We all know that Iggy Pop is a streetwalking cheetah with a heart full of napalm, but the man born James Osterberg is much more than your standard war-crime feline. As such, we here at The Hard Times have taken the time to put together a list of the Iggy Pop solo songs that really indicate the breadth of his oeuvre, which don’t even require you to smear peanut butter across your bare chest. If you want to, though, that’s up to you.

15. “Real Wild Child (Wild One)”

That’s right, we’re starting off with the poppiest song that Iggy ever made, a straight cut of 1980s cheese that was the best part of “Crocodile Dundee II: Dundee Nights.” If you’re Australian, you might know this as a cover of the iconic Johnny O’Keefe song that is often considered the breakthrough of Aussie rock, but to everyone else, it’s just a straight-up fun time.

14. “Fall in Love with Me”

The final track of Iggy Pop’s 1977 album “Lust for Life” (more on that one later), “Fall in Love with Me” apparently came about through a jam session with the Sales brothers, two guys whose mustaches are not too be fucked with. While “joyful” might not be the word you associate with Iggy, listen to him sing “You’re young at heart/ A bottle of white wine” and try not to think it sounds like a good time to hang with him.

13. “Living on the Edge of the Night”

We’ll be direct: “Brick by Brick” is a pretty shitty album and includes a song written by John Hiatt, so we know we’re toeing the line here. But “Living on the Edge of the Night” manages to transcend one of Iggy’s worst efforts by channeling the embarrassingly earnest balladry of Meat Loaf which elevates the album, if only for a few minutes.

12. “Loves Missing”

In recent years, Iggy Pop has grown increasingly contemplative, which makes sense for a 75-year-old man who has looked exactly the same since 1996. That explains the poignancy of “Loves Missing,” a ballad that works exactly because of the weathered, battered tone of the icon’s voice and the sensation that this is a guy who’s actually seen some shit in his life.

11. “Wild America”

“Wild America” might have one of the greatest riffs that Iggy has ever sung over, a metallic k.o. courtesy of Eric Schermerhorn, who would later go on to play with Seal, Pink, and other people who only have ridiculous names. This track might be the closest that Iggy has ever come to recapturing the vicious nastiness of peak Stooges, and there might not be a better closing line in his oeuvre than “We all made mistakes.”

10. “Turn Blue”

Okay, now we’re getting into the good shit, also known as the Bowie years. “Turn Blue” is as much a free-association tone poem as it is a song, reportedly recorded in an ecstatic, extemporaneous session before the singer’s girlfriend dragged him out of Bowie’s studio. It’s a bizarre, mournful, and gospel-like journey through Iggy’s darkest years, and as soulfully confessional as he would ever get.

9. “Get Your Shirt”

At one point, Iggy Pop and Underworld decided that the “Trainspotting” soundtrack was a good enough reason for them to get together and record an EP and that it actually fucking slapped. Sometimes stupid ideas actually work out.

8. “Candy”

Despite our best efforts, “Brick by Brick” is back on here again, which makes us think, is this album actually good? Fuck no, it’s not, but “Candy” is an undeniable banger, buoyed by the B-52’s Kate Pierson and the best pop melody Iggy’s ever written.

7. “I’m Bored”

“I’m Bored” is the most memorable track off “New Values,” Iggy Pop’s third solo album and reunion with late-period Stooges guitarist James Williamson. It may be the apex of the singer’s youthful snottiness and the blueprint for pretty much every pop-punk singer ever, which has to count for something.

6. “La Vie en Rose”

Did you know that Iggy Pop released an all-covers album of mostly French pop songs in 2012 titled “Après?” Did you know it includes “La Vie en Rose,” the signature song of Edith Piaf, the greatest singer to ever live? Did you know it actually is fucking heartfelt, heartbreaking, and makes a case for Iggy as a not-so-closet romantic? Now you do.

5. “The Passenger”

You know it had to be on here. This song might be the best thing Jim Morrison ever did, and that was to inspire Iggy Pop.

4. “Nightclubbing”

At a certain point, the dividing line between David Bowie’s sonic treatments and Iggy Pop’s solo works in the 1970s begins to blur. Bowie himself later admitted that he basically treated the Stooges singer like a guinea pig in his synthesizer experiments, but since it resulted in immortal drug anthems like “Nightclubbing,” all can be forgiven.

3. “Sister Midnight”

Oh hey, we’re back at “The Idiot,” Iggy Pop’s first solo album. The riff to this one is so fucking sick, it had to be recycled for Bowie’s “Lodger” album and turned into yet another hit for Iggy’s best friend and frequent lifeline. It also features Iggy at his most evocative and poetic, drifting from lovelorn ballad to strange Oedipal reverie to ecstatic baying at the moon. It doesn’t get much better than this, except for the next two songs.

2. “Lust for Life”

How is this not Iggy’s best song, you ask? What can be better than those fucking drums, based on an Armed Forces Network call signal and played by Hunt Sales? Bowie wrote the song on a goddamn ukelele like a YouTube personality and it should be engraved on Iggy’s tombstone, so what could be better than this track?

1. “Tonight”

This one. This is the best track of Iggy Pop’s entire solo career and we don’t care what you think. There is no song in his entire discography that more completely utilizes everything that makes him great than “Tonight,” a ballad with a perfect Bowie pop hook and Iggy’s world-destroyingly heartbreaking tale of lying to an OD’ing girlfriend that everything will be okay, even though it most assuredly will not.

The song begins with a shotgun kick of drums, before wailing, mournful choral vocals usher in Iggy himself, bleakly describing finding his love dying in their bed from the addiction destroying them both. The singer never sounded bleaker than in this declaration, before a gorgeous synthesizer line kicks in and Iggy sings in his warmest, most comforting voice that “everyone will be alright, tonight/ no one moves, no one talks/ no one thinks, no one walks tonight/ tonight.”

For all of the darkness of Iggy’s songwriting (and life), there is a core of bizarre, heartfelt humanity at the center of it. That’s what makes the rest of it so harrowing, and both sides have never been expressed so well as on “Tonight.”