A Million in Prizes: the Anthology: Let's face it, bloody rock god he may be, Iggy is simply not that blessed with a surfeit of talent. The three albums he recorded with the Stooges are far and away the pinnacle of his 4 decades-long (!) career, and he has never come close to topping them. Well, how could he? How could you top the band that for all practical purposes invented punk rock as we know it and took insane, overdriven, raw rock'n'roll to a precipice that few bands have reached since, despite millions trying? Needless to say, the first ten tracks drawn from the Stooges set a standard the remaining eighteen tracks on this two-disc platter don't have a chance of matching. In the late '70s Iggy hooked up with mega-Stooges fan David Bowie and recorded a pair of albums in Berlin that remain the only interesting records of his solo career. The music, written by Bowie (Iggy did the lyrics and vocal melodies), sounds unsurprisingly close to the gothy synth-pop Bowie was recording with Eno at the same time, and was not only hugely influential upon the '80s sound, but also sounds nothing at all like the generic hard rock that Iggy has purveyed for the remaining three decades of his unimaginative career. Selections from the Berlin-era albums take up the remainder of the first disc, which added to the Stooges era cuts make disc one an easy *****. Disc 2 inevitably disappoints, though there are enough stray good tracks to make it a reasonably enjoyable trawl through the desultory 1979-2005 years. But it's telling that the clear highlight is a 1993 live recording of the Stooges oldie, "TV Eye". So a *** for the second disc, which if you divide the two scores of the two discs comes out to an even ****
P.S. What?! You say you don't have any Stooges albums? WTF is wrong with you? You call yourself a rock fan?
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