Iggy Pop - A Million in Prizes: The Anthology
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Free Music Notes for A Million in Prizes: The Anthology
Free Music Review: A Million in Prizes: The Anthology
Hit: 5 Stars
A Million in Prizes: The Anthology~ Iggy Pop is an amazing anthology collection from an icon in the rock industry and rock music history. Iggy Pop has surprisingly good vocals, the lyrics are not as simple as one would have like thought they would be. I must admit that I only heard Lust for life and to be even more honest I had no idea that this song was written by Pop and Bowie. I love the photos in the book-let and the cover photo is vintage Pop at his best. I was a bit ticked of that they had not included the lyrics for the songs in the otherwise amazing book-let. This is a compilation that I highly recommend.
Free Music Review: Pop Rocks
Hit: 4 Stars
While A Million In Prizes offers little for those who've kept an eye on James Osterberg's career since the days of The Psychedelic Stooges, as a five decade overview of the leathery Detroit legend it completely eclipses the hits packages that precede it. Whether it's garage rock, glam, punk or even Berlin cabaret, Iggy Pop has kept at the top of his game via reinvention, clever allegiances and simple survival.
Roughly divided up into the four eras of Stooges-fronting, Bowie-befriending, 1980s commerciality and 1990s icon(oclast), the double disc package A Million In Prizes fulfils the obligation of presenting Iggy as an enigmatic, genre-hopping artist whose successes have been often down to savvy collaborations. Early Stooges tracks Search And Destroy and 1969 set the bar high for where the trailer park kid could go, but after The Stooges' 1973 post-Raw Power split, the helping hands of David Bowie, Jimmy Webb and even members of The Sex Pistols assisted Pop in his sonic travels. Early solo track Nightclubbing, the slamming beat of Lust For Life and the amusing Iggy drawl of I'm Bored show an artist keen on probing styles far removed from the primordial rock sounds he'd worked on with The Stooges only a few years before.
While Bowie's shadow looms large at the midpoint of this collection during the pair's Berlin recording period, by the time of his 1980s chart successes with Real Wild Child and the Steve Jones co-write Cry For Love, Pop had shown he was no mere pet project for Bowie. With the beautiful Candy (surely the single of 1990, if not the greatest duet ever), the Debbie Harry allegiance Well, Did You Evah? and the neatly cyclical reformation of The Stooges for Skull Ring, A Million In Prizes complements Iggy's sizeable manhood by being a similarly lengthy and exciting package. Here comes Johnny Yen again - rest assured, Pop rocks.
Free Music Review: At Least They Didn't Call It "Greatest Hits"
Hit: 3 Stars
I can remember a time back in the dark ages, a period I like to call my high school years, when a Stooges album was harder to find in Detroit than, well, the Stooges themselves, especially after that Michigan Palace brannigan immortalized on "Metallic K.O."
Imagine that! All three were out of print in the U.S. - Elektra and Columbia apparently uninterested in pressing any more - but if you looked hard enough and lifted up enough toadstools, you may have been lucky enough to unearth a pricey import.
For better or worse, the market is now flush with Iggy/Stooges durables, some well worth the scratch and others downright treacherous. This one, Virgin's best shot at a hagiography of Michigan's patron saint of lucidity, isn't bad, depending on your willingness to embrace whatever flaming record company hoops El Pop was trying to jump through at the time.
Those comfortable with the sound of narcotic-induced delirium, primal therapy, and civilization collapsing would be hard pressed to find much wrong with Disc 1, the section of Iggy's curriculum vitae covering the years he spent with the Stooges, making some rather unusual contributions to mankind, up through his employ as David Bowie's lap dog in Berlin. However, by "much wrong," I don't mean "anything wrong." Only one song from "Fun House" ("Down On The Street"), but four from "The Idiot" and five from "Lust For Life"? Hmmm...
The inclusion of non-LP sides "I Got A Right," "Gimme Some Skin," and "I'm Sick Of You" is a nice touch, though, all three redolent with the unmistakable bouquet of ozone and a tinge of stale sweat. And despite Bowie's attempts to re-create Iggy as the fifth member of Kraftwerk, "Funtime," "Sister Midnight," "Lust For Life," and "The Passenger" all lurch, twitch, and spasm with at least a faint trace of Murder City palsy.
Disc 2 is a little more, shall we say, problematic, Iggy bent, shaped, and pulled in so many directions by so many clueless A&R hacks that even he probably wasn't sure who that guy was looking back at him from the mirror every morning.
Part of the frustration of career retrospectives such as "A Million In Prizes" is not only what compilers choose to include, but what they choose not to. I try to console myself with the naïve belief that the complete short shrift given to the "Soldier" and "Party" albums had to be due to licensing issues between Virgin and Buddha. How else to explain ignoring "Pumpin' For Jill," "Bang Bang," "Knocking 'Em Down (In The City)," "Loco Mosquito," and, especially, "Dog Food" in favor of dross like "Look Away" and "I Felt The Luxury"?
And is it just me or does anyone else detect the faint scent of desperation in the duets with Kate Pierson and Debbie Harry, perhaps the nadir of Iggy's slowly-decomposing, post-Ashetons residence on Planet Virgin? Yeah, "Avenue B" counts, but just barely.
"A Million In Prizes" isn't a total wash, not a bad starter kit for tourists, but it's far from definitive. The shadow cast by The Stooges is simply too long, thick, and impenetrable, eclipsing everything Iggy's done since, darkening his world and ours.
Free Music Review: a very good introduction to Iggy Pop
Hit: 5 Stars
Iggy Pop is an iconic figure, somewhat on the margins of rock `n roll and the entertainment industry, a cult figure, a charismatic whirling dervish messiah, and, miraculously, a long term survivor of rock `n roll excess.
Iggy Pop was/is also the lead singer and de facto leader of the Stooges, a band now understood to be as seminal as the Velvet Underground for punk rock and other forms of modern music. But whereas the VU were something like a group of grad student misfits, the Stooges were more a motley collection of trailer park dirtbags, from the wilds of Ypsilanti, Michigan (also tied to the great Detroit garage band/biker band scenes)
For these two reasons, this greatest hits package is divided, more or less into two: a Stooges/Iggy and the Stooges disk (along with selections from the Bowie produced Idiot and Lust For Life) and a solo disk. The Stooges cuts manage to convey the raw, wild power of the Stooges and thus to hint at their greatness as a band. The Bowie cuts, with their austere Berlin ambience, have aged well, even though Lust For Life has, by now (2005) been transformed by the culture industry into an overused commercial jingle, such as to sell Carnival Cruise bookings. I wonder what Iggy thinks about that?
Disk two covers some of Iggy's solo moments, and while the music becomes a bit more formulaic, it's still very good, as it becomes a blank canvas for Iggy to, well, be Iggy. Formulaic or not, his tunes here are catchy and fun. Real Wild Child is as close to bubblegum as he's ever come, but it's great bubblegum, right up there with, for example, Sweet or Joan Jett. Home is nothing less than a kick ass rock and roll dance number; someone ought to use it in a Broadway revue. In fact, his tongue-in-cheek duet with Debbie Harry is their version of an old prerock Broadway showtune, yet it rocks! Finally, starting with the delightfully noisy Wild America, the disk closes with Iggy taking things full circle, and returning to the Stooges; Iggy has finally located his inner Stooge and made peace with it.
This is highly recommended as either introduction to Iggy and/or the Stooges for those just beginning to check this music out, as well as for Iggy compleatists, who want to own every piece of product related to Iggy Pop and the Stooges.
Free Music Review: Only ONE Song From Funhouse?
Hit: 3 Stars
The fact that there is only ONE song from the Stooges 2nd album says a lot, which isn't good. I mean how COULD they leave off "1970" or even "T.V. Eye." What were they thinking? This alone keeps it from my giving it a four star rating. Other greast songs not included "Pumping For Jill,""Loco Mosiquito,"Bang, Bang (which Bowie did a terrible cover of). I mean who put this together? This is NOT the definitive Iggy Pop anthology, but it will have to do for now. Best to make your own compilation, because this one falls way short.