The Stooges

Eight tracks in thirty-four minutes, and the subtractive test bites on side two. The frame is compelled. 1969 must open, naming the year as a dead end before anything else is said, and I Wanna Be Your Dog must follow, the record’s thesis in three minutes. No Fun is the second pillar and opens side two as the first song opens side one. We Will Fall, ten minutes of chanted drone, is long beyond its material, but it is the record’s one stillness, the dread beneath the appetite, and without it the record would be a set of garage songs. The slack is elsewhere: Real Cool Time, Not Right and Little Doll restate the first side’s riff and want with less in them. A quarter of the time is permitted rather than required.

Score: 7.4 / 10

The disclosure can be stated: at the turn of 1969, for the young of an industrial Midwest, the decade’s promise of liberation has arrived as boredom, and desire has nowhere to go but abasement. 1969 says the year is another empty one. No Fun says that being alone is no fun and asks someone to come, and its monotony is the condition it names. I Wanna Be Your Dog turns love into a wish to be owned, said flatly and without irony. That is a condition, not only a mood, and disclosure through sound is credited fully, for the sound here is the condition. What holds the axis is the articulation: the record states its condition in titles and repeats them, and does not open it further.

Score: 7.7 / 10

Elevation here is low and dreadful, and it is real. I Wanna Be Your Dog is the summit: the guitar’s descending riff, the drums driving under it, a single piano note struck through the song without relief, and a voice that does not plead but declares. No Fun reaches a grinding transport in its long final stretch, the guitar breaking loose over a groove that will not change. We Will Fall rises another way, a funeral chant over a viola that becomes, in some of its minutes, hypnotic and grave. The wah of 1969 and Ann’s turn from croon to noise give two further lifts. Against that, the three lesser songs are energetic without height, and the drone’s length dissipates as much as it builds.

Score: 7.6 / 10

The record evokes more than it builds, but one figure is built. The dog of I Wanna Be Your Dog is a particular lover’s wish and an archetype of abasement and devotion together, and the song is load-bearing on it: the leash, the obedience and the hunger are its whole structure. The year in 1969 is made into a figure of the empty calendar, a young man waiting for something to happen. We Will Fall reaches for a liturgy, a chant of falling with a mantra at its centre, and it evokes ritual without building it. The band’s name and the singer’s posture summon the holy fool, but that is a matter of presence and stage, which the record does not carry. One built image, one strong evocation, the rest atmosphere.

Score: 7.3 / 10

In 1969 rock was moving toward length, virtuosity and expanded consciousness, the summer of festivals and long solos. This record turns the other way: two-chord riffs, untrained playing kept untrained, boredom as subject and monotony as form, and a singer who sings of wanting to be a dog. The stake was real: a major label’s record by a band with almost no repertoire, a band mocked for incompetence. Against the swerve stand its sources. The garage bands of the middle sixties had played the riffs; the Velvet Underground had made drone and abjection a form, and the producer was its viola player; the MC5, from the same state and on the same label, made a loud raw record the same year. The turn is narrower than the Velvets’, and purer: it takes away rather than adds.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Change the form and the record knows less. Played with more chords, more skill or more variety, No Fun would describe boredom instead of being it, and I Wanna Be Your Dog would lose the obsession that only a riff repeated without development can carry. Repetition is the instrument of the knowledge. The sequence is counted here, once, and it is weaker. The two sides mirror each other in plan, a song of the year or of boredom and then a song of desire, but side one spends half its time on We Will Fall, and side two runs down through three lesser songs to Little Doll, which closes nothing. The record ends because the songs have run out, not because the form arrives anywhere.

Score: 7.7 / 10

Evidence of return exists, and its character holds the figure. The record has been returned to for over fifty years, by listeners, by bands who learned from it and by critics who placed it at the root of punk, and I Wanna Be Your Dog has been covered and played without exhausting. But what the return yields is mostly the same thing found again: the force of the riff, the feel of Scott Asheton’s drumming, the exactness of the sound’s poverty. The formal depth lies in a few details, the piano note, the drone and viola of We Will Fall, the wah in 1969, rather than in an architecture that reveals more on each hearing. The semantic depth is shallower still: the record means on the fourth hearing what it meant on the first.

Score: 7.3 / 10

Intrinsic force and achieved reach, stated separately. The force is a reorganised possibility: that rock can be made from almost nothing, a riff and a refusal, with boredom and abjection as its matter. It is real but shared. The Velvet Underground had made much of it, and the band’s own next records, Fun House and Raw Power, carry the fuller force of the idea. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: No Fun was taken up by the Sex Pistols, who played it and released it; I Wanna Be Your Dog was covered by Sonic Youth and by many others; and the method of riff and repetition passed into the Ramones and the punk of 1976 to 1977, and later into post-punk, noise rock and grunge. Some of the band’s reach belongs to the later records.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Survival is weighed over fifty-seven years: form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the released album has stayed in print with its sequence intact. Presence has been continuous since the middle 1970s and is wide for two songs, I Wanna Be Your Dog and No Fun, which are as present as anything from their year; the album as a whole is less played than its two best songs, and that is what keeps the figure from the top of its row. The fabric is thin and rough, and a mix by the producer now circulates beside the released one; the charge is small, since the roughness is part of the work and has not dated it out of hearing. The surface is fixed to its year by its title, and it has outlived the year as a figure.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Command of the recorded medium is narrow and exact where it matters. Scott Asheton’s drumming holds a feel the songs depend on. Ron Asheton’s guitar, with wah and distortion, makes a sound that is the content in 1969, I Wanna Be Your Dog and No Fun. The voice is placed and controlled, low and flat or howling as each song needs. The struck piano note and the viola drone are the most finished making on the record, and they are load-bearing. Against that, the playing is limited, and on Real Cool Time, Not Right and Little Doll the limits show as sameness rather than as method; and the released mix is muddy and unbalanced, not a master’s use of the studio. The best of it could not be bettered by more skill.

Score: 7.6 / 10

One physics governs: repetition without development, and appetite meeting boredom. Take the two most distant elements, the three-minute riff song of I Wanna Be Your Dog and the ten-minute chant of We Will Fall. They obey the same law: each is a figure repeated until it becomes a state, one hot and one cold. Ann’s slow croon into noise obeys it, and so do the lesser songs, which is why they are weak rather than discordant. Nothing on the record contradicts it, and the tone holds from leering to funereal without breaking. What holds the figure is the range the law governs. Much of the coherence is narrowness: five songs on a few chords and one subject.

Score: 7.9 / 10

Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held, as a young man’s boredom and want. Desire and the beloved are held in the dog, in Ann and in the doll. History is named once and sharply in 1969, where the year stands for the end of a decade and is the record’s first word. The sacred is gestured at in We Will Fall’s chant and stays gesture. Labour, the family, the state, the natural order and the city that produced the record are absent, present only as the condition the boredom implies. Three orders, one of them glancing, in thirty-four minutes: a short form that holds a little and holds it tight, and that is what holds the figure lowest.

Score: 6.3 / 10