Og jeg faldt lige over et par meget fine ord om Lou, skrevet af min Facebook-ven, Steven Tallamy:
Lou Reed was a jerk.
Rude, pretentious, dismissive to journalists, band members and fans alike.
There is a famous Eno quote (that I am probably distorting) but it goes something like “Hardly anyone bought the first Velvet Underground album when it was released. But everyone that did, formed a band”. It is a near perfect encapsulation of the power and effect of that record. What impressed me most about Reeds early work was a stubborn refusal to judge. He was the first genuine observer.. He saw the hookers, the junkies – but his songs were not about whether they were immoral or merely victims, they just were. He was rocks first ammoralist.
I saw him several times live (including the first gig when the Velvets reformed – poachers turned gamekeepers). I came to expect certain givens, not least his ability to take tracks such as Sweet Jane, extend them to 10+ minutes and yet somehow still make them seem perfunctory. Deep in the darkest mid 80s I saw him on the Magic & Loss tour (the one where he was sporting a mullet that would have shamed an Austrian 2nd Division goalkeeper). Lou had instructed the venue to put up signs stating that if we left our seats at any time we would not be allowed back in the auditorium until the next song was completed. I was therefore immediately ready to hate the performance. He proceeded to play the entire new album (which dealt with the deaths of 2 close friends)from start to finish. It was pristine, stiff and buttoned-up and it broke my heart.
But Lou Reed was an artist who after several years of zero commercial success broke through with the Bowie produced Transformer album. A year later he had the opportunity to record his new album. As Sweet and T Rex set the charts alight, Lou decided to make Berlin. If anyone is unfamiliar with the tone of this album, perhaps it can best be expressed through the knowledge that on the track “The Kids”, Lou and the producer needed authentic sounds of children crying, so they told the producers offspring that their mother had died in a car accident. Tiger Feet it wasnt.
He was also one of those few special artists that managed the Ali-esque Great Comeback Album. The Reed solo years had firstly seen a stream of albums all of which were interesting or astounding (including the contractual obligation Metal Machine Music which is possibly the greatest album ever made, possibly a painful noise and sick joke perpetrated on the listener, and possibly both). There followed a sad,slow decline to the blackboard scraping depths of Mistrial.. And then came New York. Slick, humorous, ripped with hooks, romantic and even compassionate – and all wrapped in a production that harked back to one of the many, many reasons the Velvets were so extraordinary – the records sound like “city” records. They have a restless, kinetic energy that is every bit as much a part of the albums personality as the lolling bliss out sound of the 70s Laurel Canyon artists.
So lets say bye to someone that changed peoples perceptions about what a track could be about and how a song picture could be painted. We will probably hear much in the next couple of days about the death of a “street poet”. Thats a big sack of bollocks of course. A description used by people that think poetry is somehow a higher calling or art form than the writing of a pop song.
Lou Reed was a songwriter. And at his best I can count on my fingers those that could match him.
He was also a jerk. But so am I sometimes, and so are all of us. Lou was more of a jerk than most, but he was also more of a genius. As he put it on New York
“This is no time for celebration
This is no time for shaking hands
This is no time for backslapping
This is no time for marching bands”
But it is time to say goodbye. Goodbye from me. And Bowie and Iggy and the Pistols and the Mary Chain. From My Bloody Valentine and Kraftwerk and Can and the 1000 hip hop acts that ripped off his vocal style and the 10 million indie bands that listened to the Velvet Underground albums and heard all the wrong things.
Goodbye Lewis. I’ll miss you. You jerk
Et andet citat fra MetaFilter:
“Lou’s post Velvets work was spotty and unreliable. But in his best moments, he hit big and seemed to be able to change the world. One of my favorite parts of being a Lou Reed fan is seeing the diversely different choices other fans make as to what his best songs and albums are. It seems like every Reed fan has at least a song or two from his catalog that they cherish that don’t register with most other fans. Or a record they can’t even listen to anymore is one that another fan would bring to a desert island. That’s why it’s always so much damn fun talking about Lou Reed with other music fans – I am always reevaluating his songs based on someone’s passionate urging for me to go back and give something another chance.”
“Lou Reed dying feels like rock’n’roll dying altogether,” er der en der skriver på internettet.
Og jeg faldt lige over et par meget fine ord om Lou, skrevet af min Facebook-ven, Steven Tallamy:
Lou Reed was a jerk.
Rude, pretentious, dismissive to journalists, band members and fans alike.
There is a famous Eno quote (that I am probably distorting) but it goes something like “Hardly anyone bought the first Velvet Underground album when it was released. But everyone that did, formed a band”. It is a near perfect encapsulation of the power and effect of that record. What impressed me most about Reeds early work was a stubborn refusal to judge. He was the first genuine observer.. He saw the hookers, the junkies – but his songs were not about whether they were immoral or merely victims, they just were. He was rocks first ammoralist.
I saw him several times live (including the first gig when the Velvets reformed – poachers turned gamekeepers). I came to expect certain givens, not least his ability to take tracks such as Sweet Jane, extend them to 10+ minutes and yet somehow still make them seem perfunctory. Deep in the darkest mid 80s I saw him on the Magic & Loss tour (the one where he was sporting a mullet that would have shamed an Austrian 2nd Division goalkeeper). Lou had instructed the venue to put up signs stating that if we left our seats at any time we would not be allowed back in the auditorium until the next song was completed. I was therefore immediately ready to hate the performance. He proceeded to play the entire new album (which dealt with the deaths of 2 close friends)from start to finish. It was pristine, stiff and buttoned-up and it broke my heart.
But Lou Reed was an artist who after several years of zero commercial success broke through with the Bowie produced Transformer album. A year later he had the opportunity to record his new album. As Sweet and T Rex set the charts alight, Lou decided to make Berlin. If anyone is unfamiliar with the tone of this album, perhaps it can best be expressed through the knowledge that on the track “The Kids”, Lou and the producer needed authentic sounds of children crying, so they told the producers offspring that their mother had died in a car accident. Tiger Feet it wasnt.
He was also one of those few special artists that managed the Ali-esque Great Comeback Album. The Reed solo years had firstly seen a stream of albums all of which were interesting or astounding (including the contractual obligation Metal Machine Music which is possibly the greatest album ever made, possibly a painful noise and sick joke perpetrated on the listener, and possibly both). There followed a sad,slow decline to the blackboard scraping depths of Mistrial.. And then came New York. Slick, humorous, ripped with hooks, romantic and even compassionate – and all wrapped in a production that harked back to one of the many, many reasons the Velvets were so extraordinary – the records sound like “city” records. They have a restless, kinetic energy that is every bit as much a part of the albums personality as the lolling bliss out sound of the 70s Laurel Canyon artists.
So lets say bye to someone that changed peoples perceptions about what a track could be about and how a song picture could be painted. We will probably hear much in the next couple of days about the death of a “street poet”. Thats a big sack of bollocks of course. A description used by people that think poetry is somehow a higher calling or art form than the writing of a pop song.
Lou Reed was a songwriter. And at his best I can count on my fingers those that could match him.
He was also a jerk. But so am I sometimes, and so are all of us. Lou was more of a jerk than most, but he was also more of a genius. As he put it on New York
“This is no time for celebration
This is no time for shaking hands
This is no time for backslapping
This is no time for marching bands”
But it is time to say goodbye. Goodbye from me. And Bowie and Iggy and the Pistols and the Mary Chain. From My Bloody Valentine and Kraftwerk and Can and the 1000 hip hop acts that ripped off his vocal style and the 10 million indie bands that listened to the Velvet Underground albums and heard all the wrong things.
Goodbye Lewis. I’ll miss you. You jerk
Et andet citat fra MetaFilter:
“Lou’s post Velvets work was spotty and unreliable. But in his best moments, he hit big and seemed to be able to change the world. One of my favorite parts of being a Lou Reed fan is seeing the diversely different choices other fans make as to what his best songs and albums are. It seems like every Reed fan has at least a song or two from his catalog that they cherish that don’t register with most other fans. Or a record they can’t even listen to anymore is one that another fan would bring to a desert island. That’s why it’s always so much damn fun talking about Lou Reed with other music fans – I am always reevaluating his songs based on someone’s passionate urging for me to go back and give something another chance.”
“Lou Reed dying feels like rock’n’roll dying altogether,” er der en der skriver på internettet.
(Kilde: http://www.metafilter.com/133258/Lou-Reed-1942-2013#inline-5259556)