The music is a stew of semi-electronic Eno-influenced art rock and heavy soul and R&B. And indeed, this record was recorded in the same era and location, and uses many of the same musicians as Bowie's record. At the end of these lines, the band joins in with a couple of heavily distorted, modulating guitars, a delayed drumbeat, electric piano, and bass guitar, the musical textures so influenced by the album's co-writer and producer, David Bowie, that the song sounds like it is from one of Bowie's Berlin-period records like Heroes. On "Dum Dum Boys," he recites - in a mock conversation - a list of casualties littering his past, a list consisting of ex-Stooges, his legendary proto-punk band (parentheses mine): "What happened to Zeke? (Zettner)/He's dead on Jones, man/How about Dave? (Alexander)/OD'd on alcohol/Well what's Rock doing?/Oh, he's living with his mother/What about James? (Williamson)/He's gone straight." The dialogue is intimate and convincingly conversational, over a sparse introduction of finger snaps and an electric piano.
I'm a damned man!" And on this album, and the follow-up Lust for Life released in the same year, Pop is shown reaching his artistic peak while simultaneously peeling off less desirable layers of his former self. In an interview around the time of the 1977 release of his first bona fide solo record, The Idiot, Iggy Pop insisted "I'm not a punk anymore.