THE HARD 10: #3 Iggy and the Stooges – Raw Power (1973)

The HARD 10 are ten of the most graphic albums ever released that all left an indelible mark upon the listener and the industry as a whole. Do enjoy these tales and songs, and carry their power into your life, finding their unrepentant aggression to be as emotionally valuable as tears.

The mark of a truly hard album is not just how unapologetically transgressive it is, but by how many imitators attempt to replicate its sound and fury. By that (and any other) measure, Iggy and the Stooges‘ seminal 1973 album Raw Power is one of the hardest records to ever grace vinyl.

Iggy Pop, nee James Newell Osterberg, Jr., may be on the Golden Years side of 60 now, but he was 26 years old when Raw Power was recorded and released. Under the wing of Ziggy-era David Bowie, Iggy and the Stooges (James Williamson and brothers Scott and Ron Asheton) were able to finish the album in under a month. Iggy will go down in history as a frontman without equal: he invented the stage dive, would alternately expose and cut himself, and was vicious with the audience.

In eight songs and little more than half an hour, the Stooges changed the course of rock music, with every punk, metal head, and alternative rocker paying tribute to Raw Power in some way. On it’s face, it meets the criteria for a hard album: Iggy’s lyrics are pure sex, drugs, and rock n roll – not the spandex-bound hair and makeup variety of the 80s – but the wake-up-with-a-needle-in-your-arm variety. Iggy’s drug use is so noted that it’s somewhere between cliche and myth, but one look at the glammed-out, pouting Godfather of Punk in his sinewy glory and you know there’s real darkness below the black eyeliner. And the music? Hard as it comes: riffs and solos that still sound vital, bass and drums that rumble like ominous clouds on the horizon.

Raw Power opens with one of the most memorable songs in rock music: Search and Destroy. Taking its name from one of the more brutal Vietnam War techniques, “Search and Destroy” starts strong and doesn’t stop. “I’m a street walking cheetah with a heart full of napalm / I’m a runaway son of the nuclear A-bomb,” Iggy sneers. Wave after wave of fuzzed out guitars and squealing licks are the perfect soundtrack for mayhem (a point proven by Wes Anderson in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou).

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If “Search and Destroy” is the soundtrack for mayhem, songs like “Your Pretty Face is Going to Hell,” “Penetration,” and “Shake Appeal” are the soundtrack for a night of hatefucking. “A pretty face and a dirty love / I knew right away that i’d have to get my hooks in you.” “I’ll stick it out, babe, I’ll stick it out / I’ll be all fine, every time, penetrate.” “Shake appeal / baby fits so tight / shake appeal / baby with your fists so tight.” Obviously, lyrics have gotten more explicit over time, but sometimes implying something is more dangerous and sexual than just flat out saying it. The way Iggy groans and moans on “Penetration” would make Lil’ Kim blush. Raw Power was released once the shine of the Summer of Love had worn off. This isn’t love; it’s lust, down and dirty.

Even the record label-mandated ballads are dark: no quarter given or asked. “Gimme Danger” turns down the distortion but keeps chugging along, building to a crescendo as Iggy croons: “Gimme danger little stranger / And I feel your disease / There’s nothing in my dreams / Just some ugly memories.” The garage blues of “I Need Somebody” are the backdrop for Iggy’s gnarled, twisted plea for somebody, anybody, to roll around in the muck with. Wonder if Marilyn Manson listened to this record?

The timelessness of Raw Power is constantly surprising. I could listen to the opening riff of “Death Trip” on infinite repeat; it wouldn’t be out of place on hard rock records in any decade since it was originally captured. The same can be said of the stuttering guitar and finger-in-the-eye piano on the title track. Sonically and emotionally abrasive music doesn’t go out of style.

While the band would dissolve two years after releasing Raw Power, they helped define hard for everyone from the Clash to Kurt Cobain. Fittingly, their last show (until a reunion 25 years later) involved getting in a fight with an audience full of bikers; Iggy taunted the crowd with “you can suck my ass / You biker faggot sissies,” sung to the tune of “Louie Louie.” Now that’s hard.

ALPHA MALE MUSIC WEEK presents…Streams of Consciousness on Iggy Pop and the Imagination of Male Aggression

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If one wishes to discuss aggressive alpha male archetypes in music, there’s really only one place to start in the mind of this author but none other than the lead singer of 2010 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee The Stooges, Iggy Pop. The Detroit native, with quite the solo background as well, Iggy Pop IS rock music. No, I don’t mean this in the sense that the iconic, slow rising and heavy burning fury of “I Wanna Be Your Dog” is a better rock song than anything else, but purely from the standpoint of rock music being wild, unkempt and deviant, expressing with blunt honesty the depravity of the human condition. Yes, I do enjoy a power ballad, and I love pop melodies, but, at the end of the day, if you’re talking rock, I enjoy it most when scary, frightening, in your face and charismatic to the edge of panic. Check The Stooges’ “Search and Destroy,” and you’ll see exactly what I mean. The Stooges released just three albums, but in that five year period Iggy rose to the forefront of the international consciousness to hold that most vaunted of positions prior to the dissolution of the digital divide, “Scariest Man in Music.” No greater sources than former Black Flag and Rollins Band lead singer Henry Rollins and Nirvana’s legendary frontman Kurt Cobain refer to their incredible and thoughts of danger inducing 1973 album Raw Power as the greatest album of all time. Noted and legendary rock and roll scribe Lester Bangs states that their live album Metallic K.O. “is the only album where you can hear a beer bottle breaking on guitar strings.” Both of these statements are due cause to be listed as someone most worthy of being considered a master auteur of “Alpha Male Music,” but, the truth of the belief of Iggy being easily the best lies far deeper.

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There are those who would argue that Iggy Pop invented punk rock. Or that the ribald behavior of the scene was a direct descendant of his antics. He also invented stage diving. He also performed while spreading hamburger and peanut butter on his ripped physique. He also cut himself with glass shards and writhed in it. The visceral male impulse of all of thse shows why Pop is an alpha male musical legend. Sensitive? Yes. Emotional. Yes? But only in the angriest or most completely twisted of expositions. Iggy’s greatness lies in his complete adherence to progressing the aggression of his exploration into the imagination of male aggression. By bathing himself in the ocean of masculine stereotypes, he literally went from man to superman. Not enough? Well, he experimented with androgyny and was produced by David Bowie, yes, Bowie at the height of his own androgyny, the Ziggy Stardust era. Being the protege of the world’s most sexually daring man of the era exposes the depth and scope of his understanding of the male ideal, as Pop elevated his performance style and high concept nature of his music in this era, growing even darker and more controversial in subject matter, creating an essence not just primal, but fear instilling as well. As well, in having the courage of his bizarre and macabre convictions, the perpetually heroin addled singer once checked himself into an insane asylum to quit a heroin addiction.

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Iggy Pop’s life is defined in the most “manly” and steadfast of ways by defeating the odds by merely being either stronger than the universe, or just being constituted of something other than human. I opt for the latter. Iggy Pop is THE rock frontman extraordinaire. He doesn’t so much sing songs, but in some way he deeply amplifies the emotions of the instruments surrounding him, his voice serving as an even greater lead guitar than the chords being strummed by a guitarist. Listen to his voice on “Lust For Life,” the insistent jangling jammer of decadence. It hammers home everything you need to know about the man, and it guides the song to the realm of the personal, deviating from the expectation of being a generic power rock standard. Such talent bespeaks a man who set an archetype that guides the unquestionably macho heart of a genre and in many ways, of an industry.

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