The song Iggy Pop called his masterpiece: “My immortalisation was secure”
Not all rock and roll is meant to be completely perfect. It should always be teetering on the edge of chaos at all times, and if not, there’s a good chance that people will demand their money back. Although The Stooges were anything but commercial when they first started, Iggy Pop knew they had hit on something powerful that would speak to legions of people when they laid down ‘Search and Destroy’.
But even outside of their massive hit, The Stooges were already one of the single strangest oddities to come out of American rock. Other acts like Blue Cheer had started by making albums that were far more aggressive than anything that had come before, but listening to The Stooges or Fun House, you’d swear that they had only just learned how to play their instruments and were trying their best to leave as many mistakes into the mix as they could.
They weren’t necessarily trying to be The Beatles, which was far from bad. Pop always gravitated towards heavier rock anyway, but thanks to listening to acts like The Kinks and The Rolling Stones, he knew that there was a certain power that hadn’t been tapped into yet. So that meant tunes like ‘1969’ and ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’ weren’t just standard rock and roll; they were examples of him causing mayhem within a three-minute timeframe.
And looking at the songs themselves, it didn’t look like Raw Power was going to be anything too different. There had already been harsh songs like ‘Shake Appeal’ on their previous records, but as soon as Pop sang about having a heart full of napalm on the opening track, he may as well have put every member of the audience against the wall and demanded that they pay attention.
Coming right as the nuclear crisis was beginning, painting himself as someone with a short fuse and the ability to explode at any moment was the perfect way of capturing the zeitgeist. The hippy movement was all well and good, but this was the kind of in-your-face entertainment that could help open up someone’s third eye by force if it needed to.
Even when looking back on all of the legendary tracks that he released, Pop had no problem calling the proto-punk anthem one of the finest pieces he ever made, telling Uncut, “‘Search And Destroy’ is the masterpiece. And I knew it when we did it, so I felt a sense of relief that my immortalisation, basically, was secured.”
And it’s not like the rest of the rock world wasn’t listening, either. David Bowie was already quickly becoming a huge fan and would even try to produce various tracks on the record, and if James Williamson’s guitars hadn’t sounded like a buzz saw, there’s a good chance that Ramones probably wouldn’t have had a career when they first picked up their instruments either.
But whatever the music sounded like was almost beside the point when it came to Pop. It was all about using destruction as artistic expression, and no matter how loud he screamed, people could still hear the forgotten boy behind his voice looking to lash out in anger at whatever he saw.
