I feel a wreck without my, Friday Farce

If there's one thing I can't stand, it's panic attacks in the morning. Absolutely not. Won't have a bar of it. Makes it so hard to get out the door and off to work, I tell ya. And as for keeping my hand in with this *cough* tedious *cough* minutiae of berlogging? Forgeddabouddit.

(Ok, just kidding about the tedious minutiae.)

But so sometimes yer just have to have a bit of tenderness, dontcha. And not the Otis Redding kind. I'm talking the "I'm Iggy Pop and I'm coming down from the whirly-wind ride of the fallout from the implosion of the Stooges and I'm hanging out in Berlin with my new BFF David Bowie and we're gonna make a weird proto-electro rekkid" kind.

Iggy Pop - China Girl (4.69 MB mp3: right-click and Save As to download; play using the handy little embedded player below)

(image courtesy of The Rising Storm.)

In 1976, The Stooges had been gone for two years, and Iggy Pop had developed a notorious reputation as one of rock & roll's most spectacular waste cases. After a self-imposed stay in a mental hospital, a significantly more functional Iggy was desperate to prove he could hold down a career in music, and he was given another chance by his longtime ally, David Bowie. Bowie co-wrote a batch of new songs with Iggy, put together a band, and produced The Idiot, which took Iggy in a new direction decidedly different from the guitar-fueled proto-punk of The Stooges. Musically, The Idiot is of a piece with the impressionistic music of Bowie's "Berlin Period" (such as Heroes and Low), with it's fragmented guitar figures, ominous basslines, and discordant, high-relief keyboard parts. Iggy's new music was cerebral and inward-looking, where his early work had been a glorious call to the id, and Iggy was in more subdued form than with The Stooges, with his voice sinking into a world-weary baritone that was a decided contrast to the harsh, defiant cry heard on Search and Destroy. Iggy was exploring new territory as a lyricist, and his songs on The Idiot are self-referential and poetic in a way that his work had rarely been in the past; for the most part the results are impressive, especially Dum Dum Boys, a paean to the glory days of his former band, and Nightclubbing, a call to the joys of decadence. The Idiot introduced the world to a very different Iggy Pop, and if the results surprised anyone expecting a replay of the assault of Raw Power, it also made it clear that Iggy was older, wiser, and still had plenty to say; it's a flawed but powerful and emotionally absorbing work.

-- allmusic.com

Oh hell yeah.