Reed’s love of music became his guide, and rock ‘n’ roll became his voice. His hyper-focus on the things he liked led him to music and it was there that he found himself.” “Panic attacks and social phobias beset him,” wrote Reed’s sister, Merrill Reed Weiner, in 2015. Reed also began suffering panic attacks and after a mental breakdown following his first semester at NYU, his parents submitted him for electroshock therapy. He taught himself how to play R&B songs on guitar by listening to the radio, eventually forming a doo-wopish group as a teen. A socially-awkward Jewish kid from Long Island, Reed’s musical voice, like so many others, was forged in pop and in pain. The cornerstone of the Velvet Underground’s image and sound was the songwriting of Lou Reed. That album was The Velvet Underground and Nico, a uniquely groundbreaking release from a band of artsy New York misfits and marketed by the creative whims of one of the most iconic figures of the time: Andy Warhol. But the year’s boldest musical moment was an album that didn’t appeal to the same sensibilities as idyllic hippie anthems or strutting soul classics-and it wasn’t born of Haight-Asbury, acid freakouts or middling interpretations of Eastern philosophy. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Are You Experienced?, High Priestess of Soul, Disraeli Gears, I’ve Never Loved A Man the Way I Love You-it was the year that popular artists fully realized the creative potential of the LP and it happened as a generation was discovering its cultural voice. What’s Beautiful for me? Well, the answer is there, if you look closely enough.There is no argument against 1967 as an epochal year in music. In some ways, I think Lou Reed felt much the same about drugged up drag queens or maybe he just thought of them as truly beautiful. In Inferno, Dante depicted the most abject torments of Man, yet still made beautiful the ugly and raised the profane into a sacred realm, by making it a perversion of the things we love. The hypnotic “Venus in Furs”, with its droning guitars and lyrical discussion of Masochism now does a lot for me….not that I’m a masochist. ![]() ![]() “Heroin,” my favorite track, is written to mimic the act of taking heroin, with the drum functioning as a literal heartbeat, the dynamics, and the melody, and the pace matching the act of shooting up. But I listened obsessively, wore that T-shirt which so proudly displayed Andy Warhol’s contribution of the phallic banana album cover, and took a walk on Sunday Morning with it, just so I would indulge ironically in the opening track of the same name.Īs I grew up, and my appreciation for different musical stylings matured, I developed an honest appreciation for the songwriting. I freely admit that this album took forever to fall in love with. the woman or man-or both-who haunts your dreams with beauty dressed up in tight-fitting lingerie that hides nothing, dangling your desires in your face, begging for you in cherry-red lust. That idea that you don’t have to conform to the rules if you don’t want to, that you can express yourself and people will listen-it’s practically its own syringe. That sense of freedom is so unreasonably attractive: the woman or man-or both-who haunts your dreams with beauty dressed up in tight-fitting lingerie that hides nothing, dangling your desires in your face, begging for you in cherry-red lust. It is an album completely lacking in restraint. Reed and bass player and John Cale explore the music and subjects that interest them most with no regard for audience-drugs, BDSM, death, John Cage, early electronic music, Arnold Schoenberg-all of these influences are played with no consideration for the aftermath or effect. Is this album beautiful? I say yes, though not necessarily for the sounds themselves. The concept of beauty is a necessary question for this album, as the aesthetic is integral to the understanding of art and art criticism. ![]() ![]() The emphasis is on noise, subversion, and abhorrence of the straight and narrow. The Velvet Underground & Nico is not a beautiful album in any conventional definition notwithstanding the eye of the beholder, this album is ugly-harsh, discordant, dissonant, drugged up, with singing in the loosest definitions and an anemic bass and drums.
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