The Crater's Edges #7: The Stooges (The Stooges v. Raw Power)

The Come-Up:

“Their music is loud, boring, tasteless, unimaginative and childish,” wrote Edmund Ward of The Stooges in Rolling Stone, right after their first album came out. “I kind of like it.”

Even in 2017 it’s not hard to see where he was coming from. Compared to other contemporary garage rock bands – MC5, Them, anybody on the Nuggets compilations – The Stooges were stupid. Their songs plodded in place, shuffling between two chords. Not very creative chords, either. Frontman Iggy Stooge sang about girls and fucking, and you were lucky to get the first one without the second. His legendary stage presence, which involved him hopping around shirtless, provoking the audience, swearing, exposing his penis, and rolling around in broken glass, could just as easily be empty shock theater. The Stooges had some inventive and unusual moments… but hell, those were probably just John Cale’s doing.

But this is The Crater’s Edges, and we’re not looking at albums in their own context. In retrospect The Stooges is a clear blueprint for the heights that the band would reach on their next two albums. Right now their power was muted. Scott Asheton stays in his pocket more than he would on future albums. Iggy hasn’t developed the range of yells and whoops that would come to characterize him, and so he mostly relies on subtle inflections in his delivery. Notice the way he blurts out “I want you… here,” on “I Wanna Be Your Dog,” or deadpans the chorus of “Real Cool Time” with the perfect amount of menace and insinuation. Iggy’s pig-horny on this album, and he sounds inescapably of the world rather than transcending it as he would later.

What’s most interesting about The Stooges is that its most experimental tendencies are not the ones that they followed up on. The album’s third track, “We Will Fall,” is a ten-minute dirge, driven by the band’s synchronized chanting and climaxing with a screeching viola accompaniment courtesy of producer John Cale. Cale is likely responsible for the famous sleigh-bells-and-piano arrangement of “I Wanna Be Your Dog,” which sounds like a lost White Light/White Heat track. A big reason for the song’s success and influence? Yes. A part of The Stooges’s sound going forward? Well, Iggy Pop would keep these left-field choices in his back pocket for moments in his solo career, but as for The Stooges, nah. The band was more interested in perfecting the shit-rock sound of “No Fun” than trying to be another Velvet Underground.

Thing is, The Stooges might have already been next-level, but the album doesn’t show it. Their live concerts apparently consisted of five songs that they would jam on and stretch out, and they assumed that would be good enough for an album. This suggests that their live presence was a lot closer to what we’d hear on Fun House than what we get here. Hell, there are in-studio extended versions of “No Fun” and “Ann” that confirm this, both descending into dread-laden instrumental vamps. Listen to that full version of “Ann” and tell me it’s not two steps from “Dirt.” The three songs that they had to, essentially, make up in one night before recording the album to fill out the tracklist (“Real Cool Time,” “Not Right,” and “Little Doll”) all feature more elastic grooves and creative band interplay than the pre-written ones. They also feature molten guitar solos from Ron Asheton, the only element of the band to come roaring at full power on this debut album. Listening to these songs, tossed-off as they are, it’s clear that The Stooges are growing more distinct as a band. But the stuffy atmosphere doesn’t suit them too well.

The Peak:

Fun House is a descent into Hell, one of the purest distillations of rock and roll’s exorcismic power. Locked in Elektra Sound Recorders studio with new producer Don Gallucci, with all the soundproofing torn off the walls, the band bashed out take after take of their repertoire, gradually shaking off their studio stiffness and locking into filthy grooves. The songs now extended as long as they wanted to – we only get seven tracks, but they’re freeform, bristling things that expand and contract like living organisms.

Every member of the band has ascended at this point – Scott Asheton’s drums push the songs around, lurching in uneven patterns that buoy the rest of the band. Dave Alexander locks in with him perfectly and is often the only thing tethering The Stooges to a rhythm. Ron Asheton, free to jump in at any time and not just during the bridge or ending, plays guitar like he’s summoning a demon. In an inspired move, the band picked up a saxophonist, Steve Mackay. He only appears on the last three songs, but his entrance on “1970” is one of the record’s greatest moments: a sudden intrusion of a free-jazz wail, dissonant and destabilizing. Iggy must fight with him for control, screeching “I feel alright!” with increasing madness as the entire structure goes off the rails.

It's Iggy himself who makes the greatest leap here, unlocking a new power in his voice. He baits the rest of the band to push it harder and louder with inhuman grunts, leers and boasts about how dirty and loose he is, and peels the paint off the walls with ragged yelps. It’s impossible to imagine the Iggy of The Stooges having the vocal power necessary to ring in “T.V. Eye” with that animalistic, immortal “LAAAAAWWWWDDDDD.” Here? It’s probably not even his best moment on the album.

Fun House is so complete and perfect an album that it’s hard to see what they could’ve added to it. Maybe nothing more needs to be said. Maybe this sound couldn’t have been pushed any further. Maybe I’m wrong, and in continuing as they were The Stooges would break through to some previously unknown tenth circle of hell. But the only obvious way to move on from… this… would be a major shift in sound.

The Comedown:

I consider this a first for The Crater’s Edges, in that the comedown album this week isn’t quite by the same band. My ideal candidate for this series is a band or artist who makes their three albums in the same creative swing. Sure, lots of stuff changed around Sonic Youth over the course of Sister, Daydream Nation and Goo, but the band themselves stayed the same. Between Fun House and Raw Power, though, we have a real break. After a fractious tour, during which several band members were fired and new ones were hired, as well as Fun House’s commercial faceplant, The Stooges broke up. Iggy Pop decamped from Detroit to New York City and struck up a friendship with David Bowie, who got him signed to a solo deal.

Iggy and guitarist James Williamson (one of the guitarists who had joined in The Stooges’ dying days) found themselves in want of familiar musicians while recording their album, and so the Asheton brothers were brought back in. The Stooges were basically back together, but because of Williamson’s influence on the already-recorded material, Ron Asheton was assigned to bass guitar. After two years of upheaval only to settle back down in a different configuration, The Stooges as they existed were no more. Now the members were supporting players assisting Iggy in making his album, and accordingly they were now billed as Iggy & the Stooges.

So to call Raw Power a logical follow-up to Fun House is inaccurate, because it was birthed of a different atmosphere. Raw Power is a more legible album, one that takes its cues from glam rock instead of psychedelia. You can directly trace the influence of songs like “Search and Destroy” or “Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell” on founding punk artists like Richard Hell and The Sex Pistols. Even further down the road, the combination of that punk attitude with the album’s romantic edge (exemplified by a makeup-sporting Iggy Pop leaning gloriously on his microphone stand on the album art) would go on to influence glam-metal bands like Def Leppard and Poison in the 80s. It’s an album that looks and behaves more like how we expect a rock-and-roll album to.

A big part of that is the input of James Williamson, a brilliant and influential guitarist in his own right, and the polar opposite of Ron Asheton. Unlike Asheton’s deeply instinctual, noisy playing, Williamson was a precise and flashy guitar instrumentalist. He scrawls laser-light guitar solos all over these songs, which serve to amplify Iggy’s emotions rather than destabilizing them. Had Ron Asheton taken the ending guitar solo in “Search and Destroy,” it would have been a moment of uncertainty, as the street-walking cheetah succumbs to a debauched world of his own making. In Williamson’s hands, there’s still an element of danger, but he soars instead on a bed of swift chromatic blues licks, fists pumping to the sky. We’ve been given real catharsis on this song, something that The Stooges had ever offered up before. No wonder its influence was more immediate than what came before.

Raw Power is Iggy’s album, though, and he shows his range here. One minute he’s bleating out “Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell” in the rudest belch he’s ever conjured, the next he delights in drawing out the vowels in the chorus of “Penetration.” But the biggest leap he makes is in an area The Stooges aren’t known for: the lyrics. In the past Iggy’s self-conception was limited to deterministic statements: “I’m so messed up,” “I’m a real low mind,” “I’m loose.” Now on “Search and Destroy” he starts with one of the most legendary couplets in rock history: “I’m a street-walking cheetah with a heart full of napalm / I’m a runaway son of the nuclear A-bomb.” And on the title track he delivers another iconic lyric: “Dance to the beat of the living dead.” Dig deep on the album and you can still find stunners like “There’s nothing in my dreams / Just some ugly memories,” or “Honey, come and be my enemy so I can love you true.” Whereas Iggy was a filthy animal on the last two albums, here he’s more like a Byronic hero. This is, after all, the album where he changed his stage name from Iggy Stooge to Iggy Pop. Raw Power is the album where he emerges from a long voyage into the night and establishes himself as an icon. More than any other album it’s the one that established his legend, and after all that he’s seen and gone through, nobody deserves it more.

The Verdict:

It’s obviously Raw Power, which manages the incredible feat of nearly matching Fun House the only way anything can nearly match Fun House: being completely different from it. On Raw Power you can hear the R&B edges of the MC5’s proto-punk sound being shorn off and forming into what we now understand as punk rock music. It’s not transcendent or awe-inspiring in the way Fun House is, but it’s an excellent rock album, rightly influential and rightly loved. I’m calling it for the comedown album this week.

You might also notice an elephant in the room, which is the choice between the original Bowie mix or the Iggy mix of Raw Power. I listened to both for this review and tried to keep it focused on the actual songs irrespective of how they sound. But as for which one I prefer? Well… there’s enough meat on that question for a whole other essay, especially when you consider the original John Cale mixes of The Stooges and the 1970: The Complete Funhouse Sessions and Heavy Liquid boxsets. I’ll tackle all those in a future essay soon.

The Crater's Edges #6: Janet Jackson (Control v. Janet.)

The Come-Up:

In writing these blog posts, I’ve found a related-but-not-quite-synonymous kind of album alongside the magnum opus. Call it the inventa opus: the work of discovery. It’s the album where an artist finally breaks free of their early-career shakiness and finds their own voice – one which may still carry the mark of their influences but is nonetheless a new and distinct thing. Sonic Youth had it with Sister and its leveraging of songcraft with noise experimentalism, and Autechre had it with Tri repetae and their commitment to minimalist glitch. Sometimes the inventa opus and the magnum opus are one in the same, sometimes not.

In the case of Control, it isn’t. But there is perhaps no clearer inventa opus out of all the albums we’ve covered. After all, the title track and first song begins with Janet Jackson monologuing: “This is a story about control… my control… control of what I say, control of what I do… and this time, I’m gonna do it my way.” Mission statement made. And after that brief bit of telling, she goes on to show us what she means.

But let’s back up! Because Janet Jackson, while undeniably a brilliant artist, isn’t the auteur or singer-songwriter type we’ve covered before. She grew up in the Jackson performing family under the management of her controlling father Joe Jackson. It was Joe who masterminded her first two solo albums, Janet Jackson and Dream Street. They weren’t bad projects, but they were intensely managed: focus-group-approved, musically inchoate, with no input from Janet herself. So she took the first in several industry-defining personal moves – divorced her husband, severed ties with Joe Jackson and the Jackson family industry to a much greater extent than her brother Michael had seven years earlier, hired her own producers and collaborators, and made a statement of independence.

Control, then, is a fantastically influential album. It writes its independence and artistic freedom directly into the text. Without this precedent, we wouldn’t have NSYNC’s No Strings Attached, Kelly Clarkson’s Breakaway, or P!nk’s M!ssundaztood, albums that broke their artists into pop royalty by emphasizing their independence from a stifling studio system and a change in sound. There’s an entire pop narrative invented by Ms. Jackson here. And it’s not the only way Control changed everything.

Because the album had a great sound that everyone wanted to copy as well. The producers and songwriters that Jackson hired were Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, founding members of The Time. You might also know The Time as the band that operated closely with Prince, who really forged the Minneapolis sound that sits deep within Control’s DNA. The album embodies that synthesized funk sound, where everything sounds like it’s reverberating in a small room made of aluminum. But it also pushes it forward by being more aggressive. These drum loops on these songs groove hard, bridging the gap between the digital pop style that Nile Rodgers had pioneered for Madonna in the early 80s and the New Jack Swing phenomenon that would emerge in the ‘90s.

In the middle of it all is Janet Jackson, who develops a unique personality with her lyrics that snaps all the musical elements together. In short, the thesis statement of Control is “I am a badass.” And she is! Listen to the opening salvo of “Control,” “Nasty,” and “What Have You Done for Me Lately,” one of the great one-two-three wallops in pop history, and try to deny that. But she’s a badass with enough range to express the most classic feelings of romance. By amplifying her independence, the moments when Janet Jackson years for love – as in “When I Think of You” or “He Doesn’t Even Know I’m Alive” – hit that much harder. After all, a song like “What Have You Done for Me Lately” can only come from someone who has an expectation of how to be properly treated. What kind of man could have the singer of “Nasty” swoon? One worthy of the song, undoubtedly.

Control has one final element that we won’t ever see again in Jackson’s albums: conciseness. Nine songs, with at most three ballads and no skits. Forty-two minutes. It’s a tight album with a palpable sense of discipline (or, dare I say it, control), and that makes it super-easy to listen to. But the inventa opus tends to be contrite – the first steps in one’s own space, the first words with one’s own voice, are an exploration. Does that work against the intended message of Control? A little bit, but the thrill of listening to a pop album with no filler electrifies me. Jackson would expand and lounge in her corner a lot more in the future, but her first steps into that corner have a charm all their own.

The Peak:

In the move from a tight, controlled statement to a sprawling, self-assured one, artists often lose something. Mostly consistency. A CD-straining, 70-minute magnum opus tackling themes of racial injustice, inequality, brutality? I think I know how this goes. It’s going to contain several world-beating songs that are worthy of the highest accolades, and then a pile of slush that everyone will ignore but nonetheless makes it a less-than-ideal listening experience. Case closed.

Except, no, it’s not. Rhythm Nation 1814 pulls off the impossible and manages to successfully give us more of everything that we loved about Control: more songs, more variety, more experimentation, more consistency. And it’s not even like an expansion of Control, because Rhythm Nation 1814 has its own identity. Rather than focus on Jackson herself, she’s rejecting the systems of inequality that arise in the world and arguing for education, enlightenment, and furious, righteous love as a balm to it all.

It was one of the best-selling and most successful albums in the world, charting hit after hit. Today, though, it’s been buried a bit. You’ll rarely see it even among poptimism-friendly publications as one of the greatest albums of the decade, even though it self-evidently is. Listening to it for the first time for this blog, I couldn’t help but hold my head in my hands as the hits, with immaculate consistency, kept coming. If you haven’t listened to it yet, I implore you to.

The Comedown:

In yet another moment of defying expectations, Janet. was such a monster success that it feels disingenuous to call it a comedown. It logged six singles on the Billboard Hot 100, a staggering feat which only pales in comparison compared to even more staggering success Rhythm Nation 1814, which scored seven (this makes it the all-time record-holder in that category). Arguably it’s not even the beginning of a downward slope, because the album after this one, The Velvet Rope, is hailed by many (usually fellow musicians) as her artistic masterpiece. But we must place the magnum opus somewhere, after all.

Rhythm Nation 1814 may have been thematically a departure from Control, but musically it was similar: industrial drumbeats, thick bass, pinging synths. By 1993 the innovations of Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis had filtered out into other mainstream pop acts; the New Jack was in full Swing. Accordingly, Janet. abandons the industrial drum sounds of Control and Rhythm Nation 1814 in favor of a more sumptuous, clean sound driven by hip-hop breakbeats. But that wasn’t the only thing that affected the sound of this album.

Jackson had just signed an enormous record deal with Virgin for $40 million, a record high that was soon broken by her brother Michael’s signing to Sony. After being at the forefront of pop innovation in the 80s, the Jacksons were entering their imperial phase. But people thought that Janet Jackson’s fame was primarily due to her family associations and the production/songwriting work of Jam & Lewis, despite her active hand in the songwriting and direction of her own music.

The result was that Jackson was more involved on the ground-level music-making on Janet. She wrote all her own lyrics, and co-wrote and co-produced all the songs. This variety really shows when you listen to the album; keep in mind that the first song that Jackson had sole writing credit for was “Black Cat” on Rhythm Nation 1814, a kickass genre exercise into hard rock/heavy metal. Jackson was, and is, a fearless and eclectic music fan who loves to cross genre lines.

The headstrong innovation on Janet. is best exemplified by the run of songs in the middle beginning with “If”. To start with, “If” is an eye-poppingly dense song, incorporating screaming electric guitar and meticulous acoustic guitar, dramatic strings, thumping bass, a hip-hop breakbeat, and then a sample of the Supremes’ “Someday We’ll Be Together” just for good measure. The intoxicating concoction means that Jackson can basically make the song all-chorus and get away with it, stretching the groove to ecstatic heights. Then we have “This Time,” my personal favorite song on the album and a strong contender for favorite Janet Jackson song period, an epic dance-floor stunner that Jackson sings through gritted teeth before dropping out in the bridge for… an opera interlude. It’s a flabbergasting choice, unimaginable on any other personality-centric pop album, but by the time the drumbeat comes back in and Jackson goes all out for the final chorus, and all the disparate elements congeal into a fist-pumping whole.

Afterward, “Throb” marginalizes Jackson’s voice even more – it’s a house song through-and-through, all the emphasis being placed on the production and beat with only occasional vocal contributions from Jackson herself. “What’ll I Do” is a 70s soul throwback of the kind that Sam Cooke would tear through. “Funky Big Band,” as its title suggests, brings back the 80s bass sound that was so prevalent on Control and Rhythm Nation 1814 in service of a funk stomper. And our dizzying run ends with “New Agenda,” a tune that veers a bit more towards the mean of the album in terms of sound but brings in Chuck D to pay some respect towards hip-hop, and he sounds galvanized to be in the presence of a social provocateur as visionary as him. These six songs communicate the musical landscape of 1993 as well as anything can: they embody the New Jack Swing sound that Jackson had helped pioneer, and seamlessly intertwine many other genres, both in-style (house, hip-hop, rock) and out-of-style (funk, soul, opera).

But there’s a complaint I have to lodge against Janet. It’s just trying so hard that it loses consistency, a trap that Jackson had so nimbly avoided on Rhythm Nation 1814. That run of songs in the middle is stunning, but the album gets off to too safe a start and by the end hits on a stretch of love ballads that become hard to tell apart. Nothing here is bad, because the contributing artists are operating on a rarefied level of craft, but you feel the length on Janet. in a way you didn’t on the album before it.

Nevertheless, if her goal was the prove her independence and standing as a musical artist in her own right: mission accomplished. From now on, Janet Jackson was Janet. No qualifiers needed. Nobody else capable of competing.

The Verdict:

I took a few days to simmer over this one! Control is tight, rigid and asskicking, while Janet. is intermittently transcendent. If the two albums were closer in length – say, if the former album were longer or the latter were shorter – I would go with Janet., but as a pure listening experience I’d be more eager to throw on the entirety of Control once more. This week, we go with the come-up album.