Lou Reed died over the weekend, proving once and for all that only Keith Richards can ingest absolutely every recreational chemical known to modern science and live to tell the tale forever.
It took me a long time to really get into Lou Reed – which may seem really counterintuitive, if you know me and my taste in music (and if you read the “Music” category of this blog, you do, sort of; I haven’t written about everything, just yet). After all,everyoneknows Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground were the godfathers of punk – right?
Sure.
But even though the Venn diagram among the different outbreaks of “punk” in New York in the seventies has tons of overlaps, there was a yawning gap between the joyful, garage-band-y noise of the Ramones and the New York Dolls (and their Cleveland descendants, the Dead Boys) and the Greenwich Village scene that spawned Reed, crawling as it was with high-art pretension. The likes of Andy Warhol and William S. Burroughs saw and were seen among the rat-bitten warrens of the Village, hobnobbing with and encouraging the likes of the largely unlistenably shrill Patti Smith, the campy “Stilettos” (featuring a young Debbie Harry, who’d form “Blondie” by the mid-seventies), and of course Reed and the Velvets.
It probably wasn’t until I moved to the Cities and started doing music here that I took a step back, at the urging of my band’s old drummer. “Forget all the BS”, he said, “and just focus on the fact that he’s a guy who loves doing basic rock and roll”.
And in one sense it was true – the classic Lou Reed was all about the joy of playing the most basic rock and roll, simple and unadorned and pared down to its most basic components, filtered through a layer of New York grime.
Usually.
Reed was also an experimenter. In “The Original Wrapper” (from 1986’s Mistrial), he wryly claimed the title of the orignal, well, rapper – since he never so much “sang” as “spoke in rhythm”. He delved through jazz, experimental music, screeching noise…
…even some pared-down pseudo-classical music – as in this very, very, very pre-MTV video for his classic “Street Hassle”, featuring a spoken-word coda by Bruce Springsteen around the eight-minute mark:
r
So I’m going to find my old copy of “Rock and Roll Animal” this week here, and give it another spin.
See, Mitch, that’s why I still read your blog. You’re possibly the only conservative in the United States (I WAS the other one) who would still not disown the likes of Lou Reed.
I only have Rock and Roll Animal on vinyl (and no turntable), but I was able to find a youtube post of the entire album beginning to end and enjoyed it this morning.
I also like Lou Reed. One of my favorite songs of his is “My Love is Chemical.”
Why disown Reed? He was actually listenable and to disown someone’s music (or other talent) based solely on their politics is a small minded, illiberal thing we expect from “progressives.” Reed easily passed the basic test of an artist: his work was distinguishably better than that produced by either grade schoolers or drunken frat boys. Most folks who produce “Modern Art” can’t pass that test: prove to me that drunken frat boys couldn’t have come up with Piss Christ or The Vagina Monologues.
Nice article, although I will disagree about the assessment of Patti Smith as “largely unlistenably shrill”… There were far, far more unlistenable punk rockers.
Pingback: LIVE AT FIVE: 10.29.13 : The Other McCain
Why disown Reed? He was actually listenable and to disown someone’s music (or other talent) based solely on their politics is a small minded, illiberal thing we expect from “progressives.”
Damn straight. Reed left behind nearly a half century of music and a lot of it is very, very good. RIP.
Never knew that was Bruce Springsteen on that track. I was a big fan of Lou’s when I was younger, but, listening to some of the lyrics now makes me cringe a little.
JPMN: Ditto. Some of his stuff hasn’t aged well.
RIP. I like Lou’s minimalism. Still fun to listen to once in a while.