So I saw this article on Buzzfeed... Lou Reed Thought The Beatles “Were Garbage”. The subheadline read "I mean, they were just painfully stupid and pretentious." Now I'm certainly not a huge fan of The Beatles. On some level I appreciate anyone who's willing to take a shot across the bow of the unassailable Beatles Fanship. But Lou Reed? Calling someone else pretentious? Whoa...
To be fair to Lou Reed, most of my opinion of him is informed by others. I know one person in particular who's vociferous in his dislike of Lou Reed's musical talents. Most people probably couldn't name a single Lou Reed song. But then there's a very tight-knit cadre of internet people who gush over the exulted Lou Reed and his culture-defining repertoire. The fact that his fanbase is so small yet so very forceful in their declaration of his greatness leads me to believe that Lou Reed is at best an eclectic acquired taste and at worst a totally impenetrable nightmare.
Now I talk a lot of crap about The Beatles, but I can't deny their talent or the impact they had on 60s music culture. I'm skeptical of most mainstream acts that get as big as The Beatles did because they usually wind up being musically hollow, appealing to the lowest common denominator and relying on flashy performances. The Beatles get a pass in my book because although they are about as mainstream as they come, they certainly weren't flashy on stage and are the opposite of musically hollow. So for Lou Reed to call them garbage the way I might call modern teeny-pop music garbage is flat-out wrong. Such a statement makes me skeptical of his sense of music if he can't even tell The Beatles had real talent.
What about the other half of his statement? Were The Beatles pretentious? Eh... yes and no. Their early music was innovative in subtle ways but still pretty poppy and unassuming. Things got a bit crazy towards the end, and I'm pretty sure I called a lot of what John Lennon was writing and singing on "the white album" to be pretentious junk. Still, this is Lou Reed we're talking about here. It seems the only reason his music existed was for people who wound up liking it to talk about how great it was and how special they were for being in the know. So while Lou Reed might not be completely wrong on this point, he's still a dick for saying so. Especially when the interview I linked contains him saying his contemporaries, “couldn't come up to our ankles, not up to my kneecap, not up to my ankles, the level we were on, compared to everyone else.”
This has inspired to jump ahead in my list once again and find a Lou Reed album to listen to. I've chosen to hear his debut with The Velvet Underground, titled The Velvet Underground And Nico. And if there's any band in the history of music surrounded by more pretentiousness than The Velvet Underground please let me know.
"Sunday Morning" sounds like an over-sanitized twee Bob Dylan song. "I'm Waiting For The Man" is pretty close to what The Rolling Stones were doing in 1964, 4 years before this album came out. So basically, 2 songs in and there's nothing particularly ground-breaking or timeless about this music. It's just a cheaper copy of exactly the type of pop I expected The Velvet Underground would try to avoid copying.
"Venus in Furs" is the first really outlandish track on And Nico. It's pretty standard psychedelic fare, but there's a crunchy fiddle track in the background that gives it a unique eastern-music quality. The vocals are completely off-key and the lyrics are impenetrable, but it's an OK song. It probably helps that so far the rest of the album hasn't been the putrid experimental crap like I was expecting. The following song "Run Run Run" is back into the Bob Dylan inspired rockabilly And Nico opened with. There's some cool raunchy guitar soloing in this song which keeps the simple track interesting over it's somewhat extended running time.
"All Tomorrow's Parties" has an epic Celtic feel. The lyrics and vocals strike me as pretty nerdy, but the melody combined with thunderous distant beat and piano are quite pleasant. "Heroin" attempts to do something similarly epic by featuring a folky drone and Celtic-ish drums. The song fails with its slow-fast-slow-fast back and forth which just becomes annoying after the first 3 minutes. The final 4 minutes break down into a distortion shreakfest that may have permanently damaged my ears.
"There She Goes Again" is an interesting mix of early Who and... Bob Dylan. I think I need to come up with a new comparison, but it's hard to ignore how much Lou Reed sounds like classic Bob Dylan on And Nico. "I'll Be Your Mirror" is just a weird little ballad. If there's a point to these lyrics, "Reflect what you are!" it's obviously over my head.
"Black Angel's Death Song" is a shreaky babbling mess. I'm kinda disappointed that John Cale is listed as co-writer of this piece of junk. I came to really appreciate his talent after hearing Paris 1919, but now I'm a bit worried that album was a fluke. Seriously, this song is that bad that it almost completely wipes out the good feelings I had about Cale.
The album closes with "European Son", a jammy congested mess that plods and screeches on for close to 8-minutes. At one point I accidentally leaned on the wire going to my headphones. The stereo-ness of the recording cut out and things got really scratchy. At first I didn't realize what I had done and just thought this was part of the production of the song. It certainly didn't hurt how the song sounded. It didn't help either, but I doubt anything could really save this mess.
So I went back and forth quite a bit on The Velvet Underground And Nico while I was listening. There were some decent rocking tracks, but also plenty of junk. The problem with the junk is it was exactly the pretentious lousy shit I was expecting to hear when I put on a Lou Reed-led album. I am a bit angry that Lou Reed would have the audacity to say the music he was making was so much greater than his contemporaries.
Not only was this music just OK at best, this album sounded like crap. The same year this was released The Beatles were releasing Sgt. Pepper, which even if you don't like the music that album sounds about as smooth and clean as any out there. So what the fuck were The Velvet Underground doing messing around with such a choppy, muddy, distorted sound? It's like they were recording with microphones caked in mud.
I was considering going through more The Velvet Underground music right away, but no. I don't think I can handle it all at once. Maybe next time I visit The Velvet Underground it will be more consistently pleasant. 2 stars.
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