Album: Lust For Life
Year: 1977
Because “Amount of Music > Time in Life”, we all have our blind spots. Artists that have been around forever that are loved and respected and that we’ve never been able to get around to doing more than barely scratch the surface of their career.
And for me, one of those blind spots is the full catalog of the inimitable James Newell Osterberg, Jr, AKA Iggy Pop.
I’m not even sure why, actually. Obviously Iggy has always been a staple of the periodicals I read going back to CREEM Magazine in 1977. And at the time, the reviews of both Lust For Life and The Idiot seemed to be pretty good, but I never bit, even as I made sure I got the classic protopunk Stooges records from whence his legend was spawned.
At KFSR in the early 1980s, I sampled his records from Party through Instinct without ever finding anything that really stuck and while I actually bought (and enjoyed) a used copy of 1990’s Brick by Brick at Ragin’ Records, it didn’t tempt me to go either backwards or forwards.
So, yup. Sorry Iggy purists, but Trainspotting. (Though I musta noticed it in Desperately Seeking Susan a decade earlier.)(Just not as much I noticed Rosanna Arquette.) Not so much the actual scene that “Lust For Life” scored, but the way that scene brought this song back into the consciousness of the world, and tempted me to take a flyer on the Lust For Life album.
Which, of course, kicks off with Hunt Sales Mo-punk drum beat on the title track, which never once even once flags on the initial bouncy groove by those drums and the crack band provided by one David Robert Jones AKA David Bowie.
The sameness of the music just underscores Iggy’s now-famous lyrics:
Yeah I’m through with
Sleeping on the sidewalk
No more beating my brains
No more beating my brains
With liquor and drugs
With liquor and drugs
Well I am just a modern guy
Of course I’ve had it in the ear before
‘Cause of a lust for life
(Lust for life!)
‘Cause of a lust for life
(Ooooooooooh)
I got a lust for life
Got a lust for life
(Oooooooooh)
Oh a lust for life
(Ooooooooooh)
Oh a lust for life
It’s also pretty smart how his sardonic “I’ve had it in the ear before” completely distracts from and takes the piss outta what is actually a pretty serious song about cleaning up his act.
The unrelenting beat and the unsparing words are accented with strangled, not-quite-falsetto backing vocals — probably not Bowie, but probably suggested by him — screaming “Lust for life” here there and everywhere, giving “Lust For Life” an almost overwhelming sense of momentum that carries right through to when finally fades out.
Maybe some day I’ll get The Idiot.
“Lust For Life”
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