I Got Nothin’

I GOT NOTHIN’ (Kill City)
 
They never went into the studio to record their fourth album; Iggy Pop decided to do something else since the Stooges’ records were not selling. Under the name Iggy Pop and James Williamson, these two ex-Stooges put together an album called Kill City in 1975. They brought a couple of the more mellow songs from the new Stooges material – “Johanna” and “I Got Nothin’” – but mostly this was new music and definitely a new direction.
Mark Deming, again from Allmusic: “Kill City never hits as hard as the manic roar of the StoogesRaw Power, but the songs are very good, and the album’s more measured approach suits the dark, honest tone of the material. The sense of defeat that runs through ‘Sell Your Love’, ‘I Got Nothin’’, and ‘No Sense of Crime’ was doubtless a mirror of Iggy’s state of mind; but he expressed his agony with blunt eloquence, and his sneering rejection of the Hollywood street scene in ‘Lucky Monkeys’ is all the more cutting coming from a man who had lived through the worst of it.  
(December 2016)
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Whatever else might be said of the StoogesIggy Pop and the other bandmembers put their heart and soul into their music; but none of their first three albums were big sellers.  As fantastic as their new songs were sounding in concert, there was no reason to think that a fourth Stooges album would do any better.  Additionally, the excesses of the rock and roll life were taking their toll, particularly the drug use by Iggy Pop.  Thus, Kill City was a move in a different direction, and only two of the songs from the later years of the Stooges were included on the record, Johanna” and “I Got Nothin’.  Kill City is also different from Iggy Pop’s other records, in that it is not a solo album or a Stooges album; the artist is given as Iggy Pop and James Williamson.
 
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Naturally, the material would have been arranged and polished and mixed and mastered, and the songs might have sounded completely different from the way they do on Open Up and Bleed!.  That is certainly true of Johanna” and “I Got Nothin’ as they are presented on the Kill City album.  I have said before that this could have been the best Stooges album of them all, and I mean it. 
 
(December 2017)
 
Last edited: March 22, 2021