Ogged, you're going to burn yourself out and leave me hanging again, aren't you.
Without clicking through, I'm assuming the article author is black.
People talk about music in ways that simply baffle me. I have no idea, whatsoever, what it means that Lou Reed's guitar at the start of "I'm Waiting for the Man" is "sarcastic".
It strikes me as rather overwrought. And something like this:
isn't even both over- and well-wrought.a few formative intellectual and narcotic experiences with (and in the narcotic case, also without) the husk of Delmore Schwartz
have no idea, whatsoever, what it means that Lou Reed's guitar at the start of "I'm Waiting for the Man" is "sarcastic".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LEXJfcIQfI
well, it's a simple sing-song melody, played in a kindof lazy half-assed way which totally contrasts with the relentlessly pounding drums, bass and piano. it's like Reed's vocals - not really trying to impress with technicality, just sortof telling the story in a sly and somewhat aloof way.
Not that we need yet another one but Luc Sante is writing a Lou Reed bio, in which case, hell yeah I'll read it.
6: fits in pretty well with Reed being a kind of lazy half-assed guitarist, though.
I agree he needs to rein it in, but he's got something to rein in, and I know you know what I mean, nosflow. Some quick googling suggests he's in his late twenties.
Maybe my real issue is that I just don't care about Lou Reed.
You care so much more than the average human about trashing Lou Reed, nosflow!
6: See, but to me, you could just as well that it's tasteful and restrained, just enough to put over the melody without trying to steal the show from the bad ass rhythm section. Then maybe you argue that "tasteful" playing is usually better than that, but then you get 8.
I just don't have that sort of theory of mind for musicians for ascribing sarcasm (or similar, ambivalent mental states; anger or joy I can get) to guitar, except when it's something obvious, e.g. quoting another bit of music, or playing that's completely out of character with the rest of the song. But, "he should be playing this, but since he played that, he must be employing irony" seems impossible to me.
I'm not saying it's wrong; I've read descriptions implicitly along those lines enough to know that people mean them sincerely, and I think they're just experiencing music very differently from me. I can't really get to "Wagner is inherently fascist" either.
I'm not saying it's wrong
It's not even wrong. It's bullshit.
Very DFW-influenced, but not quite as mathy.
There is the performatively-obnoxious "talking about music is like dancing about architecture" line (I never understood this because of course dance can be representational; the alternate version "fishing about architecture" makes the nonsequitur clearer but you see it less often; no I don't want to google this). I don't know who's originally responsible for this bad idiom of rock criticism, but it's something people learn and practice. I have taken ten or twelve stabs at explaining why a particular Bright Eyes song works in a particular way for me, motivated less by anyone else's need to know than by my own curiosity (I'm not a fan), and in the words of a friend "they ended the way stabs usually do."
I've like Nitsuh Abebe's music writing in the past, but it's probably too twee for ogged and mostly not about the kind of music either of us appreciates, I would guess. (He was a personal acquaintance long ago and made a good in-person impression on me too, which biases me.)
12.
frankly, i totally agree.
i can think of situations where it would be easy to say "he's playing sarcastically". but it would take at least some amount of personal knowledge about the players involved. in this case, the closest i can get is "lazy and sloppy".
and i mean "lazy and sloppy" in the best way. he's getting the job done, but isn't trying to be too precise or straight about it; it's loose and kindof off-hand. it fits his vocal delivery.
maybe that seems sarcastic to other people.
So, would the idea be that he's playing in roughly the way that a lot of people do something they find annoying and think is below them, meaning with a sloppy enough manner that it's clear that they're being insincere when it comes to acting like something is worth doing? (I mean, not even necessarily in a grudging or pained way but the in the just-on-the-side-of-openly-surly way that people treat, I don't know, meetings about things (they think) everyone already understands just fine.)
I don't generally get this kind of description either, honestly, but I think that for me it's that I have a worthless ear for a lot of what people hear in music anyway. (I get the emotion in it, but I can't help but notice that the music I like most is usually distinguished by rhythms or lyrics. I had to take a music class in highschool and it turns out I can distinguish between major and minor keys only slightly better than chance.) I think with a lot of terminology like this though it just gets learned in the brute (Wittgenstein!) method where you just repeat things over and over until you just kind of see how to use it. Which, I guess, isn't really that distinct from learning how to use words like "sarcastic" in the literal sense either but it's harder to make explicit the way it is with sarcasm.
17: This is what young Corley Miller wrote
This isn't to undersell Reed's musicianship -- he's a genuinely unique guitar player, just listen to the complete sarcasm of the first few bars of "I'm Waiting for the Man"
If this is Exhibit A, I feel ok about underselling Reed's musicianship.
You guys are some first-rate philistines, you know that?
I actually liked (what I've read of; it's really long) the linked article. But that bit really stuck out for me, precisely because it mirrors the sorts of things I've read before that feel, yes, like dancing about architecture*.
It's hard not to think that it's a bit of a Rorschach situation: this musician's work doesn't do it for me, so it must be because they have Daddy issues, while this other musician's work makes my soul sing, so they're probably one of God's own angels.
*generally ascribed to Elvis Costello, whose reputation as a surly young man must have been something you had to be there for, because, as someone born in late '72, he's never seemed meaningfully different from any other rock guy of his era. I don't mean that his music is indistinct, but that he has this reputation as being so cutting and fierce, and... I have no idea. He writes some nice tunes. Sometimes he seems interesting in interviews.
*generally ascribed to Elvis Costello,
I think you mean Frank Zappa.
Since it's this honesty that's most obviously persistent in (at least my personal genealogy of) modern highbrow pop, and since it's generally these Lou songs[3] that burn the brightest in one's headphones,[4] it's pretty easy to essentialize Lou in retrospect as a kind of junky Lorax: he spoke for the marginalized, for the marginalized had no voices. And -- to be clear -- this is a totally adequate affirmative answer to the whole "does Lou Reed matter" question: this kind of honesty is one of the evergreen art-prescriptives, and the particular content of Lou's honesty feels like it lies somewhere in the stream of the #[marginalized][experiences]matter progressivism that's one of the most important and (hopefully) least-doomed-seeming modern political projects.
See, in fact I don't have any opinion about the article because I died after "a kind of junky Lorax: he spoke for the marginalized, for the marginalized had no voices." I assume everyone else also died and we're having this argument posthumously, which is, yes, relevant to the phenomenology of doom, if not one of the evergreen art-prescriptives.
All the references to just plain old "Lou" grate as well.
Here is pretty close to exhaustive list of the top-tier Reed/VU tunes, in no particular order:
- Heroin
- Venus in Furs
- Sweet Jane
- European Son
- The Gift
- Pale Blue Eyes
- All Tomorrow's Parties
- I'm Waiting for the Man
- Sunday Morning
- I'll Be Your Mirror
- The Gift
I'd be very curious to hear the argument for categorizing that as a top-tier song; I've never liked it personally.
- The Gift
The bassline is top-tier, and the feedbacky guitar noodling is also outstanding; it has just enough inherent interest to push back against the narration without pushing it entirely aside.
|| We saw Shakey Graves last night. There's a guy who can play feedback guitar.|>
24: I've never heard it, actually. I'm not really qualified to make that kind of list.
I can't really get to "Wagner is inherently fascist" either.
I was feeling a little antidemocratic by the time Valhalla burned, but that may have been hunger rather than a desire to build a new and all-comprehending corporate state on the jutting rocks of the primordial spirit.
I wonder if Fernwood Tonight is on Netflix.
Yeah okay, this link from apo's link vindicates my feeling that it wasn't worth googling. (But thanks! Paradoxically it is worthwhile to feel vindicated.)
22 "a kind of junky Lorax"
Didn't read it but I'd die too after reading that.
Also, Lou Sneed.
I like his guitar playing.
20.3 Elvis Costello not cutting and fierce? I don't get this at all. I was a kid then but listen to "My Aim is True" or (especially for me) "This Year's Model". Careful there, you'll cut yourself.
Lou Reed was wrecked for me when I actually listened tot he words of "Magic and Loss" and realised that they were nothing more than wind and cliche. Also, I have a friend whose daughter is a junky, qui nunc in quadriviis et angiportes and every time I think of that I feel deep shame at my adolescent self thinking how brave and transgressive it was to listen to "Heroin" and "Waiting for the Man". Essentially he was selling coach party tours around the lower depths.
The notable thing about the links in the OP (I read about half) was that there seemed no mention of Ree'd gay period, yet around Transformer that was the thing he was most famous for in the southern oblasts of KnifeCrimea. The original recording of Sweet Jane is the campest artefact you'll find outside the Vatican.
This is the Lou Reed thread, so...this weekend, I saw Patti Smith at the Roundhouse, and her band came close to spoiling a fantastic gig by doing a *fucking Lou Reed covers medley* like something out of a museum of dickhead boomers while she was off stage.
I mean it was a great gig. The measure of the greatness was that an epic fart like that wasn't quite enough to spoil it.
Damn! I didn't know she was here. The roundhouse would have been great for her. It can't have been as much of a letdown, though, as Joan Baez doing "Imagine"
The Roundhouse was indeed great, and the gig went off, hard. Played the whole of Horses (including taking a break in the middle and turning the record over, with a record) then a lot more songs. Ripped the strings off a guitar.
I sort of think some of Reed's music is OK, but I struggle to get past the fact that he was such an obvious and total prick. I get past that with people like Miles Davis, because ... it's Miles Davis' music, and even his most dickish utterances -- when he was being nasty about other musicians, for example -- had some core of something interesting and possibly true in them. Reed, not so much.
As long as we're talking about Lou Reed, this Lester Bangs interview is kind of fun.
Kind of pleased that apo's link pretty firmly refutes 21:
The same goes for Frank Zappa, another long-time contender I keep hearing about--plenty of assertions, but never any specific citations.
I never paid enough attention to Reed to know that he was supposed to be a standout asshole by rock star standards, and a renewed appreciation for New York plus finding out about his long, reportedly happy marriage to Laurie Anderson made me positively inclined towards him, but I've recently seen it asserted pretty firmly that, no, he really was a colossal asshole and a real shitbag of a human being. Oh well.
For slightly inchoate reasons, right now the words "With God as my witness, I thought turkeys could fly" are running through my head.
43: My wife and I always say, "As bob is my witless..." and my stepdaughter always angrily corrects us.
Also I don't get the whole -- "I found out the guy is an asshole, and now I can't listen to his music" thing Does it sound different?
And someone like Lou Reed who was such an ostentatious asshole -- is he necessarily a worse person than some other guy who smiles and signs autographs, but never calls his mother and refuses to change a diaper?
They need to do a gritty reboot where the turkey drop isn't off-screen.
46: Give me some warning, so I can plan the protest.
I know a guy who worked with both Lou Reed and the Sex Pistols infamous US tour, and vastly preferred the Pistols (who, to be clear, were assholes then) to Reed, who apparently really was the ultimate asshole of the 70s music biz to those around him, which is truly saying something. Still, the feelings of music industry flacks and hangers-on are probably not the most important things in the world.
Music-critic Lou Reed and semi-popular Lou Reed are such different things that it's hard to take that article seriously. My view is 98% the people who seriously prefer White Light/White Heat to the third The Velvet Underground album or Loaded write for rock publications. The "sweet" poppier songs are his better songs, the other ones are things that especially in hindsight were done way better by either actual avant-garde musicians or punk or metal.
45.1: Oh, I haven't stopped listening to the music, it just stopped me wanting to know anything more about him. Unlike a lot of musicians, he seemed like maybe an interesting guy, so if he wasn't an especially big asshole, it might be worth reading up. As it is, I'll stick with listening.
The sweet poppier songs were and are also way more influential. 98,000 bands have tried to redo "What Goes On," and that's his real legacy.
41: of course it doesn't refute 21, you yahoo. It is generally ascribed to Frank Zappa. I wasn't asserting that Zappa actually said it.
The "sweet" poppier songs are his better songs, the other ones are things that especially in hindsight were done way better by either actual avant-garde musicians or punk or metal.
As I've said before, John Cale >>> Lou Reed.
Right, 53 is clearly correct, at least for that portion of the Lou Reed/VU catalogue that rock critics seem to want to enshrine as the important stuff.
I have an pointless and stupid feeling of affectionate connection with Lou Reed. I really didn't have a gritty, dangerous, punkrock adolescence at all; my only connection with anything of the sort was geographical -- like, as a small child, I went to story hour in the library off Tompkins Square Park where Reed was buying heroin. That's enough of a connection, though, that _New York_, which is all ripped from the headlines in the year I graduated from high school, feels like listening to a family member ranting about shit.
(Given that this is me, I have no opinion whatsoever about the value of Reed's music qua music. But it is stuff I still listen to.)
It's funny, I like New York as well (though, uncharitably, by that point he was basically a liberalish-NYC Andy Rooney singing old man complaint songs) because it reminds me of my Aunt, who in turn is near-identical (in my mind) to LB.
I've always thought of you as the insanely powerhungry nephew I never had.
But won't somebody think of the poor heroin marketing specialist stuck out in the cold all winter.
Every family needs someone who dabbles in fantasy absolutism.
I just read the interview linked in 40. The weirdest part is that Reed thinks that his music can't turn people gay, because if you're going to be turned gay you are by something that happened to you before you were 7. He then reaches for the old Jesuit saying and comes up with this:
"It's like Franco said: 'Give me a child until he's seven and he's mine.'"
Francisco Franco? So if he gets you before you're 7, you'll either turn out to be gay, or a Falangist, or maybe a gay Falangist.
He also seems to think that there's such a thing as 150 proof sake.
Lou Reed: Wrong about sake. Wrong for America.
I'm not done heaping scorn on the scorn-heap 24 hours in. I bet most of you did not reach the last three paragraphs, not least because they are inconspicuously humped up over a hecatomb of footnotes.
If the oceans are going to rise, isn't "getting rich" sort of the only procreatively responsible action to take? Shouldn't we, on behalf of our unborn children and the possibly disastrous world they'll inhabit, be doing something a little more lucrative than playing the guitar, or painting, or (for that matter) writing about biographies?
Lou, and more particularly Lou's life, can help us with this in two ways: first, in the historiography surrounding the work of Lou's early career is a reminder that while our current doom may feel totally unprecedented, there have been other dooms before. Rome has always been burning, in roughly the same way that the novel or publishing or whatever has always been dying. [pause for restroom visits] If doom pushes us away from ourselves in two ways -- first by discouraging us from being honest at all, and second by making honesty such a bleak place that it's hard to bring much out of it as art -- then a lot of the tensions in Lou that at first seem ridiculous start to look something more like necessary. The person who could only write "I'll Be Your Mirror" might not have been important, and the person who could only write "Heroin" might not have survived for long enough to write too many songs. We need both halves of Lou to fight what's eating us -- both the honesty and the faith, the naïveté, which, in the end, isn't an incrimination, isn't an indulgence, but just a way of surviving the things you see when you're honest.
ogged, how can you possibly not want to wipe the smarm off this guy's face? This seems entirely out of character for you. I mean this earnestly.
He also seems to think that there's such a thing as 150 proof sake.
I did a double take on that one.
When I saw Cale at this show it made me happier than anything, except that I thought he straight-up murdered "Fear." I think it makes an excellent chaser for the above, though. Five minutes in. (Not for everyone. I mean, not for me until today.)
Huh when I saw him (over a DECADE AGO omg) he did a great version of "Fear".
Have a listen. It has certain virtues.