#446/2095
October 23 1986
Iggy Pop
Blah-Blah-Blah
3.5 out of 5
Highlights:
Cry For Love
Requisite 80s cover:
“Real Wild Child” by Bobby Rydell which sounds like a “Hey! What if we make this sound like if David Bowie fronted The Cars in 1978?!?”
You don’t open your album with a cover if you have ANYTHING stronger. You just don’t. That tells me everything.
Have I told my Iggy story yet?
I used to work at a boutique video store in the village called New Video. Very quickly they expanded to the west village, upper west side, midtown east side. I was one of the first of my friends to get a job there. I was transferred to just about every branch and almost fired more times than I remember.
We thought we were the shit. That we knew more about movies than anyone else. It was our calling card. We were the Clerks that Clerks was talking about. Boy, did that movie resonate with me. After a while I was put in charge of the x-rated section. Debbie from Dallas was a customer. One of the regulars offered me a job on her X-rated feature.
Yes, I took that job.
Yes, it was everything you imagine in the 80s.
Anyway. In the mid-80s, we were the place to come to if you were wanting movies to rent.
David Byrne would come in with his choices written on sheet music.
Ric Ocasek would cluck and jerk with Paulina.
Tom Cruise would rent Ridley Scott movies cuz he was gonna work on Legend and wanted to know more about the director. He was worried once when he came in because he had a military movie he was working on and he didn’t know if it would be good. It was Top Gun.
Ellen Barkin hated me because I would try to steer people away from Buckaroo Banzai. Just to piss her off.
One guy would come in, looking for something new, something interesting and ask for suggestions.
Every single damned time I would ask, “Have you seen Repo Man?”
He would say that he had. And then I’d recommend Buckaroo Banzai.
This went on every Friday for a month.
His name was James Osterberg.
He wrote and performed the theme song. Cuz, he’s Iggy Pop. And I knew that but he didn’t know that I knew that. Cuz his name was “James”.
You know how you’re supposed to use your place of work to network?
I did the opposite.
Fuck Iggy Pop. Never liked his music. (On his own, that is. The Stooges are fine)
This album is the furthest from the groundbreaking punk of the Stooges. A 100% attempt at commercialism that fails. I love crass commercialism. He just can’t do it. It’s mostly co-written by Bowie. So it sounds like 80s Bowie. Check out “Isolation” for a perfect example of this. But because of that I don’t hate it as much as his previous garbage.
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