Author: Steed

Tidal Catalog #2: Iggy Pop

(Edited on 5/24/2020 to add in adjusted summary)

Introduction: For those of you that have stumbled across this website and are interested in reading about my trek through the universe of the Tidal streaming service, let me tell you a bit about what I did. Back in 2016 I thought it would be kind of cool to listen to artist’s catalog from start to finish and rank them from best to worst. After all, who doesn’t like a good list? I thought I might do a few of them and see what happened, hoping it would introduce me to records that were foreign to me in the arsenal of an artist I was familiar with. I also though that it would be pretty cool to get out of the “one off” mode of listening to a new record, years after the previous one, in order to get a true sense of how the artist matured over time. Flash forward to June of 2019 and 250 catalogs later, I have ended the trek. I posted these all on Facebook over the years as they were completed but I’m going to move them all over here, starting with #1, in order to expand them out a bit more.

As with all my catalogs, to be considered in the ranking, an album has to meet certain criteria:

  • The artist must actually perform on 80% of the tracks (soundtrack and rap provision)
  • No compilations of previous released material will be included.
  • The
    album must have been released officially and within the realm of the
    label that the artist would have been on at the time or official
    releases posthumously (normally applies to a slew of live records)
  • Any EPs must contain new new music and be relevant to the catalog, not be more like a single with a b-side or two.
  • Compilations
    of previously recorded material will be included if they are remixes,
    bonus tracks, outtakes… mostly music that hasn’t been part of a main
    release before)

Entrance Point: I had heard Raw Power by the Stooges, some of Iggy’s solo records in the 80s and 2001’s Beat ‘Em Up but not much other than singles beyond that.

Not included: Only some of the Shout! Factory live records in the past decade. Everything else with the Stooges, solo and collaborations are here.

Iggy Pop was a natural choice for catalog #2 since the first one was David Bowie. I originally intended these catalogs to work this way, sort of a six degree thing that would take me down the rabbit hole. But yeah, that stopped with the second catalog. So much for that. But I went to Iggy pop because he was buddies with David Bowie, wrote a lot of music with him and collaborated often enough that his named popped up a bit while I was going through the Bowie catalog. I knew some Stooges stuff, “Real Wild Child,” “Lust for Live” and “Candy” from him but not much else stuck. I had heard his albums were all over the map so it was worth a shot – and it turned out great.

All albums ranked on a 10 point scale.

  • New Values (10)

Before this catalog, when I heard the name Iggy Pop, I immediately thought “punk rocker” and while that’s a very real part of his persona, I ended up finding out how versatile he really was. And my favorite record from him was 1979’s New Values, ironically the first album since the second Stooges record that didn’t have any involvement from Bowie. This was his second solo record that he collaborated with Stooges guitarist James Williamson on and it marks a movement into his rock/new-wave hybrid period.

I love the production on this record from Williamson. No real bells and whistles, very raw and dry, which works well for Iggy’s sound and is a bit of a hold over from how the Stooges records were sonically. Despite Bowie not being part of the record, you can surely hear the influence on the disc. “How Do Ya Fix A Broken Part” has all the elements of a Bowie track from that era. And what Williamson does here is blend elements of rock and punk with horns and keyboards, the latter of which comes from Scott Thurston who played with the Stooges for a couple years and would later join Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers.

Although the critics did like New Values, it didn’t sell well. I also completely realize that putting this above Raw Power is likely silly in some people’s eyes but my interest is peaked in different ways sometimes.

Iggy Pop, “The Endless Sea”
  • Raw Power (the Stooges album) (10)

” I’m a street walking cheetah with a heart full of napalm.” Could that be the greatest first line of any album in history? And it sets the stage for some of what’s contained within. The first two Stooges records were a bit more groove-based than this one which focused more on rock and punk aesthetics. The raw and muddy production from Iggy and David Bowie suits the music perfectly (I know a lot of people disagree) whether it’s the blistering punk tune “Your Pretty Face is Going to Hell” or the more subtle “Gimme Danger.” The title track is the perfect example of how to blend punk, rock and a great hook to create a vicious, yet easily accessible track. This was the final Stooges album until their reunion in 2007 and marks one of the best send off albums of all time.

The Stooges, “Raw Power”
  • The Stooges (The Stooges album) (10)
  • Lust for Life (10)

Wrote, recorded and mixed in just eight days, this is very much an Iggy Pop and David Bowie collaboration. Iggy’s first solo record (The Idiot) was more like a Bowie art-rock record. Lust For Life feels more like an Iggy Pop record with significant contributions none-the-less from David. Seems that Iggy kind of new it had the potential to turn into a Bowie record too as he’s stated in the past that Bowie was writing material so fast that he had to be faster to make sure it had his sound on it. Either way though, it’s a brilliant album, with another great opener in the title track, that has become one of Iggy Pop’s signature tunes. And it also includes the darker, yet still catchy “The Passenger” (which would be covered in ever darker versions by many artists) and “Tonight,” a trippy pop track that Bowie would then remake for his album by the same name, many years later. Smack dab in the middle of his best period, this is just one instance of Iggy being extremely versatile and at the top of his game.

Iggy Pop, “The Passenger”
  • Soldier (9.5)
  • The Idiot (9.5)
  • Préliminaires (9)

The next place I stop has to be with 2009’s Préliminaires. This album came after a reunited Stooges released The Weirdness in 2007. Critics hated that record (I don’t think it’s that bad) but I still thought more hard rock/punk would continue after that. Well, at least his next two albums weren’t like that at all. This is a jazz rock record and even better, partially sung in French while consisting mostly of tunes written by Pop. His follow up record (Apres) was pretty much a French jazz cover record. Not only wouldn’t you expect one of these, but two? And the best part about it of course is that they are both pretty damn great, especially Préliminaires. I remember fans buying this and reacting poorly, thinking they were getting a standard Iggy Pop record but I love this for the adventurous turn and chance he took putting the record out.

Iggy Pop, “How Insensitive”
  • Ready To Die (The Stooges album) (9)
  • Teatime Dub Encounters (w/ Underworld) (9)
  • Post Pop Depression (9)
  • Fun House (8.5)
  • Party (8.5)

When I think of a party, Iggy Pop isn’t the first person to come to mind however, considering how many drugs he did, maybe he should be. I love this record from 1981, maybe because everyone else seems to hate it or maybe that for the 80s, it’s pretty fucking solid. I can’t say it’s his most well written as some of the lyrics are pretty fucking stupid but it’s actually a pretty catchy post-punk/new wave record. The Uptown Horns are featured prominently on “Houston Is Hot Tonight” but the highlight of the record is the very Cars-like “Pumpin’ for Jill.” Yes, this is a bit of an odd bird in the catalog – happier than most, kind of dumb lyrics but there’s something oddly satisfying to see that even when Iggy doesn’t bring his A game, it’s still pretty damn good.

Iggy Pop, “Pumpin’ for Jill”
  • Leaves of Grass (w/Tarwater and Alva Noto) (8)
  • Kill City (8)
  • Skull Ring (8)

In 2003, Iggy Pop decided to release a full blown punk rock record and thus Skull Ring was born. The album features guest performers on every track, be it the Stooges or the Trolls (his backing band at the time) to Green Day, Sum 41 and Peaches. Although this was the first really heavy record he’d released in a long time that was worth a damn and it does have some great tunes, the mixing and matching of guests/bands makes for a bit of an uneven listen at times. The tracks from the Stooges (5 of them) sound a bit stuck in the 70s, while the tracks with the Trolls sound a bit more updated than that. With the first five tracks going back and forth between the two bands it’s an odd vibe. Iggy’s vocals are interesting as well as I’m not a huge fan of them on the opening track, “Little Electric Chair” but then they are really cool and off-kilter on “Superbabe.” The Green Day tracks sound you know, like Green Day. “Private Hell” could have easily been sung by Billie Joe Armstrong and put on a Green Day record but also makes me kind of wonder what a full album with Green Day and Iggy would sound like, as he can carry their three-cord polished punk pretty damn well. Even the Sum 41 track (“Little Know It All”) sounds pretty good coming from Iggy, though it is kind of weird hearing him sing that kind of pop-punk essentially from kids. Overall, there’s 17 damn tracks here, so it’s way too long and the flow is pretty terrible but there are great tracks on the record if you can just get to them.

Iggy Pop, “Supermarket”
  • Apres (8)
  • Free (8)
  • Avenue B (8)
  • The Weirdness (The Stooges album) (7.5)
  • Blah Blah Blah (7)
  • Naughty Little Doggie (7)
  • Brick by Brick (7)
  • Leaves of Grass (6.5)
  • Zombie Birdhouse (6)
  • Instinct (6)
  • American Caesar (5)
  • Beat ’em Up (4)

I stop one last time, all the way down here at an album I gave a 4/10 ranking to, because at the time of writing this, it was the last record I had heard from him and while it obviously didn’t leave much of an impression on me, it still made me want to do this catalog. The thought behind this record was good. It was the first thoroughly hard record he had put out in a long time and he brought in Mooseman, formerly of fucking Body Count to help bring new life to his sound. Now, let’s keep in mind that Body Count was/is a pretty shitty band, even more so around this era and while that really wasn’t the fault of Mooseman, he was a contributor. He only co-wrote three songs on the record, with the rest co-written by long time collaborator Whitey Kirst. Ironically, it’s the Mooseman tracks that might be the best on the disc. But some of the other tracks, like “L.O.S.T.” and “Beat ‘Em Up” sound like Body Count outtakes, while Iggy actually howls on the appropriately titled, “Howl!” and the track “Football” might actually be the dumbest shit he’s ever recorded. Sometimes the trainwreck is what gets me though and I still hear the energy and purpose behind what he was trying to do. He just didn’t execute very well at all.

Iggy Pop, “Football”
Iggy Pop, “Beat ‘Em Up”
  • TV Eye Live 1977 (3)

Summary: 28 total albums. Average rating: 7.8

Tidal Catalog #1: David Bowie

For those of you that have stumbled across this website and are interested in reading about my trek through the universe of the Tidal streaming service, let me tell you a bit about what I did. Back in 2016 I thought it would be kind of cool to listen to artist’s catalog from start to finish and rank them from best to worst. After all, who doesn’t like a good list? I thought I might do a few of them and see what happened, hoping it would introduce me to records that were foreign to me in the arsenal of an artist I was familiar with. I also though that it would be pretty cool to get out of the “one off” mode of listening to a new record, years after the previous one, in order to get a true sense of how the artist matured over time. Flash forward to June of 2019 and 250 catalogs later, I have ended the trek. I posted these all on Facebook over the years as they were completed but I’m going to move them all over here, starting with #1, in order to expand them out a bit more.

As with all my catalogs, to be considered in the ranking, an album has to meet certain criteria:

  • The artist must actually perform on 80% of the tracks (soundtrack and rap provision)
  • No compilations of previous released material will be included.
  • The album must have been released officially and within the realm of the label that the artist would have been on at the time or official releases posthumously (normally applies to a slew of live records)
  • Any EPs must contain new new music and be relevant to the catalog, not be more like a single with a b-side or two.
  • Compilations of previously recorded material will be included if they are remixes, bonus tracks, outtakes… mostly music that hasn’t been part of a main release before)

Entrance point: I was very familiar with all of David Bowie’s singles and all of his albums from 1980 through at least the mid-90s.

Not included: Christiane F. soundtrack (previously released material), Labyrinth soundtrack (half score, half Bowie tunes), Lazarus cast recording (songs from David’s musical). I also made the call to not add the posthumous records milking his vault, which means this catalog is pretty much closed now.

David Bowie had released ten studio albums before I was born, so I had a bit of catching up to do here. The first memory of Bowie for me was the Let’s Dance album. I was 7. I don’t know that the nuances of him creating a record with Nile Rodgers really hit me at time but I am pretty sure that “Let’s Dance” was a call for me to get my butt moving in my Dad’s house.

I listened to Bowie with my Dad through the 80s and then kept up the listening through 1997’s Earthling, then sort of drifted away. But the reason I made this catalog #1 is because I loved Blackstar and wondered what I had been missing for years. So let’s rank the catalog.

All albums ranked on a 10 point scale.

  • Station to Station (10)

Weirdly enough, my favorite Bowie record was released three weeks before I was born. Maybe my mom was listening to this one while I was in the womb or something. I’ll have to ask her if she was a Bowie fan at all. A mixture of funk and krautrock, to me this is the pinnacle of Bowie’s output in his most significant and creative period (and even though he was wasted all the time, it seems). It’s a short album with only six tracks but one of those is the fantastic title track, which is David’s longest studio recording at 10:15. “Golden Years” was the second track on the record and is still one of David’s funkiest singles. But the highlight for me is “TVC 15” and the story behind it. Bowie was with his buddy Iggy Pop, when Iggy hallucinated and thought the TV was swallowing his girlfriend. “TVC 15” then became the story of a holographic TV that you can crawl in-and-out of. Drugs, man.

  • Young Americans (10)
  • Black Tie White Noise (9.5)

So, Black Tie White Noise is all the way up here with a 9.5/10 ranking ahead of many of his traditionally classic records. I’m sure there aren’t many people in the world that agree with me on this one but that’s okay. After growing up with Bowie in the 80’s and struggling with Tonight, Never Let Me Down and the first Tin Machine album, this release was gold for me in 1993. It helps that I have listened to this album more than any other record in Bowie’s catalog but it’s not just nostalgia that makes me believe this is by far the most underrated record in his arsenal. It came out in 1993 right around the time that Duran Duran got their second life with their self-titled record. I link those two together because it a way, they kind of have the same vibe. Sure, Bowie’s record is a bit more experimental and avant-garde even, with David playing the saxophone all over this record, even though he’s not really a sax player. His playing style is more free-form jazz than structured and it really works great here. He brought back Nile Rodgers again which added a lot of funkiness to the tunes. Mix in some electronics and lots of rock and you have what boils down to a really great listen, consistent and yet still adventurous. And yes, that is Al B. Sure on the title track.

  • The Next Day (9.5)
  • The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (9.5)
  • Let’s Dance (9)
  • Blackstar (9)

I probably should have paused to chat about Let’s Dance since I brought it up earlier but I really want to talk about the his last record. There’s not too many artists that can create one of their best records 39-years after their first release, but here we are. There’s always going to be the interesting history behind it – an album recorded in secret, released without much warning, on Bowie’s 69th birthday and two days before his death due to liver cancer, which the public wasn’t even aware he had.

It’s hard to even describe the sound on Blackstar, it’s simply so unique. I suppose it’s art rock but that can mean so much. It’s free form jazz, drum & bass, electronic, hip hop and trippy as hell at points. Bowie was supposedly listening to Kendrick Lamar before making this record and it shows in how he created the beats. Listen to this record and then Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly or Damn and then tell me you can’t hear similarities in some of the tunes.

I listened to this the day it came out, twice. Then Bowie passed and I listened to it again and the lyrics about looking to heaven and the sad horns in “Lazarus” took on new meaning. I’m listening to this track again just writing this and it’s really is quite emotional.

It’s simply an amazing record and a remarkable ending to a great career.

  • Aladdin Sane (9)
  • The Man Who Sold the World (9)
  • Reality (9)
  • Low (9)
  • Diamond Dogs (9)
  • Heathen (8.5)
  • Scary Monsters (8.5)
  • Dance (8.5)
  • Pin Ups (8)
  • Hunky Dory (8)
  • Glass Spider Live (8)
  • No Plan (8)
  • Serious Moonlight Live (8)
  • Tin Machine (8)
  • The Buddha of Suburbia (8)

The Buddha of Suburbia might be ranked a little too low on my list to be honest. It’s a pretty great record for one that many people didn’t even hear at least until the 2007 reissue. In 1993 it was released as the soundtrack a four-part BBC drama but only the title track was used in the show. David wrote other tunes that really represent the soundtrack more accurately and this really turned out to be a new ten song album by him instead. There are three ambient instrumental pieces in here, mixed with experimental electronic jazz and rock tunes, so I have it ranked down here because the flow of the record isn’t the best overall but some of the tunes on this record are simply remarkable.

  • Live Santa Monica ’72 (7.5)
  • Hours (7.5)
  • Space Oddity (7.5)
  • Cracked Actor (7)
  • Glastonbury 2000 Live (7)
  • Welcome to the Blackout (7)
  • Outside (7)
  • “Heroes” (7)

There’s a lot of people that aren’t going to agree with me on having “Heroes” this low on the list but I simply don’t think the album as a whole stands up as well as many others do, in retrospect. After David released Low in early ’77, he followed up in Q4 of that year with “Heroes” (album) which was a return to loud, upbeat music after his previous melancholy turn. He recorded the disc in Germany and was influenced again by bands like Kraftwerk and Neu!. This was the second of three records where he collaborated with Brian Eno (considered the “Berlin Trilogy”). The title track is of course one of his most memorable hits but some of the other tunes like “Sons of the Silent Age” are a little offputting, horns in the first verse, cheesy chorus, 60’s psychedelia in the second verse etc… and while I applaud him for trying something different, “V-2 Schneider” ends up being a bit of an odd, mostly instrumental track with Bowie playing his saxophone off the beat. Interesting but a little weird in the end. And then he follows it up with three more instrumentals, two of them being ambient tunes with Eno. In the end, the first and second sides of the LP sound like two totally different EPs simply released together and that’s really the reason this one is so low on my list.

  • Live Nassau Colosseum ’76 (6.5)
  • A Reality Tour (6.5)
  • Tonight (6)
  • Lodger (6)
  • Tin Machine II (6)
  • Never Let Me Down (6)
  • Ziggy Stardust: The Motion Picture (6)
  • VH1 Storytellers (5)
  • Spying Through a Keyhole (5)
  • David Bowie (5)
  • Stage (5)
  • Earthling (5)

For my final stop on the list, we go to Earthling, his industrial drum-n-bass record. I also listened to this album a ton in my junior year of college, not right away but after Nine Inch Nails came out with “The Perfect Drug” in May of ’97. I then heard Trent Reznor had recorded “I’m Afraid of Americans” with Bowie and that was on Earthling, released a few month s before. Since I was a huge NIN fan, I listened and I fell in love with this record. Bowie was really into The Prodigy at this time and there’s plenty of influence from them in this album and lots and lots of quirkiness. One of my favorite tunes is “Looking for Satellites” which David made Reeves Gabrels play only one guitar string at a time, leading to a very unique sounding song. At the time of original listening, I didn’t even care that the version of “I’m Afraid of Americans” wasn’t even the one with Trent Reznor on it (that’s V1, which is a remix and better than the album cut). (Fun note: “I’m Afraid of Americans” original chorus was “I’m Afraid of the Animals” and appeared on the soundtrack to the movie Showgirls! Yes, Showgirls. You’re a real Bowie fan if you knew that one.) Anyway, I listened to the hell out of this record and loved it for many years but what’s nice about these catalogs is that I’m essentially starting over. I went from the beginning and heard so much great music before this album came out and saw how poorly this aged, which really put the lack of quality material on this one in perspective.

  • David Live (4)
  • Tin Machine Live: Oy Vey, Baby (3)

Summary: 44 total albums. Average rating: 7.4