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Probably the strongest effort yet from this powerful rock band. Nobody has ever accused Iggy Pop of possessing a good voice, but he does have one of the most maniacal voices in rock, and the Stooges, with James Williamson now handling lead guitar, are much improved as a band over their last album some two years ago. Though an extremely visual act, the band manages to push their brand of deviant rock well on disk. Best cuts: "Search And Destroy," "Your Pretty Face Is Going To Hell," "Raw Power."
- Billboard, 1973.
Bonus Reviews!
In which David Bowie remembers "the world's forgotten boy" long enough to sponsor an album -- and mixes it down till it's thin as an epicure's wrist. The side-openers, "Search and Destroy" and "Raw Power," voice the Iggy Pop ethos more insanely (and aggresively) than "I Wanna Be Your Dog." But despite James Williamson's guitar, the rest disperses in their wake. B+
- Robert Christgau, Christgau's Record Guide, 1981.
The title says it all. The blueprint for the Sex Pistols and the entire punk rock movement. * * * * *
- Cub Koda, The All-Music Guide to Rock, 1995.
The Stooges' Fun House (1970) and Raw Power (1973) are molten slamfests that are essential touchstones for every form of aggressive rock that came after -- from 70s heavy metal to punk to speed metal and thrash. Lots of blitzkrieg, but no bop. (Nike used the song "Search and Destroy" from Raw Power during its commercials for the 1996 Summer Olympics.) * * * * 1/2
- Gary Graff, Musichound Rock: The Essential Album Guide, 1996.
The blueprint for punk, this eight-song album is full of sound, fury and chaos. Raw Power is a defiantly ugly album. The cover shows Iggy as a made-up rock mannequin, bare-chested and coolly defiant, against a plain black background. There's no mention of a title, nor of the artist, which is either a wilfully anti-commercial move or an egotistical vanity (unfortunately, given the state of Iggy's mind at the time, it's probably the latter). It was around this time that Iggy appeared at Rodney's English Disco in New York and cut his chest to threads -- he'd actually promised to commit suicide. The music inside is defiance itself. "Search and Destroy" is ramshackle, all slashing guitars and lyrical violence -- and it gave rise to a great t-shirt courtesy of Vivienne Westwood. "Penetration" is an insinuating lech of a song, hissed vocals that degenerate into unhinged yabbering at the end; Williamson turns in a splenetic solo. "Raw Power" starts with a grunt. It's primeval rock'n'roll -- chugging guitar, nagging piano and Jerry-Lee-Lewis-on-speed vocal -- an angry rejection of all and sundry. On the closing "Death Trip," Williamson pulls out tortuous squalls of guitar over which Iggy lets rip with demented yowls and grim one-liners. It's a crash course in what rock'n'roll is all about -- the Clash would record their first-ever demos in the same studio, three years later.
- Collins Gem Classic Albums, 1999.
While I retain a wide place in my heart for the loutish, dunt-dunt-dunt anthems, the three-chord odes to boredom that comprise the first Stooges album, and for the insane free-jazz squall of their second, Funhouse, it is their third, Raw Power, which stands as the band's high-water mark. Nothing, not even the previous two, could have prepared me for my first encounter with that record: newbie James Williamson's paint-peeling guitar, pure treble, blasting through my speakers with Iggy's apeshit screaming on "Search and Destroy." The taut, acoustic "Gimme Danger," which dissolves three-quarters of the way through into washes of feedback that are almost, somehow, poignant. If I'd never heard music like this before it's because it didn't exist, and still doesn't, really, apart from this album.
Williamson is brilliant throughout, as on the flame-fingered "Shake Appeal" (lurid by even this band's formidable standard), the shivering riffage of "Penetration" (ditto).
But this is Iggy's record, of course: On "Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell," he opens up and delivers a vocal so tremorous, so crusted with gravel and dirt, it sounds like he's singing from the center of the earth. Elsewhere, as on the punishing title track, he delivers no more -- and no less -- than the title implies. But any number of singers, before and since (especially since), can claim to deliver "Raw Power." None but Iggy have done so with such a soulful control, such an electrical almost an elegant vitality. He invents and inhabits these songs, so that even the most unremarkable among them (the lurching bluesy "I Need Somebody," for instance) becomes thrilling.
It's alarming, if not entirely surprising, to consider that the band's record label, Elektra, was reluctant to relase the album at the time; only David Bowie's intelligent, if emasculating, remix of the chaotic master tapes persuaded them.
Years later, Pop remixed it again, and it still sounds like shit. Grimy, trebly, and murky all at once. This, of course, is the album's glory: a sound that cannot, really, be captured; that refuses, somehow, to stand and give a coherent account of itself. All the best rock 'n' roll is like this, however, and it's difficult to imagine it ever gets beter than Raw Power.
Raw Power was voted the 69th greatest album of all time in a VH1 poll of over 700 musicians, songwriters, disc jockeys, radio programmers, and critics in 2003.
- Matthew Specktor, VH1's 100 Greatest Albums, 2003.
 Further reading on Super Seventies RockSite!: Album Review: Album Review: |
Raw Power was chosen as the 125th greatest album of all time by the editors of Rolling Stone magazine in Dec. 2003.
- Rolling Stone, 12/11/03.
The image of a defiant, staring Iggy Pop on Raw Power's cover perfectly encapsulates his response to the trials and tribulations he went through before this album took shape. After an unhappy relationship with their lable Elektra, who had mismarketed the band's first two albums and ditched them before their third took shape, Pop had disbanded the Stooges and escaped Detroit to hook up with David Bowie in New York.
At Bowie's suggestion, Iggy and guitarist James Williamson decamped to London to record Raw Power. There, Pop re-recruited Ron and Scotty Asheton, the brothers who made up The Stooges' primal rhythm section. The genteel surroundings of "Merrie Olde (England)," as Pop put it, in no way tempered the raucous machismo of Raw Power; indeed, the record could not be further from the sexual ambiguity of the glam rock that Bowie and others were touting at the time. Pop's vision for the record was ambitious -- initial mixes of "Search and Destroy" featured the sound of a sword fight, while "Penetration" utilized that rock 'n' roll staple, the celeste (a keyboard of orchestral bells) -- but the driving guitar of Williamson and the raw stomp of the Ashetons keep the album simple and centered firmly in the belly and the balls.
Columbia hated the album, viewing it as even less accessible than the band's material for Elektra, and charged Bowie with salvaging what he could from the mess. Thankfully, Bowie paid heed to Iggy's vision, and delivered eight tracks that influenced the proto-punks of New York and London and secured Pop's legacy as the movement's godfather.
- Seth Jacobson, 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die, 2005.
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