Description

1LP Vinyl

Also released in 1977, The Idiot’s follow-up Lust for Life breathes some punk grit back into Pop’s performance. Its title track, driven by Hunt Sales’ animated and playful live drumming, could be a marginally tidied-up Stooges song; rather than sounding dwarfed by the instrumentation surrounding it, Pop’s voice resumes its fevered snarl at the front of the mix. He sounds alert, embodied, no longer a Bowie-animated cadaver but an enlivening force in his own right.

Pop’s performance shocks itself awake on Lust for Life, but the album’s most enduring track clings to alienation as its principal subject. “The Passenger” makes a saga of passivity. Written alternately in the first and third person, it watches a man riding a car, or a train, or a bus, seeing a city slip past his window, feeling the seal around himself. He is not of the city, just in it, gliding through. The city has “ripped backsides,” a vaguely homoerotic anthropomorphization; the passenger, who both is and isn’t Pop, stays “under glass,” sees “the bright and hollow sky,” as if for all he devours with his hungry eyes there were nothing of substance inside it. Four guitar chords, briskly strummed and punctuated by rests, roll onward, never budging from a single progression. There’s no chorus, save for a wordless repeat of the verse melody with Bowie chiming in on backing vocals. Pop moves but someone else is driving. “All of it was made for you and me,” he asserts towards the end, as his voice breaks composure, and threatens to “take a ride and see what’s mine.” So he arrives at a paradox: He’s an inert body rolling through space, and also the rightful owner of all he sees. He does nothing but owns everything, the whole empty world and all the nothing inside of it.