Iggy And The Stooges
Raw Power

THE REVIEW

Fuck-ass!
The iguana has always excessively fascinated me, who doesn't remember at least once in their youth, Iggy Pop and his fun, no fun, fun time, fun house, the word fun often recurs in the work of Iggypop, but it's a fun that borders on madness, it's a deviant and sleazy fun, it's a terrible fun filled with drinking, gang rapes, car races, it's like living while dying.

I like the cleaned-up version by David Bowie's mix that tamed the ferocity of the primitive sound, Iggy in '97 set things straight by releasing the original tapes, and what comes up? A satanic beastly stuff, enough to make today's trendy guys pale even after 30 years...

Iggy freaks out and Williamson supports his frenzied, expansive, dramatic voice with raw and corrosive riffs.
"I'm a street-chewing cheetah, with a heart full of napalm.
I'm the runaway son of the atomic bomb.
I'm the forgotten child of the world, the one who searches and destroys....
Darling, please, you have to help me, someone has to save my soul...
Baby, get into my brain, but be careful darling, I use technology..."

Search and Destroy is the powerful start, with Gimme Danger the atmosphere becomes torrid, Pop's baritone deviatingly touches that of Nick Cave, for an acid ballad that ends obliterated in its own exaggerated returning reverb, it's the dramatic heart of the record, which continues with Your Face Is Pretty Going To Hell, punk heated to boiling point, the frequencies and volumes are so pushed and Iggy's voice so devilish that the piece received, believe it or not, the imprimatur of Cardinal Ruini.
Penetration is a claustrophobic anal incursion, how can one feel confined between the walls of an anus? Listen to the piece and you'll have your answer.

What the iguana tries to do is hallucinate with raw power and under the effect of veronal (as he himself admitted), heroin and debauched sex, a reality (that of the city and Christianity) at the opposite stage (satanic campaign).
Raw Power is a satanic Saturday, it's a foggy and wolfish night for us Romagnoli in the outdoor bistros of Rimini (I mean the beaches and all that is correlated to them), it's participating in a celebration of the most untamed instincts of the mammalian-feline inland (Iggy Pop is no longer a man but the result of a mating between a feline and a mammal, the power of a lion combined with the physical motion of a panther on stage), but it's also the epic of the everyday: and Iggy Pop's epic is one that starts from the worker already collapsed at the pub at one in the afternoon, sets off due to the premature winter darkness and then gets lost in the night length.

I Need Somebody, blues as sensual as only those of J.L. Hooker and the Doors knew how to be, perhaps never again will Iggy's voice touch such excessive and explicit heights of perversion.
It's a staggering completely devoid of shame, think of Iggy's debauched screams: “aaaaaaaaaaooooooooooohhhhh”, this scream recurs increasingly throughout the album, but what turns out to be the most obscene of all is the last one: at the opening of Death Trip, the final track, listen: “aaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhoooooooooooouuuuuuuuu”
gives the idea of a man who has lost his bearings, I have always wondered in what conditions was Pop while he was singing this final piece... an overexcited man launched far beyond madness, it was 1973, things like that hadn't been heard yet.
Death Trip is a mess of detuned guitars spitting repeated riffs trying to maintain a glimmer of melody... we going down in the history... save me!!!!! save me !!! come on save me!!!!! The rock goddess (that is, destiny given rock's agnosticism) has saved Iggy from death many times, but I am more than sure that Iggy never wanted anyone to save him, and it's this particular that distinguishes the greats like him from today's youth who will never reach such heights of primordial madness because they are too busy saving their own asses rather than going all out nihilistically in honor of Rock.