Iggy Pop
The Idiot

THE REVIEW

MASS PRODUCTION #?

Jimmy had that rubbed look of stray days, wandering hungry for nothing in the city's dirt, wearing the slightly grubby second-hand jacket and bruised eyes. The ragged man sitting at the corner raised his rusty hand, asked for a coin worth a few cents, and understood, understood that the one with such a hole in his chest was Jimmy, not him. But James looked straight, walking at the bottom of the desirous beast that tormented his nights of dust and suicidal adrenaline. With a sleepwalking step, he followed Sister Midnight, seeking her defeated. She could sometimes answer you acidly.

"What is the pain you're feeling, what damn pill did you forget?"

Sister Midnight could soothe wounds that had been bleeding for a decade. Just invoke her, and she would find a roof, a shelter for the idle despair of two shipwrecked souls. In the long night of rain and distant lights, David picked up the Michigan hitchhiker from the road, a filthy son of the night flood that stained the white veil of post '68 utopias with mud. He loaded him into the car, destination France. Chateau D'Herouville, then the cold Berlin winter of the Hansa Studios. The caged tiger of "L.A. Blues" no longer roared, left to die with bones picked clean, and the boy seemed just another poor idiot lost to rot between extravagances and enormous insecurities.

"Calling Sister Midnight, can you hear me call...Can you hear me well, can you hear me at all...Calling Sister Midnight, I'm an idiot for you..."

"The Idiot" is an absolute, epochal album. Irritating in its modernity. A post-punk prototype in the cradle of the "No Future" revolution, 1977. Cybernetic and humanistic, anxious in dark clothes and glasses, fragile yet brash: Zelig Bowie's production is a sharp spit in the face of conservatives and presumed rock anarchists. The vaudeville with industrial intoxication, the Central European existentialism evoked by a paranoid crooner, on the stage of a retro-futuristic nightclub. Ladies and gentlemen, the Idiot of our times hides behind the red curtain. And sings like a seasoned dandy of the synthetic moans of "Baby", and of decadent "Dum Dum Boys" while the rhythm section of brothers Tony and Hunt Sales, on bass and drums, digs squarely into Jimmy's words with Carlos Alomar's deviant electric guitar.

"People said that we were negative, we could take without needing to give...I just wanted to make a little noise with the Dum Dum boys, and sing a drawn-out da-da-da..."

The beam of light illuminates the bony silhouette of the Idiot in the dust, and soft sax notes color the neon ballad of "Tiny Girls". The icy heartbeat of "Nightclubbing" is now the robotic signal from a near future of "unknown pleasures", an electroshock with the fumes of Alomar's guitar in acid. Like zombies after the nuclear bomb, we cross the desolate streets, narcotized by the present. We are passengers of the night learning new dances and ancient rites. Having fun is a mechanical gesture, "Funtime" (the Duke on backing vocals and synth keyboards) is a bright wave blade penetrating the diseased flesh of '77. "China Girl" has a turgid and unforgettable pop/new-wave melody (so perfect that we know well which scrupulous use the crafty producer will make of it, years later). "Mass Production" is the rhythm always identical to itself, of barcodes on the neck, of the depersonalization of the System that scrutinizes, selects, impoverishes, makes lazy. Mass thinking has buried instinct and human relationships. James Newell Osterberg, aka Iggy Pop, had already understood that the risk was a dialogue between replicants. Tired holograms in front of a switched-off television. Identical. Same expression. Similar dreams. Same nightmares.

"I'm buried deep in mass production, you're not nothing new. I like to drive along the freeways, see the smokestacks belching. Breasts turn brown, so warm and so brown..."