The title of Iggy Pop's second career retrospective seems to me as arbitrary as, say, That's Like Hypnotizin' Chickens or Of Course I've Had It in the Ear Before, albeit much less entertaining. And it's subtitled like we've been waiting for it for a long, long time-- which is true, but only to an extent. For the past nine years, Pop's career has been summarized only by the single-disk Nude & Rude: The Best of Iggy Pop, which tried to explain a complex artist in only 17 tracks. Even to an initiate, Nude & Rude had to seem only cursory-- a problem A Million in Prizes seeks to correct. It collects 38 tracks from nearly 40 years (!), including alternate takes, non-album tracks, and live cuts. It renders its predecessor immediately obsolete-- look for N&R; to flood your local used CD store-- and is probably as good a Pop retrospective as we're likely to get on two disks.
Most collections like this give us an opportunity to reassess an artist's accomplishments and reconsider the shape and effect of their output. A Million in Prizes: The Anthology, however, seems just the opposite: several years of revisiting and reconsidering his past work have finally culminated in a retrospective anthology that might be the crest of a second wave that started with Trainspotting (did it really? or did it just seem to?) and has been building ever since. In the intervening decade, Pop has become a legend to the garage rock bands and punk nostalgics while remaining a guiding saint to throngs of disaffected adolescents (including the dropout who used to blare "Lust for Life" in the apartment above me all hours of the day and night). Todd Haynes made a movie about him, Jim Jarmusch made a movie with him, and we here at Pitchfork placed four Iggy-related albums on our Top 100 Albums of the 70s list.
Murmured rumors and outright statements claim that Pop's the father of both punk and the garage-rock revival. While it's tempting to assign that extra meaning to his stage surname, influence does not necessary produce a positive paternity test. Pop is punk only in retrospect. Instead of defining a movement (that already had a leg up with MC5 and wouldn't hit full steam for several more years), the Stooges simply stripped 50s rock and roll down to its animal essence-- broken-glass blues riffs, steady backbeats, and punctuating hand claps-- then exaggerated its hedonistic appetites and self-destructive tendencies to brutish, nearly comic proportions on their first three albums, which are represented by 10 tracks on A Million in Prizes-- almost a fourth of the compilation.
I can't really argue with that. The Stooges' distillation of rock is no small feat, but Pop wasn't a first amendment pioneer. A succession of 60s artists from Jim Morrison to Lou Reed had already cleared the way for Pop's anarchic aesthetic, but just as this lineage doesn't dull his music, neither does it dull his legacy. Instead, it points out his distinct accomplishment-- the performative aspect of his music. It wasn't the lyrics that made his songs dangerous, but Pop's yelping insistence, the depraved howls that punctuated his verses and hid a curiously smooth baritone. Just like his body, his voice was wiry and exposed and graceful, slithering and bleeding and peanut-buttery.
The first disk of A Million in Prizes showcases this aspect of Pop's music, but the second disk has the unenviable task of summing up everything since, from New Values and Soldier to Beat Em Up and Skull Ring. Admittedly, there are some incredible moments: the live cut of "TV Eye" from the 1993 Feile Festival in Ireland suggests Pop hasn't lost as much edge on stage as he has in the studio. Two duets stand out: he and B-52 Kate Pierson are well matched on the wistful "Candy", and he and Debbie Harry have a goof with Cole Porter's "Well, Did You Evah!" from Red Hot + Blue. And even though it mercifully omits his collaboration with Peaches, the second disk can't possibly match the first for sheer raw power. Really, who could keep it up that long?
But A Million in Prizes tells a story that's greater than the individual tracks themselves, one that elevates even the dimmest of material. Even so, there's something a little sad about seeing such a vital artist canonized like this. Greatest hits compilations are round holes into which pegs of every shape are fitted, and they tend to have a neutering effect, absorbing rebel music into the very system it once railed against. Even though A Million in Prizes accomplishes exactly what it set out to do, it's difficult to get excited about this collection, especially with upcoming reissues of The Stooges and Fun House to look forward to.
