ALBUM: Funhouse (1970 RE: 1985)
MVC Rating: 3.5/$$$$$
Not a record I listen to much. It’s loud (except for Dirt) and Iggy and his gang of Stooges sometimes sounds like the worst garage band in the world.
But this was the first layer of punk music. The kind of music that got more ‘turn-that-shit-offs’ until Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music several years later.
I bumped it up a notch on the rating scale because of its historical significance. The band was shooting for that 2.5 but I’m not giving it to them. Iggy Pop was an underground legend. You think the Rolling Stones played sloppy? You think the Stones had a wiry, spindly lead singer with a mouth that covered half his face?
The difference: the Stones worked hard to make songs that made money. They could still be outrageous but not at the expense of their songs which sold millions not thousands.
The Stooges sold practically nothing when they first released Fun House. Over the years it has gained cult status for presaging punk rock years before Johnny Rotten.
The godfather of critics, Robert Christgau, gave this album an ‘A-‘ in his ‘Consumer Reports.”
But in the same review. Christgau wrote:
“It always interests me intellectually, though–with its repetiveness beyond the call of incompetence and its solitary new-thing saxophone, this is genuinely “avant-garde” rock. The proof is the old avant-garde fallacy of “L.A. Blues”–trying to make art about chaos by reproducing same.”
By the way, I remember exactly where I bought this. It would have been about 1985 in Oklahoma City. The Birmingham News sent me up there as part of an investigative project I was working on about small plane crashes. The trip was fruitful in that I talked a lawyer representing some of the plane crash victims into letting me hole up in his basement going over (paper) documents. I gleaned enough to show there was a link between a type of autopilot that was malfunctioning. Amid scouring NTSB and FAA reports, I had time to pop into a record store and here I am writing about it.
Now that’s avant garde.