, no matter what ending you prefer, this song perfectly depicts the attitude and atmosphere of Reagan’s America in the 1980s.

The RepoMan song and the RepoMan soundtrack also served as my introduction to early 80s hardcore punk, as it did for millions of other middle Americans. 1984 was the year that signaled hardcore’s peak and its demise. My hardcore phase barely lasted a year as I transitioned to my prolonged college rock phase by 1985. There would be many bands that would try to emulate Iggy’s rage against the machine, but none would come close to having the impact and perfect poetic encapsulation that RepoMan did. It was a last sad, cry for help from the dying old weird America.

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