1/ Iggy Pop – The Idiot (1977)
When Joy Division lead singer Ian Curtis hung himself, his body was discovered with Iggy Pop’sThe Idiot still spinning on his turntable. The choice made sense, as the record directly inspired the dreary post-punk that Joy Division was beloved for. It’s odd then, that The Idiot was actually a stylistic detour for Iggy, an outlier in his brilliant discography. So, The Idiot is not Iggy Pop’s most essential record (that goes to his 1973 album Raw Power), but it may just be his most influential one, becoming a defining document of the post-punk and industrial scenes alike.
Recorded in Munich with the guiding hand of a David Bowie tilting close to his brilliant Berlin phase, The Idiot has often been described as the unofficial beginning of Bowie’s Berlin phase. It makes sense, too. Pop described the record as a hybrid of James Brown and Kraftwerk. You can hear these slow funk grooves on songs like “Sister Midnight” and “Mass Production”, the opener and closer respectively, pulsing and grinding like old machinery.
On the brilliant “Nightclubbing”, a dubbed-out, skeletal drum machine and grandiose sheets of synth pile on top of a piano, all swinging drunkenly. Noisy wah-wah guitars threaten to collapse the whole structure, as Iggy, with a flair for the robotic and demented, sits atop the dirge, his lyrics about lurking at night nihilistic and haunting.
“Baby” takes a menacing guitar, and sprinkles in some cheesy horror movie synths as Pop moans desperately and hopelessly. The sunny “China Girl” is a nice change of pace, as blocky xylophones mask the darkness and torment plaguing Pop’s lyrics. The explosion into saxophones and strings on the track is just absolutely stunning.
But for me, the best track on the album has to be “Tiny Girls”. It’s here we really see Bowie’s luscious, smooth, emotive, and all-out stunning saxophone work. It stuns, adding character and body to the callousness of Pop’s lyrics in a marvelous performance.
Though Pop never really went this direction again, The Idiot’s importance can’t be ignored. It reached everywhere, from the industrial grind of NIN to the dreary, detached dub-punk of PiL. It stands today as brilliant addition to an outstanding discography – a dark, corroded masterpiece.
by Raghav Raj