Lou Reed 1942 - 2013
bassie
11,710 Posts
I am a huge VU fan. Changed/made my life type thing.
RIP and Thank You.
RIP and Thank You.
Comments
Then again, I guess one can just go through his music and listen to the story that way.
VU & Nico was a huge gateway album for me. I still remember when some older dudes did Heroin at the Battle of the Bands in high school (not actually "did heroin"; you get the point) and how weirded out I was at the time.
RIP.
It's short (and not really an obit per se), but Chris Richards wrote a nice one in the Washington Post:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/appreciation-lou-reed-lived-in-the-musical-moment/2013/10/27/941c86c8-3f31-11e3-9c8b-e8deeb3c755b_story.html?hpid=z3
By Chris Richards, Published: October 27 E-mail the writer
As the summer of ???69 collapsed into the autumn of the unknown, Lou Reed had a question for the youth of Texas: ???Do you people have a curfew or anything like that????
It was Oct. 19. Two months after Woodstock. The crowd that had gathered in Dallas that night to see the Velvet Underground was too meek to give much of a response.
???Then this is gonna go on for a while,??? Reed said, ???so we should get used to each other.???
Reed ??? who died Sunday at age 71 ??? never let this world get used to him. He sang about lives infinitely more dangerous, glamorous, horrific and insane than ours. Most of the time, he was living one, too.
That night in Dallas, after the chit-chat died down, he started strumming ???I???m Waiting for the Man,??? a brilliant ramble about the $26 bulging from his jeans pockets to pay his heroin dealer ??? ???feel sick and dirty, more dead than alive.??? It???s the first cut from ???1969: The Velvet Underground Live,??? an album that best captures the Velvets in all of their casual brutality.
The band started recording in 1965, when the Beatles were singing about hiding your love away. Reed wanted to sing about folks hiding in the gutters of New York City ??? junkies, prostitutes, artists and other assorted maniacs. His grime fantasies made danger feel like the intersection of nihilistic fun and abject fear. The noises that came coughing out of his guitar amp were as messy as the world he was singing about.
It didn???t take long for the Velvets to find a champion in Andy Warhol, an association that gave their street ballads the sheen of high art. It also helped make Reed the archetype of Gotham cool. Black leather jackets and giant sunglasses have become respective American industries. So, too, did glam, punk and alternative rock. But that all took time.
All four studio albums Reed made with the Velvet Underground were stunners. And all four were flops. Reed had to wait until 1972 to become a rock star, when his single, ???Walk on the Wild Side,??? finally breezed onto the airwaves. It made life in Warhol???s milieu sound dreamy and nightmarish at once. Do-do-do-do-do .???.???.
By 1975, he had delivered a landmark in pop contrarianism with ???Metal Machine Music,??? an album of feedback drones that sounded like a staring contest with the void. That same year, the great rock critic Lester Bangs called his hero ???a completely depraved pervert and pathetic death dwarf and everything else you want to think he is .???.???. a liar, a wasted talent, an artist continually in flux, and a huckster selling pounds of his own flesh. A panderer living off the dumbbell nihilism of a seventies generation that doesn???t have the energy to commit suicide.???
Which is to say that Reed was our most uncompromising rock star. The pedestal that so many reserve for Bob Dylan? It belongs to Reed. Reed, the grouchy genius. Reed, the street poet with the lousy singing voice. Reed, the inscrutable self-mythologizer. Reed, the white guy (too frequently, very erroneously) credited with inventing rap. Reed, the guy who always made rock-and-roll feel mysterious and alive.
Did you hear his most recent album? The one he recorded with Metallica in 2011? It???s called ???Lulu,??? it???s based on a series of German expressionist plays and it???s even more gnarled and baffling than anyone had imagined. But if you had the curiosity and the endurance to listen to it, you heard Reed delivering fresh reportage from an unknown gutter.
???Maybe listening to my music is not the best idea if you live a very constricted life,??? he told Spin magazine in 2008. ???Or maybe it is.???
Through all of his contortions, he was consistently digging his heels into right now, listening. In recent years, New York concert-goers could spot the man and his wife, composer Laurie Anderson, at various nightspots. A sighting was a treat but not always a surprise. He was out there.
Earlier this year, Reed wrote a review of Kanye West???s new album, ???Yeezus,??? for a new Web site called the Talkhouse. His closing thoughts casually explained the essence of listenership itself: ???[West] obviously can hear that all styles are the same, somewhere deep in their heart, there???s a connection.???
He was talking about Kanye West, but also Lou Reed, and anyone out there who???s really, truly been listening.
Back then I had passing knowledge of his radio stuff, but had mostly kinda checked out on him, but then I saw him on tv getting booed when he sang ??? I'll take Manhattan in a garbage bag / with Latin written on it that says / ???It's Hard To Give A Shit These Days???", and at the first possible opportunity dubbed New York from my man Jonathan (I had it on this nasty-looking brick-colored TDK and the other side was, I don???t know, The Havalinas or some shit). It was pissy, brutish, and comparatively low on immediate sonic appeal. But fuck, was it ever vivid. It was all I played for a long time.
As much time as I ultimately spent with that record, though, Magic And Loss has, I think, ended up being more important to me. I spent my teen years in a semi-rural town and had a small, tight circle of good friends, and there was a stretch of many years where our musical tastes evolved more or less concurrently, intertwined in the way that happens when you???ve got a heavy knot of teenagers where new records are few but blank tapes are many. Of course in a situation like that little fissures and divergences are going to occur as time goes on, but each of us still more or less kept up with everything that each of the other ones was listening to. Even so, each of us has that moment where we recognize a hard divide between what we love and what our friends love, that first true realization that there are now limits to the extent to which will be possible for us to experience music socially. And for me, I think this was that. Magic And Loss came out when I was seventeen, and it was the first record of my music-purchasing life that I was conscious of experiencing entirely alone. I bought the cd from a store where nobody really knew what the fuck it was or how it had gotten in their shipment or why anybody under forty would be buying a Lou Reed record in 1992, none of my friends had any interest in hearing it, and even if they had, there weren???t any of them I would have wanted to play it for.
I don???t to over-dramatize it???those small, gradual isolations are important and necessary, and they???re nothing that???s gonna kill you, but the early ones can be a lot to sort through. These days I only put on New York and Magic And Loss once in a great, great while, and usually find them now as I found them then: flat, difficult, deeply felt, and seeming to have been produced mostly as articles of faith. I???m real glad to have had them.
I hope it's true what my wife said to me
I hope it's true what my wife said to me
I hope it's true what my wife said to me
She says, "Lou, it's the beginning of a great adventure"
I am glad for the pieces that run through his achievements and remind me of his contributions and prolificacy...but the best things I've been reading, James' post included, are personal pieces of chance meetings, life-changing records and songs and the role Reed's music and approach to life and art played in so many's people's careers, perspective and taste.
OK, well, maybe I will post this here after all...
i love all the velvet albums and a bunch of his solo albums
Source?
I don't know. That's why I'm asking here. Figured somebody could speak on it. I could be mistaken. The Non mentioned the possibility of him being one of those "rap ain't music" guys so maybe that's all it is.
Or maybe you could do 3 minutes of research before defaming a dead guy.
Sheesh. Jackass.
Also, I asked. Never claimed.
Very boring that you try to turn every thread into a fight.
Reading this, it seems like this would have been a perfect opportunity to air out any and all issues with Lou Reed, given he was interfering with the group's paper...but alas...
http://www.prefixmag.com/news/a-tribe-called-quest-never-got-paid-for-can-i-kick/58939/
Hardly. Couching your question with "Didn't he?" is a type of accusation.
And if you have nothing to base it on, why bring it up at all?
Yeah I mean.... I don't give a shit what Lou Reed thought about rap. Dude was a bonafide genius who changed the course of music, he was more talented, influential, cooler and tougher than 85% of all rappers ever.
Peace,
Big Stacks from Kakalak
What I said needed to be said. If you can't handle it, grab a teddy bear and a blankie and take a nap.
As for Reed and rap, clues can be found in his song "The Original Wrapper" or his recent (and highly publicized) review of "Yeezus." But who cares, right? That shit bores Flobee.
Seriously, you think that?
Despite being a fan of some of his music, I've always thought Lou Reed to be a hack who just happened to be in the right place at the right time.
My original question was about racist remarks, not whether or not he hated rap. R.I.F.
Lazarus, shut up.
Glad to know I was wrong though. Sad to admit my view on him as a person was tainted this long. Crazy thing is...I could've sworn I read what I read right here on SS waaaay back in the day.
http://thegrio.com/2013/10/28/lou-reed-dead-tribe-called-quest-sampled-late-legends-walk-on-the-wild-side/