Redefining 'classic Iggy Pop'

MIAMI — Iggy Pop, the shaman of punk, metal, glam and alternative rock, the man known for his baritone howl, scarred chest and unsettling stare, is sick of what the music he helped forge has become. "Rock is worse than 'Kumbaya,' " Pop said from the art-filled Miami riverfront bungalow he uses as a studio and clubhouse. "I think it's a terrible form."

So when he began to record his 20th studio album, the schoolteacher's son turned to other musical loves. Fans of the Stooges, the legendary proto-punk Michigan band that launched Pop's career and reunited in 2003, might be in for a shock when they hear "Preliminaires," released Tuesday, on which Pop finds his inner crooner.

He sings French cabaret like Serge Gainsbourg, poetic blues like Leonard Cohen, bossa nova like a blasted Sinatra and jazz like Louis Prima.

Rockers who start second careers by singing jazz have become an industry cliche, but Pop, no surprise, doesn't just rework the standard songbooks. Using "The Possibility of an Island," Michel Houellebecq's 2005 existential sci-fi novel about a dissolute, desolate icon as a springboard, "Preliminaires" follows the poete maudit tradition of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, not the sunny show tunes of Gershwin.

Pop sings "Les Feuilles Mortes," the mournful French basis for "Autumn Leaves." On "A Machine for Loving," he recites a passage from the book over an acoustic guitar: "Through these dogs, we pay homage to love." The ironic anthem "Nice to Be Dead" is the closest "Preliminaires" comes to a rocker.

"If someone wants to hear a good rock song by me, I've got a few," Pop, 62, said with a laugh, alluding to a catalog that includes "Raw Power," "Lust for Life" and "China Girl." "Your thyroid slows down after a certain age. I can still do it live, but I don't wake up dying to write one in that vein."

As frontman for the Stooges, Pop became infamous for shows in which he would cut himself, get into fights with concertgoers and smear peanut butter on his naked torso. In the years that followed the group's breakup, he lived with David Bowie in Berlin, built a solo career in New York, then decamped to Miami in the '90s before reuniting the Stooges.

The band produced a new album, "The Weirdness," in 2007 and began touring around the world; a Times review of the Stooges' show at the Wiltern in April of that year praised Pop's "ability to unhinge himself effortlessly, to go loosey-goosey and channel a toddler, making up his pure, spastic moves as he goes."