Recently I went through a few days where I played the closing track “Mass Production” from the 1977 debut album The Idiot by Iggy Pop a number of times, mainly as it’s such a weirdo curiousity, which I’ll get into more below. Obviously I’ve listened to the album at periods over the years — mostly at parties or other diagetical situations where it just happens to be playing, or a few times on my own. Obviously it’s a classic album with a lot of experimentation and Pop‘s debut, written by both him and David Bowie when they escaped out of their druggy period in LA in the mid-1970s and they busted over to Berlin to clean up and and clear the slate for new ideas.
Oddly enough any listen I had of this album was never that in-depth, perhaps one reason being that in more recent times (say, the last twenty years) The Idiot has had so many written articles analysing the album by music academics, or articles going into great detail about the creation of the album that a lot of the mystery of discovering the album on an individual basis was sort of overshadowed by the legends and written material about it. For me this sometimes obscures the process of having your own discovery about the actual “art” itself, as I’m always wanting my own viewpoint on something, even if the opinions of others are numerous and readily available online.
By far the longest track on the album, at eight and a half minutes, you don’t even know that it’s even started as there’s a slow fade-in of a detuned synth that calls from the distance like some demented fog horn. Then the main riff kicks in at a somewhat drudge-y, funereal pace (with the exception of a few, off-the-cuff, spazz-y drum fills). This riff almost sounds like a locked groove at the end of a record because at many times in the track it just loops and loops forever — something you find less and less on more high profile releases these days as people’s attention spans have drastically shrunk in this age of instant information, instant gratification and accessible streaming.
Pop‘s voice sort of goes for this vibrato-heavy, torch song delivery like some grizzled distant cousin of Scott Walker belting it out after a few drinks — the setting being a mostly empty, cigarette smoked filled dive bar at the edge of town. The chorus has some contrast to the verses, with its chord structure and instrumentation being more akin to a melancholy, plodding country music ballad — then lurching back into the main verse riff with a strange, dischordant chord transition.
For me the most interesting highlight of this song however is the synthesizer work, in particular the synthesizer that comes in around the 4m10s mark, which sounds like either a mid-70s Arp synthesizer having a meltdown, or some “Hal”-style computer (from Stanley Kubrick‘s 2001: A Space Odyssey) being systematically shut down one chip at a time. It makes for a really disorienting vibe while the vocal track sings on about factories and “mass production”.
This synth looping with the main guitar riff really gets into your mind — the feeling of insanity by dissonant, uneasy instrumentation and the sheer brutality of repetition. There’s one other song that gives me that similar feeling, and that would be the track “Luau” by the legendary San Diego noise-rock/post-hardcore band Drive Like Jehu, whose singer/guitarist Rick Froberg unfortunately passed away last year. More well known for their wild, math-rock laden blasts of discordant guitar fury that laid a blueprint with their debut self-titled album released in 1991 that was way ahead of it’s time, the track “Luau” — from their second 1994 album Yank Crime — more plays on the idea of a hypnotic, repetitive 3/4 groove in where the last two minutes of this nine and a half minute long track is an extreme exercise in just that: insanity through noisy repetition.