Marching forward with a discography littered with hidden gems, darker spectacles and hit tracks, Iggy Pop’s latest offerings are more of that same, intense consistency. Pop leans into the tamer side of his latter-day vocal range and offers up a dance-infused pop track that feels quite light when compared to his most notable era. Easy it may be to write off the Every Loser single as a look back on those wildcard days with David Bowie in the later 1970s or the glorious era of The Stooges, it appears that is the whole point. A rather apt takedown of drugs and the strung-out style Pop can remember from those full-on, fear-filled days.
Strung Out Johnny opens with grand intentions, masking its real meaning and managing to do so until its second verse. The obvious illusion is a nicely worked synth-pop piece, one that extracts Pop from the guitar world he was once placed in. This is not the garage rock status Pop was once known for. This is a tad more upbeat, a new genre to explore the nature of drugs and rock and roll now that the era has long passed by. Pop appears to understand that particularly well, Strung Out Johnny receives a great lyrical treatment and turns what marks itself initially as an upbeat pop song into a sincere and sombre warning against heroin. Pop’s music may be forever infused with that thanks to Trainspotting, but Strung Out Johnny feels an obvious takedown of that relation.
Autobiographical in obvious parts, Strung Out Johnny has a good sensibility and message behind it but fails to mount any real, pure or exciting stage of instrumental greatness. Open lyrics that reflect on the glory days of a career put to a relatively shrill synth, one that Pet Shop Boys would have used on Opportunities. It is hard to knock the man too much though, for what Strung Out Johnny could achieve and for the age at which Pop cracks it out is certainly impressive, just not incredible. It is the status that will guide him through what is a powerful track to engage those with his upcoming work on Every Loser, but not the most inspired musically. Pop has always struggled to find that balance, though never shied away from trying out something strange, something new. Nightclubbing and The Passenger are two instrumentally different songs and if it is for the sake of variety, then Strung Out Johnny is like nothing else in his popular discography.
Much of the defence to Strung Out Johnny will be that Pop can still crack out an inspired bit of rock-like music. That he can, but the defence falls flat when moving past the lyrical quality. As great a writer as he always was, Pop concedes that his lyrical strength, the three-beat entrance into heroin, and the cries for help deeply set into those charming and haunting verses, are the key here. Despite all that well-intended strength, it is a shame to see Pop cannot quite mount an all-out attack on the instrumental section, which maintains a steady, mediocre course and does little to expand those writing charms. Solid teases of what Every Loser could be, but certainly not a track to go back to again and again, it runs its course by the third listen, even though that, Pop warns, is when you get hooked.
