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every time I give this a relisten Iām always shocked by how consistently great it is as an album. Obviously, āThe Idiotā gets a tonne of praise and deservedly so, and even though this album helms a lot of Iggy Popās most popular singles, I never see people talking about it as an album and what it does brilliantly.
even with āThe Idiotā, Iggy Pop was very much performing under David Bowie wing and environment- a lot of dark and brooding electronics and atmosphere which complimented Iggy well but, here he is definitively Iggy Pop.
I think people forget that āpunkā music (which Iggy hated the label of) doesnāt necessarily fall into a genre, more so an attitude of performance. This is proved time and time again in this album, as Iggy covers styles of hard rock, blues rock, ballads and soul- all unmistakably polished with a punk edge.
Punk isnāt the music you play, just how you play it (at least I think so), and itās so obvious that Iggy and the band just had a blast recording and performing this, they donāt take themselves seriously, if anything, poking fun at the restrictions of rock and pop songwriting in the process. Yet, the album never feels like itās smarter than you, itās inviting you in to feel the excitement.
Such a blast of a record, if you need a pick-me-up like I did today, give this a whirl!
Related Recs
Listened to this for the first time on the way to work this morning. Heavy asf and a kick to the jaw of an album. Badass record.
9/10
Listen if you like:
The Velvet Underground - White Light / White Heat
The Stooges - The Stooges
Patti Smith - Horses
Feb 6, 2024
(the Bowie cover from the 90s) is excellent, but Iāve done nothing but listen to the Modern Lovers since my move to New York even if theyāre more Boston. Had a realization that punk rock ranges in quality, but proto-punk from garage rock is great and post-punk is great.
Aug 23, 2024
I'll state it right up front: This is a dad-rock rec.
Try to picture yourself (a theme of this album's third track, "Picture Book") back in 1968: songwriting pairs dominate the UK scene. Lennon/McCartney; Jagger/Richards; Page/Plant. Into this noisy fray saunters the Kinks' Ray Davies, who has had hits earlier in the decade with his group the Kinks that SOUND a lot like to guitar-up-to-eleven frenzy ("You Really Got Me," a number one, was said for years to feature a young Jimmy Page on the solo, until it was debunked) but is now fixated on a sepia-toned sort of quasi-nostalgia that is pivoting his band from England's Hitmakers toward the sort of cult band that would later be cited by Blur's Damon Albarn and Oasis' Noel Gallagher as a seminal source of material and influence (it's hard to imagine "Parklife" or "What's the Story Morning Glory" -- hell, Britpop, period -- without this album and the pathway it created).
Davies was busy wrapping himself in the cloak of the Union Jack, long before this sort of move would have had him branded as National Front (or Morrissey-adjacent). "Village Green Preservation Society" didn't sell much when it was released (it only went gold in 2018) but was notable for its acoustic, singer/songwritery pastoral vibe and a yearning for a return to a Middle England that arguably had never existed. Indeed, the mix of sarcasm and sentimentality that marks the title track ("We are the skyscraper condemnation affiliates/God save Tudor houses, antique tables, and billiards") and other key cuts such as "People Take Pictures of Each Other," "Last of the Steam Powered Trains," the music hall sounds of "Sitting by the Riverside" and "All of My Friends Were There" speak to a love of both the literal village green as well as the metaphorical village green -- many of these mementoes of the past are likely better left behind (which Davies either notes directly or through comparison) but the crank in him just can't resist making the point that a way of life and a slice of history is sliding away before our very eyes.
Davies spent part of 1968 writing satirical numbers for a late-night BBC comedy program, so it's entirely possible that this ironic sensibility (which would inform his writing from that point forward) spilled over into the writing and creation of this album. Earlier songs like "Dedicated Follower of Fashion" and "A Well Respected Man" pointed the way toward this endstate but Davies had never sustained it for a full LP. This was a novella about the premature death of England, The Concept and The Empire.
Two contemporaneous non-album tracks -- "Days" and "Wonderboy" -- do as good a job of explaining Davies' motives at the time (a sort of inward and wistful focus on their Britishness, which a five year U.S. performance ban for reasons that remain somewhat vague no doubt also created, by extension) as the album itself, which is nonetheless one of the first extant concept albums ever recorded.
These days, we think of Davies as doing his best work with a quiet, knowing, ironic smile -- this is the album that started his whole downstream career phase as the poet laureate of a quickly-evaporating Albion, which groups like the Libertines (and all their tongue-in-cheek Olde Ways mythmaking) were surely taking note of.
A top-ten all time record for me. All hail the Godfather of Britpop (I'm sure he hates that moniker but it doesn't mean it's not true).
Oct 27, 2024
Top Recs from @glenbek
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Been a very slow year with not much acting work at all but, last year I managed to get a line of dialogue in the last season of house of the dragon, and also filmed two seasons of a kids show for the BBC.
Iām happy I stuck with this wish, even if itās painful to continue pursuing it sometimes :)
Oct 18, 2024
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If youāre lucky enough to have a cinema nearby that shows certain films on actual film stock then I canāt recommend it enough.
All of the mistakes and signs of use on the film stock, that are apparent to you throughout the runtime, adds another layer of immersion to a cinema experience. No one else will see that particular showing of that particular film except for the people in that room with you at the time.
One of my old drama school teachers once told me a fun little story about the gaps between each frame. He said that all those empty gaps which are only fractions of a second between frames being processed and projected are all registered in our brains when we watch a film on celluloid. He also said that our brains see these blank spaces and instinctively imagines what would fill the empty gaps so, we feel more immersed in the film as our brains try to connect these dots in front of us.
I donāt know if thatās true at all, but Iād like to believe so.
Oct 15, 2024
This song has kept me alive more times than Iād care to remember or mention!
āI hear what you want,
And I feel that wayā
Oct 17, 2024