Iggy Pop's Corniest Moment

...came somewhere along the overstuffed and uneven 1993* American Caesar album with this track, “The Highway Song.” The song itself is somewhat overstuffed and uneven. It starts with these two lines:

          I’ve been walking down this road,
         Where it leads, I don’t know

...which ranks with “Woke up this morning” as the most overused lines in any song, of any genre, anywhere. Yet this opener is immediately redeemed by

          I’ve been walking down this highway
         With the bad food flying by me.

I love that flying food image. I love this song, even if it does sound a lot like the kind of thing that plays as the credits roll for the kind of movie your wife or girlfriend made you watch with her.

Look, it’s Iggy Pop. He gets the Iggy pass. You need a good, driving anthem to get you through the day, who else are you going to trust?

*Iggy gets another pass here, as American Caesar was a victim of its time. As compact discs became ubiquitous in the early 1990s, recording artists were encouraged to put more songs on their albums, as the discs could accommodate far more songs than vinyl. That resulted in a lot of albums you got sick of hearing long before they were over. Even the better ones, like the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ 1991 breakout album, Blood Sugar Sex Magik, suffered for this.