“The weakest song”: The track Iggy Pop wanted to delete from history
When Iggy Pop first started working on songs with The Stooges, there were no set rules. The entire premise of their existence was based around causing as much chaos as possible within the span of one song, and even if it wasn’t the most listenable thing in the world, it was worth it if it meant giving the audience some thrills along the way. That wasn’t about to stop once Pop moved onto a solo career, but he figured that it would be a net positive if he didn’t record ‘African Man’.
Coming off of Raw Power, most people were already willing to see what the wild man was up to next. There was a far greater chance of someone picking up that than a James Williamson solo album, and when Pop started working on records like Lust For Life, it was clear that he had just entered into a new era of insanity.
Now, with friends like David Bowie working with him, records like The Idiot became the precursor to what future art rock bands would be doing later. Looking at tracks like ‘Nightclubbing’, you not only hear samples of Nine Inch Nails but also vague hints of what Talking Heads would do later in the decade when they got ahold of the more electronic side of their sound.
Since New Values came out right amid the new wave movement, Pop should have fit right in, but there’s something about ‘African Man’ that tonally feels off. There’s still that typical sing-song approach to what Pop was doing, but the lyrics read a lot more tone-deaf and/or racist, depending on how you choose to interpret the lyrics.
It’s not like Pop hadn’t tackled this kind of taboo topic before. There had been ‘China Girl’ from back in the day that Bowie would cover again on Let’s Dance, but if that song was teetering on the line of being insensitive, this is crossing it more than a few times over. Pop may have just been using the tune as a way of provoking a reaction like all punks do, but he also admitted that it was far from good taste nowadays.
When looking back on New Values, Pop said he would gladly have taken an axe to the song if he had the chance, saying, “I would put it this way. It’s the weakest song on the album. If the record company wanted to knock that off the album, I’d be all for that.” Then again, it’s all the more sad when this is far from the first questionable moment coming out of hard rock in the next few years.
Outside of the incredibly racist look at immigration that Genesis would get up to later when making the track ‘Illegal Alien’, the fact that Pop gave his approval to this might be the reason why Axl Rose thought he was totally within his right to use racial slurs in the middle of the tune ‘One in a Million’ on Guns N’ Roses Lies EP.
Pop’s lines in the song may have been nothing but harmless word painting, but it doesn’t matter when the final product just makes the art and the artist look a lot uglier. The new wave always was about creative reinvention, but if Pop had just changed the lyrics, he may have been on the cutting edge of something more interesting on the horizon.
