Little Doll

Closing the debut album, this track has a looser, almost playful momentum that sits in interesting contrast to the heavier material surrounding it. The guitar riff has a circular quality, spinning back on itself with a kind of relentless cheerfulness that reads as something between affection and menace — the Stooges could rarely do one without the other. The rhythm section drives forward with more conventional rock energy here, Scott Asheton's drumming a little more propulsive and less atmospherically inclined than elsewhere on the record. There is a catchiness to this song that it seems almost embarrassed by, or rather that Iggy Pop deliberately roughens through his delivery — he sings the lyric with a physical immediacy that keeps the song from becoming sweet, ensuring that any tenderness in the melody is complicated by something harder in the performance. The lyric exists in that particular teenage register where romantic interest and objectification have not yet been distinguished from each other, which gives the song its period-specific charge. What matters historically is how this album, with this track as its finale, essentially handed future generations a fully operational template for a certain kind of rock and roll — four people in a room, minimal pretension, maximum physical commitment. It is a song for the beginning of a night out, for the moment of departure, for the specific energy of a decision just made.