"Academics"

[This post was edited by, Wm. Crain]
A quick definition of an "academic": Someone who values rarity over content, someone who values chronology over how something makes you feel, and anyone who champions music they don't like just because someone else said it was important.

More often than not "academics" reserve their
praise for Iggy's records with the Stooges while ignoring his more textured and nuanced material from the mid to late 1970's.



Those first three Stooges records are seminal, no question, but at the same time they are also relatively one dimensional... its a tough, wild, adolescent reflection of Jim Morrison and his Doors. What really excites me about Iggy's mid-career work from the Idiot through New Values is the multidimensionality of it. On these records Iggy is alternately and sometimes all at once; dumb, funny, smart, sarcastic, sincere, vulnerable, ambiguous, tough, depraved, seedy. We see his maturation after being shattered by his failures and drug abuse. Going through this dark period in the early and mid 70's he obviously must have had a much greater pool of experiences to draw from. (Of course, Bowie helps dredge this out of Iggy). People who dismiss Iggy's mid-career work while hoisting up the Stooges material are just not paying attention.

I would love to see the 60 year old Iggy Pop redoing his mid-career work instead of the Stooges work.