The classic 1973 album Iggy Pop couldn’t stand half of: “Just filler”
For a musician as contrarian as Iggy Pop, it’s almost expected that he would end up hating his most revered album.
The minute the masses began flocking to that record and eulogising it as the next great classic, is the minute Iggy begins growing tired of whatever it was he laid down. He’s looking forward, into a sonic space where no one yet exists.
That’s what Raw Power was in the years before its release. As music turned into the 1970s, punk rock was only in its embryonic form and hadn’t yet turned into something culturally vital. So the ideas of caustic creativity that Iggy and The Stooges were harvesting in those years was deeply exciting, not only because of what they were laying down inside the record but because of how it was being delivered, by a front man who wholly embodied the anti-establishment attitude.
Iggy was wild and unpredictable to the very core, which ultimately caused the neglect of Raw Power in the years that followed its release. There was a predictability to its essence thanks to the popularisation of punk as an art form, and Iggy stepped back, instead giving love to some of his more overlooked records, instead.
“I think I’ve made better records,” he said. “I think The Idiot is an awfully good record and way ahead of its time.”
But it’s not just that Raw Power became a more popular product. It’s the fact that with hindsight, Iggy was able to realise that the carefree creative attitude sometimes described as punk was in fact apathy, and the songs on the record came in underbaked and not serving any vital purpose to the overall album.
He continued, “I think about half of Raw Power is really good, and about, there’s four really good songs on it, is what there is. There’s ‘Raw Power’, there’s ‘Shake Appeal’, there’s ‘Search and Destroy’ and one other one, I can’t remember, but there’s one other really good, well ‘Gimme Danger’ is fair. There’s about four good songs on it, the rest is just filler.”
He noted that the feeling was evident in the group. They knew full well that the songs didn’t cut it to their established standards, with Iggy remembered his manager Tony DeFriese claiming, “‘I’m ashamed to release this stuff, James. You’ll have to go in and just do something else.’” He added, “So that was the album before Raw Power which had all, a bunch of other songs, ‘I Gotta Right’, and ‘Tight Pants’ and ‘Gimme Some Skin,’ and this was really up tempo.“
But maybe the truth is that The Idiot served as a more beloved record for Iggy because it was his first solo outing. Maybe it wasn’t punk and the movement he was getting bored of, but his own band who by that time represented something as an obstacle to creative freedom.
The Idiot was him stepping out of their shadow and proving himself as an independent artist, and that’s likely what he wanted to be known for.
