‘I Got a Right’: The song that Iggy Pop believes invented thrash metal
The mission of any great heavy metal band is to try to make something darker than what’s come before. While Black Sabbath may have gotten the ball rolling for metal music back in the 1970s, the start of thrash metal gave way to some of the heaviest bands that the world had ever seen by the time the 1980s kicked in, with Metallica and Megadeth being celebrated for their complex guitar parts and machine-gun like precision. While many groups had started to make songs much heavier than what had come before, Iggy Pop believed that he had already invented the genre years before.
Before Sabbath had even put together their first albums, Pop had already carved out his own warped vision for rock and roll with The Stooges. Being a fan of heavier rock and roll, Pop wanted to make deliberately provocative music, which usually involved him stripping off his shirt throughout every performance and giving in to his primal urges whenever he took to the stage.
Across the band’s first record, the goal was always about trying to make something that captured a feeling rather than playing everything exactly right. Even though it might not take a virtuosic talent to play a song like ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’, no one would sing it with as much gusto as Pop could.
With the MC5 also making noise out of Detroit, both bands would be the progenitors for both metal and punk rock, focusing on the raw sounds they could get out of their instruments rather than tidying it up for radio. While Pop may be known as one of the kings of the punk movement today, he knew that one of his tracks was far heavier than anything that had come before.
After The Stooges went their separate ways with Raw Power, Pop would reunite with longtime guitarist James Williamson for the album Kill City. While Pop was following up his biggest commercial success yet with Lust For Life, the song ‘I Got a Right’ was far heavier than anything he had done up to that point, featuring his trademark shrieks alongside Williamson punishing his guitar at a rapid-fire tempo.
When talking about the song in the book Louder Than Hell, Pop considered the track to be groundbreaking for the thrash movement, saying, “It was thrash before anybody was doing thrash. But when we played it, not one person would move. They’d just sit there and fucking stare at us, like, ‘What the fuck is this?’”.
Although many audiences at the time were left stunned and traumatised by the song, ‘I Got a Right’ has all the hallmarks of a great thrash metal tune, from the punk rock attitude to the fast tempo to the guttural vocal delivery. As the rest of the metal community caught up with Pop, the next generation of artists would pick up where he left off, injecting influences from acts like Iron Maiden into the equation to form the basis of thrash metal out of the California Bay Area.
That didn’t dissuade Pop from experimenting with his art, making more commercial or caustic songs, depending on where his muse carried him. While many fans may not have understood what Pop was getting at with ‘I Got a Right’, there’s a good chance the song was too forward-looking for its time.
