I Wanna Be Your Dog & Disorder

Here are some M&Ms. There are 10 of them.

I’m not a math person, so it was late in life when I first tried to wrap my head around the concept of “base 10.” That is, we worked our way into a counting system that groups things into bunches of 10, but it didn’t necessarily have to be that way. We probably arrived at it from counting on our fingers. Other civilizations apparently gave base 20 and base 8 a try. If I understand base 8 correctly, it means we’d count up that row of M&Ms and say there are 12. As in 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10, 11, 12. The actual amount remains unchanged; M&Ms could give a fuck how we describe them.

Base 10 seems to be one of those fundamental concepts that pervades everything and yet you can get by just fine without ever once thinking about it. (See also: Why is the alphabet in the order it’s in? Ka-boom. Mind blown.)

And this, naturally, brings me to Iggy Pop.

Have you ever watched any old Iggy Pop interviews on YouTube? Do it. They are wonderful. In one, he explains to Tom Snyder, very coherently and intelligently, the difference between Apollonian and Bacchanalian art. In an interview on Dutch TV he offers out a humble and insightful definition of punk. But it was a remark he made on Dinah! that got me lining up M&Ms.

Dinah: Do you think you’ve influenced anybody?

Iggy: I think I helped wipe out the 60s.

We bunch the years together into decades and, the further we get away from them, the more certain we are that there was a coherence to that bracket of time—however arbitrary that bracket might be (not to mention the arbitrariness of the starting point: year zero). 

But I get what Iggy means. Whatever whiff of love and optimism may have been in the late 60s air, it was bound to fizzle out, leaving in its wake a tinge of disillusionment and a thriving drug culture. (Though it’s worth noting that “I Wanna Be Your Dog” was released just a few weeks before “Give Peace a Chance”.)

"I Wanna Be Your Dog" came out in 1969, and, at Iggy’s prompting, it’s reasonable to think of this song as bringing down the curtain on the 1960s.

The decade that followed, musically, was a lot of things. Prog. Disco. Punk. It's difficult to be reductive about it, but as the decade wrapped up, the 1979 Joy Division song, “Disorder,” (in my humble and partially informed opinion), once again brought down the curtain. Part of what I hear when I listen to this song is: It’s not the 1970s any more.