For all intents and purposes, he should be crediting Bowie with the actual existence of the album since it was his intervention that precipitated its materialization. It must have slipped Iggy's mind that the Stooges were on the verge of disintegration when Bowie urged his management team to take a big risk and offer the band a lifeline. Despite being the version most people heard first, Bowie's supposedly sterile mix was promptly condemned, and in 1997, at the behest of Columbia Legacy, Iggy remixed the original tapes and the fierce, punchy "definitive" version was released, albeit with caveats: zero dynamics and lashings of distortion, compression and clipping. So the story goes that Iggy Pop, dissatisfied with David Bowie's sonic neutering of "Raw Power", attested that egregiously tamed the ferity of the original recordings. Unfortunately, with the surplus of various remasters, reissues and deluxe packages currently on the market, how do you figure out which one is conclusive? Truthfully, you have to go with what particular one you prefer, not what the consensus insists is the authoritative source, master or mix. "Raw Power" is one of those pre-CD era classics now accessible in several forms, with not all of them sounding as bad as you would expect for such a poorly recorded proto-punk record. No longer is deciding which version accords with the vision of the creators the only burden of a modern music consumer, there is also the added difficulty of cherry-picking an edition that will not result in earache if you listen to it through headphones. In recent years, the advent of revisionism has led to a veritable Sophie's Choice. Quite simply, if a mix of a classic album was less than acceptable, people did not decry it, they tolerated it, for there was no possibility (or so they thought) of improving it. "Raw Power" was not available in multiple versions back in 1973.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |