The Idiot by Iggy Pop

The Idiot, Iggy Pop's first solo album, slunk out on RCA on March 18, 1977, and anyone expecting the gutter-level proto-punk of the Stooges got something colder and stranger. The Stooges had fallen apart in 1974, Pop and David Bowie had both sunk into drug addiction, and the pair decamped to Europe to clean up. Bowie produced, wrote most of the music and played a big share of it, while Pop wrote words to fit what Bowie was building, in sessions at the Château d'Hérouville in France in the summer of 1976 and at Musicland Studios in Munich after that.

Pop called it a cross between James Brown and Kraftwerk, and that's about right: mechanical grooves, electronic shading and Pop's voice pitched low and menacing instead of howling. The title comes from Dostoevsky. "Sister Midnight" and "China Girl" were the singles, the latter later remade by Bowie himself. RCA only released it after Bowie's similar-sounding Low had sold, and critics were split but mostly won over. Joy Division were among those listening closely.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.