This was the single (b/w "The Passenger") from the Lust for Life album, Iggy's second Bowie collaboration that year. If it's pretty clearly a case of comical wish fantasy to pick this for the radio—"Here comes success, over my hill ... here comes my car ... my Chinese rug"—it always did jump right off the album for its hilarious high spirits. It is a laugher, literally, and perhaps the point where the heavy-stomping exuberance of the album reaches its finest point. All these tracks, especially this, feel a lot more like Iggy music, slashing riffs and bellowing chants and the brothers Tony and Hunt Sales (sons of Soupy) hammering down the rhythm section with a good deal of power. It contrasts well with the doomy moody swoons of The Idiot, which are fine enough but feel more like Bowie music to me. "Success" is a great example of one of the best features of this session, when Iggy starts taking it off the top of his head in a call and response structure, finally reaching a point where he is improvising at the top of his lungs, with the chorus, chiefed by Bowie, sending it right back with dispatch, until they all crack up and almost certainly must have fallen about the place. Freeze frame. Golden memory. Now that "Lust for Life" is the better-known rocker, thanks to sports enthusiasts and/or the movie Trainspotting, that has become the better-known "choose life" option, and indeed, perhaps the better rocker too. But on this album, they are all pretty good rockers. And I haven't yet begun to get over the priceless moment at the end of "Success": "I'm gonna do the twist ... I'm gonna hop like a frog ... I'm gonna go out in the street and do anything I want ... oh shit!"
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