Self-Deprecation: Despite its unflattering title it's still Iggy who we see on the album cover.The song "China Girl" would later be re-recorded by David Bowie on his album Let's Dance (1983). Repurposed Pop Song: Bowie re-worked "Sister Midnight" with new lyrics and a new title as "Red Money" on his 1979 album Lodger.Real Life Writes the Plot: "Dum Dum Boys" was written by Iggy in remembrance of his former Stooges bandmates who succumbed to their wild lifestyle.One-Word Title: "Nightclubbing", "Funtime", "Baby".Both Pop and Higelin were recording at the Château d'Hérouville in France when the song was written. One-Woman Song: "China Girl", based on Pop's brief infatuation for Kuelan Nguyen, who was French pop singer Jacques Higelin's partner at the time.Mistaken Nationality: Iggy Pop's infatuation for an Asian woman was the inspiration for "China Girl".The sound meanwhile is the exact opposite, being a frigid and bone-splitting industrial tune with droning, deadpan vocals. Lyrical Dissonance: The lyrics to "Funtime" are energetic-sounding on paper, describing a particularly joyous and all-including night out.In the Style of: Bowie advised Iggy Pop to sing "Funtime" like Mae West.Bowie would remain Two other stage players on the circuit, Todd Rundgren collaborators Tony Fox Sales and Hunt Sales (sons of Soupy), would later become Bowie's bandmates in the Hard Rock supergroup Tin Machine just over a decade later. To promote The Idiot, Bowie eschewed the possibility of a supporting tour for Low and instead acted as a sideman for Pop during his own tour. Bowie would co-write and co-produce two more of Pop's solo albums, Lust for Life later in 1977 and Blah-Blah-Blah in 1986. Recorded just before Bowie's album Low but released two months after, The Idiot acts as a direct prototype for Bowie's Berlin Trilogy (which makes up 1977's Low & "Heroes" and 1979's Lodger), featuring a similar Krautrock and ambient-infused style of art rock that builds off Bowie's earlier avant-funk experiments on Station to Station. Made after the breakup of The Stooges, the album was written and recorded with help from David Bowie. It stands today as brilliant addition to an outstanding discography – a dark, corroded masterpiece.The Idiot is the debut studio album by Iggy Pop, released in 1977. It reached everywhere, from the industrial grind of NIN to the dreary, detached dub-punk of PiL. Though Pop never really went this direction again, The Idiot’s importance can’t be ignored. It stuns, adding character and body to the callousness of Pop’s lyrics in a marvelous performance. It’s here we really see Bowie’s luscious, smooth, emotive, and all-out stunning saxophone work. The explosion into saxophones and strings on the track is just absolutely stunning.īut for me, the best track on the album has to be “Tiny Girls”. The sunny “China Girl” is a nice change of pace, as blocky xylophones mask the darkness and torment plaguing Pop’s lyrics. “Baby” takes a menacing guitar, and sprinkles in some cheesy horror movie synths as Pop moans desperately and hopelessly. Noisy wah-wah guitars threaten to collapse the whole structure, as Iggy, with a flair for the robotic and demented, sits atop the dirge, his lyrics about lurking at night nihilistic and haunting. On the brilliant “Nightclubbing”, a dubbed-out, skeletal drum machine and grandiose sheets of synth pile on top of a piano, all swinging drunkenly. You can hear these slow funk grooves on songs like “Sister Midnight” and “Mass Production”, the opener and closer respectively, pulsing and grinding like old machinery. Pop described the record as a hybrid of James Brown and Kraftwerk.
Recorded in Munich with the guiding hand of a David Bowie tilting close to his brilliant Berlin phase, The Idiot has often been described as the unofficial beginning of Bowie’s Berlin phase. So, The Idiot is not Iggy Pop’s most essential record (that goes to his 1973 album Raw Power), but it may just be his most influential one, becoming a defining document of the post-punk and industrial scenes alike. It’s odd then, that The Idiot was actually a stylistic detour for Iggy, an outlier in his brilliant discography. The choice made sense, as the record directly inspired the dreary post-punk that Joy Division was beloved for.
When Joy Division lead singer Ian Curtis hung himself, his body was discovered with Iggy Pop’s The Idiot still spinning on his turntable.
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