Amazon.com: Spanning the punk and garage rock globe--from snot-nosed trailer-park kid fronting the legendary Stooges to universal pop culture icon and influential granddaddy of punk--the career of Iggy Pop has reached its fifth decade, and this remastered 37-track, chronologically sequenced set has been christened to hold us over while we wait for the definitive box set. Commencing with "1969," "I Wanna Be Your Dog" and "No Fun" from the Stooges' trailblazing debut album, the first disc provides a ringside seat to the band's keg-of-dynamite demise Raw Power ("Search and Destroy," "Gimme Danger," and the title track, though omitting the spellbinding "Shake Appeal"), the David Bowie-led Pop restoration ("Nightclubbing," "China Girl") and Iggy's solo pinnacle ("Lust for Life," "The Passenger"). While the second CD is patchy (spotting synthesizers for guitars too often) and erratic (missing notable songs from the Soldier and Party albums), it does include duets with Debbie Harry ("Well Did you Evah") and the B-52s Kate Pierson ("Candy"), 1993 live versions of the Stooges "TV Eye" and "Loose," and the first Stooges studio partnership in 30 years, "Skull Ring." --Scott Holter
Amazon.com:
Iggy Pop Photos
More from Iggy Pop
Lust for Life
The Idiot
Nude & Rude: The Best of Iggy Pop
Brick by Brick
American Caesar
Live at the Avenue B
Disc 1:
1969 - The Stooges
No Fun - The Stooges
I Wanna Be Your Dog - The Stooges
Down On The Street - The Stooges
I Got A Right! - Iggy And The Stooges
Gimme Some Skin - Iggy And The Stooges
I'm Sick of You - Iggy And The Stooges
Search And Destroy - Iggy And The Stooges
Gimme Danger - Iggy And The Stooges
Raw Power - Iggy And The Stooges
Kill City - Iggy Pop & James Williamson
Nightclubbing - Iggy Pop
Funtime - Iggy Pop
China Girl - Iggy Pop
Sister Midnight - Iggy Pop
Tonight - Iggy Pop
Success - Iggy Pop
Lust For Life - Iggy Pop
The Passenger - Iggy Pop
Disc 2:
Some Weird Sin - Iggy Pop
I'm Bored - Iggy Pop
I Need More - Iggy Pop
Pleasure - Iggy Pop
Run Like A Villain - Iggy Pop
Cry For Love - Iggy Pop
Real Wild Child (Wild One) - Iggy Pop
Cold Metal - Iggy Pop
Home - Iggy Pop
Candy - Iggy Pop w/Kate Pierson
Well Did You Evah! - Iggy Pop w/Debbie Harry
Wild America - Iggy Pop
TV Eye (live 1993-previously unreleased) - Iggy Pop
Loose (live 1993-previously unreleased) - Iggy Pop
Creative Anger Followed By Regular Anger Disc one exposes a man who could shift with the best of them: His Stooges days are marked by wild proto-punk riffery mixed with the most cantakerous nihilist lyrics this side of 1976. Fantastic. The latter portion of the disc sees our man taking a trip with Bowie, a trip where synths plod along within the most vacous soundscapes this side of dub. The legacy of drugs looms in the content of these tracks, and the clash of Iggy's vocal delivery and the atmospherics is unique indeed. A triump.
Disc 2 is revelry smothered by cliches. The first few tracks on the disc have homogenous production values that make all the songs sorta blend into each other. The cod-Bill Idol phase (from the Blah Blah Blah album) is rather amusing, since the slick production makes Iggy seem like the glossiest rebel ever (and that's not a bad thing). After that, however, tracks like Cold Metal and the like reveal a complacency characterized by yelling over the most contribed riffs. Nothing special. The latter tracks share one thing: bloody awful production values. These sound like they were recorded in a Third World radio station's maintenace closet in 1965. At least the live tracks (re-hashes of Fun House tunes) revive the raw aggression of the Stooges.
I'd say that forking over the extra dough to get this set, when you could get the one disc compilation, seems rather extreme. Just get the 1996 compilation and then buy all three Stooges albums. If you're really curious, get Iggy's late 70s albums and Blah Blah Blah. And that's about it. It's not plausible that you'll be tempted to delve into most of his 90s work.
Disc One -- Indispensable; Disc Two--Dullsville "A Million in Prizes," like other two-disc compilations by acts like The Fall, Devo and The Damned, features an essential first disc with Iggy Pop at the peak of his powers (with the Stooges, James Williamson and David Bowie). Featuring remastered versions of the Stooges best songs plus the remixed songs from "Raw Power," this stuff is blood-curdling, head-banging rock n' roll of the highest caliber. Topping it off are newly cleaned up versions of Iggy's pre-hardcore classics "I Got a Right," "Gimme Some Skin" and "I'm Sick of You." This material is followed by the best songs from his first and best two solo albums, "The Idiot" and "Lust for Life." Once again an improvement over "Nude and Rude," the previous official Iggy best-of, this disc features "Success," a wonderful, unheralded cut from the latter album. Then ... there's disc two. It starts off solidly with a holdover from "Lust for Life," "Some Weird Sin," and the best cut off his underrated "New Values" album, "I'm Bored." Even "I Need More" is listenable, as Iggy's voice is still thunderous and convincing. After that, however, Iggy's records fall victim to bad 80s production and a seeming complacency on his part. "Real Wild Child (Wild One)" represents Iggy at his most commercial ... something akin to David Bowie's "Let's Dance" album, only much less satisfying. Despite the dropoff in quality, Iggy's energy and commitment to musicmaking is praiseworthy, making "A Million in Prizes" an essential part of any respectable music fan's collection.
A Million in Prizes: The Anthology A Million in Prizes: The Anthology~ Iggy Pop is an amazing anthology collection from an icon in the rock industry and rock music history. Iggy Pop has surprisingly good vocals, the lyrics are not as simple as one would have like thought they would be. I must admit that I only heard Lust for life and to be even more honest I had no idea that this song was written by Pop and Bowie. I love the photos in the book-let and the cover photo is vintage Pop at his best. I was a bit ticked of that they had not included the lyrics for the songs in the otherwise amazing book-let. This is a compilation that I highly recommend.
Pop Rocks While A Million In Prizes offers little for those who've kept an eye on James Osterberg's career since the days of The Psychedelic Stooges, as a five decade overview of the leathery Detroit legend it completely eclipses the hits packages that precede it. Whether it's garage rock, glam, punk or even Berlin cabaret, Iggy Pop has kept at the top of his game via reinvention, clever allegiances and simple survival. Roughly divided up into the four eras of Stooges-fronting, Bowie-befriending, 1980s commerciality and 1990s icon(oclast), the double disc package A Million In Prizes fulfils the obligation of presenting Iggy as an enigmatic, genre-hopping artist whose successes have been often down to savvy collaborations. Early Stooges tracks Search And Destroy and 1969 set the bar high for where the trailer park kid could go, but after The Stooges' 1973 post-Raw Power split, the helping hands of David Bowie, Jimmy Webb and even members of The Sex Pistols assisted Pop in his sonic travels. Early solo track Nightclubbing, the slamming beat of Lust For Life and the amusing Iggy drawl of I'm Bored show an artist keen on probing styles far removed from the primordial rock sounds he'd worked on with The Stooges only a few years before. While Bowie's shadow looms large at the midpoint of this collection during the pair's Berlin recording period, by the time of his 1980s chart successes with Real Wild Child and the Steve Jones co-write Cry For Love, Pop had shown he was no mere pet project for Bowie. With the beautiful Candy (surely the single of 1990, if not the greatest duet ever), the Debbie Harry allegiance Well, Did You Evah? and the neatly cyclical reformation of The Stooges for Skull Ring, A Million In Prizes complements Iggy's sizeable manhood by being a similarly lengthy and exciting package. Here comes Johnny Yen again - rest assured, Pop rocks.
At Least They Didn't Call It "Greatest Hits" I can remember a time back in the dark ages, a period I like to call my high school years, when a Stooges album was harder to find in Detroit than, well, the Stooges themselves, especially after that Michigan Palace brannigan immortalized on "Metallic K.O."
Imagine that! All three were out of print in the U.S. - Elektra and Columbia apparently uninterested in pressing any more - but if you looked hard enough and lifted up enough toadstools, you may have been lucky enough to unearth a pricey import.
For better or worse, the market is now flush with Iggy/Stooges durables, some well worth the scratch and others downright treacherous. This one, Virgin's best shot at a hagiography of Michigan's patron saint of lucidity, isn't bad, depending on your willingness to embrace whatever flaming record company hoops El Pop was trying to jump through at the time.
Those comfortable with the sound of narcotic-induced delirium, primal therapy, and civilization collapsing would be hard pressed to find much wrong with Disc 1, the section of Iggy's curriculum vitae covering the years he spent with the Stooges, making some rather unusual contributions to mankind, up through his employ as David Bowie's lap dog in Berlin. However, by "much wrong," I don't mean "anything wrong." Only one song from "Fun House" ("Down On The Street"), but four from "The Idiot" and five from "Lust For Life"? Hmmm...
The inclusion of non-LP sides "I Got A Right," "Gimme Some Skin," and "I'm Sick Of You" is a nice touch, though, all three redolent with the unmistakable bouquet of ozone and a tinge of stale sweat. And despite Bowie's attempts to re-create Iggy as the fifth member of Kraftwerk, "Funtime," "Sister Midnight," "Lust For Life," and "The Passenger" all lurch, twitch, and spasm with at least a faint trace of Murder City palsy.
Disc 2 is a little more, shall we say, problematic, Iggy bent, shaped, and pulled in so many directions by so many clueless A&R hacks that even he probably wasn't sure who that guy was looking back at him from the mirror every morning.
Part of the frustration of career retrospectives such as "A Million In Prizes" is not only what compilers choose to include, but what they choose not to. I try to console myself with the naïve belief that the complete short shrift given to the "Soldier" and "Party" albums had to be due to licensing issues between Virgin and Buddha. How else to explain ignoring "Pumpin' For Jill," "Bang Bang," "Knocking 'Em Down (In The City)," "Loco Mosquito," and, especially, "Dog Food" in favor of dross like "Look Away" and "I Felt The Luxury"?
And is it just me or does anyone else detect the faint scent of desperation in the duets with Kate Pierson and Debbie Harry, perhaps the nadir of Iggy's slowly-decomposing, post-Ashetons residence on Planet Virgin? Yeah, "Avenue B" counts, but just barely.
"A Million In Prizes" isn't a total wash, not a bad starter kit for tourists, but it's far from definitive. The shadow cast by The Stooges is simply too long, thick, and impenetrable, eclipsing everything Iggy's done since, darkening his world and ours.
Anything Goes Trivia
Last Kiss
Megaton Man
Trevor
