"Lust For Life" Vs. "Exile On Main St."

what?

what?

Well it isn't! Here's Lust For Life:
Lust for Life
Sixteen
Some Weird Sin
The Passenger
Tonight
Success
Turn Blue
Neighborhood Threat
Fall In Love With Me

and here's New Values:
Tell Me A Story
New Values
Girls
I'm Bored
Don't Look Down
The Endless Sea
Five Foot One
How Do Ya Fix A Broken Part
Angel
Curiosity
African Man
Billy Is A Runaway

Now, from Lust for Life we get the undeniably brilliant title track, the insanely great "Sixteen" which might as well be a Stooges song, "Success" which is a career highwater mark as far as I'm concerned though it feels very much like a Bowie envisioning of an Iggy song, the awesome "Turn Blue" - and from the rest, some great Iggy moments admidst what are to me just not as much fun as the more forward-looking, less garage-band fetishising stuff on New Values: "Billy Is a Runaway" is one of Iggy's alltime greatest, "Don't Look Down" is a Pop/Williamson number that's not trying to re-create the Stooges era = it's more interesting to me than "let's do that Stooges style!", the title track which is fucking awesome and has such a fucking great Iggy vocal it makes my hands shake just thinking about it, "Tell Me A Story" is a totally killer lyric AND vocal AND performance AND riff and especially melody, just terrific. Throw "Five Foot One" and the very weird and atmospheric "The Endless Sea" and "Angel" in and the whole groove is just more distinctive to me: Lust for Life is sure great, love it, and the "Jesus? this is Iggy" moment is just heartstoppingly great, but New Values has that let's-try-something-new feel to it that just works for me. I love Bowie but he's a pastiche artist, and it shows on Lust for Life; New Values has Scott Thurston doing all kinds of neat Tom Verlainey turns of phrase on the guitar, fuckin' Klaus Kruger on drums holding down the fort, and Iggy in lean & hungry form throughout. Yeah yeah, the Sales brothers, I know, that jubilant murderous garage stomp from the gates of paradise, but the New Values record just provides more thrills per minute for me and more gristle to chew overall.

Of course, it also has "African Man," a strong candidate for "worst song ever written, recorded or released by anyone," so that's a mark against it.

I generally like Stones a lot better, but having to choose between those two, I think I'll go for Iggy this time around. "The Idiot" is even better though.

I really love Party myself - it's pretty loaded with filler, but "Pumping for Jill"? Straight CLASSIC - Ivan Kral had one great ear...was Zombie Birdhouse still Arista? That had "Run Like a Villain," which was terrific, and I remember it as having a pretty distinct feeling - which is what I like about late-seventies/early eighties Iggy: he's sort of off in his own boat! more so than in the Bowie period to my ears.

Nice passionate review of New Values there!

As much as I dig Lust For Life, I could never go against Exile on Main Street. So Exile it is.

What?! It's not even Iggy's best album of the 1970s (that would be Funhouse).

I like both Life and Exile a lot, but, even though I listen to Life considerably more, I'm going to side with the Stones on this one.

Take Funhouse against Exile on Main St. and you have your self a real fight. I love Exile, but I think I'd take Funhouse between those two.

Candy.

Amen to that