Where to start with the primal howl of Iggy Pop

Iggy Pop 101
In February—one month after the death of his close friend and collaborator David Bowie—Iggy Pop covered Bowie’s “The Jean Genie” at Carnegie Hall. Two weeks earlier, he said in an interview that he’s probably “closing up” and retiring from the recording business after the release of his new album Post Pop Depression. If Pop seems a little morbid these days, well, it’s nothing new. A hell-bent, self-destructive streak runs through his entire body of work; in fact, that streak long ago became his calling card, along with this feral, hair-raising baritone. Hard to believe he launched his music career innocuously enough as fresh-faced James Osterberg, the drummer of various ’60s garage bands in Michigan such as The Iguanas and The Prime Movers.
Pop’s next band, The Stooges, hit like a runaway earthmover. Not that the band was particularly popular during its time. Formed in 1967 when he was still going by the name Iggy Stooge, The Psychedelic Stooges (soon shortened), the group harnessed the jet-engine power of fellow Michigan band The MC5 while droning on in a spectacularly Neanderthal way. The Stooges’ self-titled debut appeared in 1969, produced by The Velvet Underground’s John Cale, and it turned psychedelia into something overwhelmingly new: simple, primal, brutal, and blazing the trail for a new style of music still a decade away, punk rock. On the album’s best-known track, “I Wanna Be Your Dog,” Pop howls in an lascivious imitation of Ron Asheton’s wah-wah guitar, celebrating sexual submissiveness while paradoxically playing up the group’s own aggressive, distorted domination.
As great as The Stooges was, it’s an album that all but painted the band into a corner—that is, until Fun House blew off the roof. The blueprint from the first album is dutifully carried over—no one ever accused The Stooges of being eclectic—but the band’s attack is deepened, sharpened, and given a far more insidious atmosphere of transgression and hedonism. On top of that, the decision to bring saxophonist Steve Mackay into the mix on songs like “1970” and the sinuous, swaggering title track lent a jazzy edge that only enhanced the album’s ominous atmosphere. And Pop’s blistered voice urges on the noise like a drug-pushing drill sergeant. At the start of the ’70s, as rock ’n’ roll was congealing into corporate slickness, Fun House ripped off the skin and pissed in the wound.
Three years passed between Fun House and its follow-up, Raw Power. The album was billed under the name Iggy And The Stooges, reflecting the new star power of its self-abusive frontman, whose bloody, destructive stage performances were already becoming the stuff of legend. But the band itself had disintegrated in a haze of drugs and reformed in those three years, giving Raw Power a far more abrasive and hard-edged sound; co-produced by Pop and his admirer David Bowie, the album’s ear-shredding, in-the-red chaos kickstarted the punk movement. On songs such as “Search And Destroy,” guitarist James Williamson threatens to split the heavens with his unhinged solos; meanwhile Pop weaves a new mythology of rock decadence that teeters on the brink of sanity and reality.
Intermediate work
Barring the officially released demo Kill City in 1977 (recorded in 1975 and credited to Iggy Pop and James Williamson), The Stooges’ time in the studio was long over by the time Pop began in solo career in earnest with The Idiot. Released in 1977, the year punk exploded, it took a different route than all the groups The Stooges had inspired; instead of raw power, the album bears the cool, dour, synthetic tones that co-produced and collaborator Bowie was about to use on his Berlin Trilogy (The Idiot was also recorded in Berlin). In a way, Pop is fish-out-of-place on Krautrock-inspired tracks like “Nightclubbing” and the ethereal “China Girl” (later turned into a hit by Bowie himself). But it’s exactly this bewildered displacement and fresh context that makes The Idiot such a welcome jolt in Pop’s career arc—one that stretched his formidable voice into strange new shapes.