Remembering Lou Reed
By Chuck Klosterman
When a famous man dies, his critics tend to evaporate (at least temporarily). The type of person who disparages the newly dead always comes across like an opportunistic coward, and every postmortem potshot inevitably has the opposite effect. When a famous man dies, you don't mention the qualities that made him a problem. There is no point in attacking a man who is no longer there.
Unless that man is Lou Reed.
Then there is a point, and it explains everything else.
Reed died yesterday — somehow both predictably and surprisingly — at the age of 71. You probably won't find an obituary that fails to mention the cantankerous complexities of his character. In the punk oral history Please Kill Me, Reed's nastiness is literally described as "famous," which is completely accurate. He was uncommonly famous for acting like a prick; it was essential to who he was as a public figure. He was the single-most famous jerk in an idiom supersaturated with jerks who hope to be famous. But that's not why his death is such a loss. That's not what's important. What's important is that this universally shared opinion about Lou Reed's persona never made anyone question the merits of his music. You were allowed to think whatever you wanted about who he was as a person (mostly because he didn't seem to care), but there was never any argument over the veracity of his genius. Few rational listeners injected their discomfort with Reed's personality into the experience of hearing his records; even fewer concluded that the way he sometimes acted in public eroded the insight of his output. You might say, "I hate Lou Reed," but you couldn't say, "I hate Lou Reed and I hate all his music." If you did, it only meant you had terrible taste in everything. This is why Reed's life was such a profound, unparalleled success: He proved that the only thing that truly mattered about an artist was the art.
Start at the beginning. Start with The Velvet Underground & Nico. You play the record once. You play it again. Maybe you've heard it many times before, but it always sounds less reassuring than you expect. The first track is fragile. The second track is gravel. All 11 songs make you think about things you normally ignore. Maybe your first thought is, This music seems like it could have been recorded last week. Considering that the album is 46 years old, this is mildly amazing. But then you think something else: You know, these songs are still weird. The voices are bizarre. The structures are so simple they almost seem awkward. Some of these ideas are crazy. So then you start to wonder how this contradiction could exist. You wonder how something this old could feel so in step with everything that's happened in popular culture over the past 46 years, yet still manages to strike the audience as perverse and unorthodox and consumed with self-aware otherness. It makes no sense: Something that sounds this modern should also feel familiar; something that feels this weird should also sound like it belongs to a different age. But it doesn't sound rote and it doesn't sound anachronistic. It is, in all likelihood, the most irrefutably timeless rock music anyone has ever made — not necessarily the best, but the most aesthetically durable. The smartest, all things considered. "Heroin" wasn't the first song ever written about heroin, but it was the first song about heroin that was titled "Heroin." It was not a metaphor to unpack. It arrived unpacked. You just had to deal with it. And because Lou Reed was the man who wrote it, you just had to deal with him, too.
more
http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/9892086/remembering-lou-reed
= new reply since forum marked as read
