Welcome to the weekend and another edition of the CD Odyssey. Today we have some post-punk from a time when most people were still doing regular punk.
Disc 1927 is…The Idiot
Artist: Iggy Pop
Year of Release: 1977
What’s up with the Cover? Mr. Pop himself, decked out in what appears to be a ladies blazer stands on a dark…beach? Desert?
Iggy is holding his hands in a very deliberate and peculiar way. I’m going to assume that it is semaphore for “idiot” and then not look it up, because its funner that way.
Yeah, I said funner. You can use funner in a sentence where you are randomly discussing idiots and semaphore. It is – quite literally – an idiot word.
How I Came To Know It: Welcome to the first edition of the “Ross Records”. A few weeks back my good friend Ross was parting with his (very excellent) CD collection and gave me dibs on picking through before he went commercial. I got about 25 albums that day, including discovering some very cool bands I had not previously known.
I also got this Iggy Pop record. Anyway, huge thanks to Ross.
How It Stacks Up: This is my only Iggy Pop record, so it can’t stack up. I also have a Stooges record (Iggy’s band) but I’m making the call to keep that separate.
Ratings: 2 stars
The vast majority of the Ross Records are awesome additions to my collection. Sadly, “The Idiot” starts our journey in a more average fashion.
Iggy Pop’s first solo record shows the freedom of an artist out on his own, willing to do new things, but it also shows the self-indulgence that can happen when you don’t have other band members say, “that’s an OK groove, but let’s leave it off the record until we’ve workshopped it a bit.”
First the good news – Iggy Pop’s natural charisma survives the transition to a solo career just fine. He has one of those “everything I say is important” cult leader kind of voices, akin to Glenn Danzig or Patty Smith. These are the rock voices of a generation, able to compel you to wave a flag, or raise a fist, or storm a Bastille simply through the force of their tone and the presence behind it.
This quality is evident throughout the record, and on the band’s opening track, “Sister Midnight” I was hopeful for the future. Sure the song didn’t really go anywhere after establishing its groove, but the groove was a good one, and by the end I was fully ready to call Sister Midnight, despite lyrics indicating this would be a poor decision.
Another solid tune is the dramatic “Tiny Girls” which has Iggy’s vocals climbing into a vibrato and a bit more melodic structure than you might usually expect from a founding father of punk. There’s a saxophone at the end of the song, which is always a dangerous arrangement decision in rock and roll, but here it works.
The challenge with “The Idiot” is that most of the time the songs don’t achieve this level of interest. They start with a fairly cool groove, and a feel for dark streets and darker thoughts that will have you wanting to hear more, but then they don’t develop into anything. Iggy is content to let the songs be mood pieces, with a lot of repeated lyrics and repeated song structures, but absent the dynamic energy of punk. It is punk pushed under water and held there until it stops kicking.
This is irritating, because there are multiple occasions where things start out with great promise. “Nightclubbing” aims – and to a degree, captures – the hollowed-out world of going out to the clubs. There is a great start here, but it just walks along in the same moment, content to add strange bits of production (piano jangle here, strangled guitar solo there) rather than fully dig in.
Does “Nightclubbing” capture that numbing experience of being out too late, too drunk, and walking too far to find the impossible - a club with the perfect mix of cool vibe and short lineup to get in? Yes, it does, but it isn’t something I want to listen to. In the end it just fades away, an undeveloped melody that doesn’t know where to head next.
“Dum Dum Boys” is similarly tiresome. Great start, and Iggy’s vocals almost sustain the song all on their own, but at over seven minutes long, I was tired of hearing about it long before Iggy was tired of telling me.
The album features an early version of “China Girl” six years before David Bowie would release it on “Let’s Dance”. Iggy Pop cowrote the song, but his version while novel at first, ultimately is a pale comparison to Bowie’s.
David Bowie also produced “The Idiot” and it is fair to say that – as is not uncommon in my complex relationship with Bowie – I didn’t like the choices. The record sounds dull and flat, capturing the lo-fi sensibilities of punk but minus the visceral energy of it. While the production fits the vibe of the record, this is a sound you don’t want to be doubling down on.
This record has its moments, but it mostly had me wanting to go back in time and listen to the Stooges blast out “Raw Power” or dance to the synthy detachment of early eighties Bowie. The no man’s land between the two experiences did not appeal.
Best tracks: Sister Midnight, Tiny Girls
No comments:
Post a Comment