My Top Favourite 350 songs of all time. #346

The Stooges – I Wanna Be Your Dog

Being one of those songs that changes everything. Like Hound Dog or Blue Monday, a template for much that is to come, one of those songs that when you find out when it was recorded, you feel the need to verify that information somewhere. Listen again to the first thirty seconds, the most exciting, visceral, gut wrenching, bollock pumping half minute of recorded music up to that moment in time and it’s like what, 1969? No fucking way. A fuzzy distortion, a whine of feedback, a menacing bassline, some insistent and irresistible drum beat and the best one note piano riff in history – it’s the kind of song that acts as a kind of litmus test for your humanity. Do you like this song? No? Kill yourself.

A couple of years earlier the Rolling Stones had written a song called Let’s Spend The Night Together which was too explicit for mainstream America to handle. And that was a fine song, almost sweetly conservative by today’s standards. Iggy wants to spend the night together too and he isn’t being too coy about it either, sounding desperate and testosteronic at the same time. Iggy knew what mainstream America could handle and went way beyond it.

Even Guy Ritchie, a man synonymous with the reverse Midas touch, couldn’t ruin this song, introducing it to a new generation of kids in Lock, Stock And Too Much Shit Acting. Yeah we can mock Iggy now for doing insurance adverts but fuck it, the guy wrote I Wanna Be Your Dog, an ode to dysfunctional yearning as eloquent as any in history which, in my book, means he can pretty much do whatever he wants.