The Iggiot

So last night I downloaded some new music, all in a similar vein:

Joy Division - Unknown Pleasures

Joy Division - Closer

Depeche Mode - Violator

New Order - Power, Corruption & Lies

Iggy Pop - The Idiot

All characterized by their icy, heavily processed sounds and feelings of a) despair, b) measurably more gorgeous and cinematic despair, c) suave self-absorption, d) propulsion created by tension, and e) methodical restriction, respectively.

I should mention that I had to furrow my brow over some of those adjectives. Because they're hard to sum up. As parts of the same family, they have a common thread, and it's hard to describe any of them without invoking the others. Each of them was a landmark in its own way, channeling a little more of a single, distinctive spirit.

But it's The Idiot I want to talk about, if only because I know its story better. In the mid-to-late-70's, both David Bowie and Iggy Pop were in exile, trying to get away from Los Angeles and their respective drug problems. Iggy was looking for direction, no longer the lead gunslinger for the mighty Stooges. Bowie was trying to coalesce his new ideas, which included the kosmiche sounds of Kraftwerk, the pervasive feel of the city of Berlin, and his thoughts on narrowly escaping his own personal cocaine hell. This gave him plenty of inspiration, but his pen was dry.

Iggy, on the other hand, was ready to hit the studio and start cranking. So, in an interesting form of symbiosis, Bowie produced Iggy's The Idiot, using the recording process as a sort of test-run for ideas he would develop further on his own Low. As a result, the album sounds virtually nothing like you would expect from one of the godfathers of proto-punk. (The album bears no resemblance to the Dostoevsky novel of the same name, but the bookish Bowie shared an affinity for it with Iggy and co-producer Tony Visconti). The album is all cold anguish and robotic stridence. Iggy sings most of his vocals in a kind of somnolent chant, making him sound intense and vacant at the same time (and did this have an effect on the vocal style of Joy Division's Ian Curtis? You can bet the autobahn it did. As a matter of fact, it was The Idiot that was found spinning on the record player when Curtis' body was discovered, dead by suicide in his kitchen. Eerie). 

I mean, look at the album cover:

Caught in a stiff, affected pose, Iggy looks like a figure from some 1920's expressionist cinema. And where the hell is he? The moon? The background is almost completely blank, dreary, grey. He might be sporting a pair of quintessentially-American denim jeans, but the pop-shouldered jacket is his new persona-- something that doesn't really fit. Streaks of white are falling, probably snowflakes, putting him outside in a cold environment-- outside, without a home, wandering around, probably lost. The picture is perfectly descriptive of the lonely, brilliant music inside. Highly recommended.

(For a much more authoritative take on The Idiot, as well as subsequent activity on Iggy's part, all as a part of David Bowie's oeuvre, check out the excellent Bowie in Berlin by Thomas Jerome Seabrook. In addition to The Idiot, it's chock full of information about some of Bowie's best work, including Station to Station, Low, and "Heroes").