One last collaboration between Iggy Pop and David Bowie. On paper, Blah Blah Blah has it all. Two titans of the studio and stage back together after great successes like Lust for Life, moody essentials with The Idiot and with this, a commercial effectiveness. It is blatant in its materialism and the decision not to hide this presents a blunt effectiveness. Pop knows what he wants. Listeners do too. To masquerade Blah Blah Blah as anything but a pop album with its sights solely on the top of the charts is to reduce the music within, to remove the blatant grab at notoriety this soon turned out to be. It did not work. But it does have some tremendous songs on it. Far from the best work Pop would make, further still from the sound he made with Bowie’s assistance, but some excellent interpretations of 1980s pop.
Therein lies the problem, or at least it was at the time. Could punk mix with pop? “Yes,” was the answer. But the trouble is Bowie who, at this point, was hamming it up in his post-Let’s Dance phase, something he never quite recovered from until a decade later. It infects Blah Blah Blah in the worst ways possible. From the first notes of Real Wild Child (Wild One), those horrid and dated notes of instrumental synth excess can be heard. A typecast of the 1980s that few could mould into an interesting sound. Pop and Bowie are not up to the task either, and considering the way the pop genre was headed at the time, it sounds like they were late to the party and working out the basics well after other artists had turned them inside out. And yet there is a blistering irony which keeps Blah Blah Blah alive. Baby It Can’t Fall is a gluttonous presentation of keyboards and brass, the thump of an electric guitar just about heard in this messy mix of good fun.
Nobody could have paired The Stooges’ frontman with the soppy tones of Shades, and yet the contrast works in Pop’s favour. All of its at-the-time modern swing blurs together into some unremarkable experiences but what lets Blah Blah Blah stand out is the lower octaves from Pop. They do not fit these admittedly lighter, lover tones he searches for and it creates an interesting contrast. This is how the album survives. Isolation is a better swing at the pop tones of the time. Saxophone presence is the difference-maker here and Pop finds some consistencies which can slot into the rest of his discography, though it still has the hangups of Peter Gabriel or Madonna-like loving. It never reaches those high points because Pop hasn’t the heart to truly turn his back on the intricacies of punk, and in turn, just sounds a bit like Lou Reed leading a jazz record. Make no mistake, that is the best result Blah Blah Blah could have hoped for.
This marked the end of the Bowie and Pop power struggle. Their collaborations frequently offered brilliant material and their final outing is an attempt to elevate Pop as a household name, as Bowie was and still is. Blah Blah Blah is not the best material to do that with and, in hindsight, Pop had already managed it with Lust for Life and The Passenger. But that is fifty years on, and the effectiveness and reflections of Lust for Life were not around when Blah Blah Blah was released. A competent, clearly pop-rooted album which does have its charms. Pop never had the voice for it but gives it a go, backed by the clarity of the genre Bowie was engaged in, collaborating with Mick Jagger and Queen gives you a touch for what is popular, but not what is artistically interesting. An objective in popularity mired by a lack of heart and dedication to the broader, clunking strokes of the genre.
