"The Passenger" (Iggy Pop)

Can a punk song be "jaunty"?
I mean, if there ever were a song that fits into that category, it's "The Passenger" off Iggy Pop's 1977 album Lust for Life.
The music was written by guitarist Ricky Gardiner while strolling through a field with his acoustic guitar on a spring day, which might explain why it feels so upbeat.  As Gardiner told music journalist Dmitry Epstein in 2000, "The apple trees were in bloom, and I was doodling on the guitar as I gazed at the trees.  I was not paying any attention to what I was playing…At a certain point my ear caught the chord sequence…which became 'The Passenger'." 
Inspired by a ride on Berlin's commuter rail, Pop wrote the lyrics, borrowing the song's title and a few lines from an untitled Jim Morrison poem found in a collection called The Lords and The New Creatures (1971):

Modern life is a journey by car. The Passengers
change terribly in their reeking seats, or roam
from car to car, subject to unceasing transformation.
Inevitable progress is made toward the beginning
(there is no difference in terminals), as we
slice through cities, whose ripped backsides present
a moving picture of windows, signs, streets,
buildings. Sometimes other vessels, closed
worlds, vacuums, travel along beside to move
ahead or fall utterly behind.

There also are allusions to Pop's collaborative partnership with David Bowie, who provides the la-la harmony vocals on the track.  If you read the credits of Lust for Life as well as The Idiot (also from 1977), the musical direction, production, and a bulk of the songwriting are all Bowie.  In a way, Pop was a guest on his own records—a "passenger" along for the ride, if you will.  Nevertheless, the fact that Pop was enjoying a modicum of success with Bowie at the helm made the ex-Stooge a willing participant.
In all, Gardiner's riff is something that sticks with you for days and then pops into your head months later while tooling down the freeway.  There's a feeling of freedom and hopefulness ingrained in the music and lyrics.  Even when Pop is singing about seeing crumbling cities from his window, there's a feeling of rebirth in the decay.  And that, to me, is what makes this song—and a lot of Pop's songs from this period—a perennial favorite.