we all know about the stooges and the bowie-saturated "lust for life" and "the idiot" albums, but after the berlin days (and before "lust for life" became the theme song for luxury cruises), iggy spat out a few confounding classics that have gone all but completely overlooked.

these four albums - "new values", "the soldier", "party" and "zombie birdhouse" - are some late '70s/early '80s slabs of cranked-out lovin' from the iggster, with some songs famous to his fans ("dog food" comes immediately to mind) and some songs known to die-hard bowie fans (DB covered "bang bang" and "neighborhood threat", though neither cover does the originals justice).

while each album kinda sorta has a sound of its own, taken as one big blob of iggy, these four albums bleed into each other to create a wonderful wave of chaos and wacked-out charm.

i don't know much about the wheres/whens/whys of these albums, other than i saw a video of iggy promoting "soldier" on the old tom snyder show and ig was missing a front tooth. that, and iggy references chicago a few times on "party", making me guess that he recorded the album in my current hometown.

every once in a while, the backing vocals make me wonder if bowie was still along for the ride during this stretch of recording, but i'm gonna have to do some googling to see if that's really the case. david or no david, these albums are a fun, trashy, skanky way to pass a hot, skanky, sticky summer. yummy stuff indeed.

any iggy fans out there?

You're making me want to fill in some gaps.

GangstaFam said:

you should have a gap-filling party.

speaking of which, "party" is a good start, if just for the title track and "eggs on a plate".

I thought new values was thought of as a classic Iggy Pop album.

lilgish said:

it was on a major label...i think it was groomed to be a classic iggy album...and who knows, among music snob intelligensia, maybe it is...but it seems like a "decline" into the quirkier, more intimate stuff on the next few albums.

Anx said:

That's a good assessment. Even the cover seems to harken back to the classic Raw Power. Not a fan of New Values, The only track I really like is Girls, it reminds me of Lou Reed. Iggy is great when he sounds like a fractured version of his contemporaries (Bowie, Reed..) A really listenable record with a cool cover. I don't know the other albums . I've heard a bit of zombie birdhouse which sounds kinda cool. Still nothing approaching the level of something like The Idiot; Mass Production being like one of the best songs ever.

lilgish said:

i think the albums i listed are a good progression for when you need an iggy fix but you're sick to death of hearing "idiot", "lust for life", stooges, etc...he's still 100% crazy-ass iggy, but it's fun because it's a little more obscure...and it was well before "blah blah blah" and the whole mess afterwards...

Anx said:

Did you have a Reckless used bin party?

Anx said:

are you putting Brick by Brick in that category? tell me you don't like Candy?

lilgish said:

oh, i LOVE 'candy'...i love him in 'crybaby' and 'dead man'...he's done lots of good stuff in his later years, but unfortunately not a lot of it has been on his albums. 'brick by brick' is probably the best of his post-'blah' releases.

Confession time - sometimes I think Iggy Pop was hot.

iggy pop=good party music..
also good coke music

New Values is alnmost as good as Lust for Life and The Idiot.

Soldier and Party have one good track apiece.

Zombie Birdhouse is the strangest album Iggy's ever made. In places it's dreadful, in others it's great. The trouble is Clem Burke's early 80s production drowns everything in synthesizers, often to the song's detriment. It's well worth checking out all the same. And if you do, track down the reissue which came out on the Burning Airlines label in 2003. It has thirty plus tracks on it, including demos and an entire concert from the Zombie tour.
[Edited 6/21/06 21:22pm]