The Black Angel's Death Song: On the Passage of Time and the Passing of Lou Reed
I'm listening to "Sister Ray," the 17-minute closing track off the Velvet Underground's 1968 album, White Light/White Heat. It's a fuzzy, chaotic, three-chord jam that--as far as I can tell, which isn't very far at all--is about some indistinct situation involving sex, drugs and murder. Like most songs written by Lou Reed, it has a story, and as with most of Reed's stories, the plot is nowhere near as interesting as its language or its author's vocal manipulation of that language. Few singers could pull of a line like "She's busy sucking on my ding-dong," and still fewer could make it seem like "ding-dong" was not just the right term but the only term to suit what the author was trying to communicate. Whether moaning or crooning or mumbling or shrieking, Reed always understood that the method of communication was just as important as the content. Between thought and expression, Reed sang, lies a lifetime.
As the great Chuck Klosterman noted, the passing of Lou Reed at age 71 was somehow both predictable and surprising. Reed wore his love for hard drugs and general seediness more prominently on his sleeve in his younger days than later on, but he also never made a serious attempt to reverse that image of himself. Even if he was no longer the sort of mainlining hedonist who occasionally penned heartfelt love letters to heroin, it just made sense that one day Reed would have to atone for his sins.
And yet the news of his death was an absolute shock, and not for the obvious reasons. Surprising as his longevity may have been, Reed never seemed "indestructible." Unlike with Keith Richards--another frequent flyer in "how is this guy still alive?" musings of the last four decades or so--Reed's drug use is not a large part of his legacy. He enjoyed excess, but never seemed impaired by it; his drug use was famous, but not infamous. Lou Reed was a rock star in the most benign sense: He played rock music and was famous for it.
What's shocking about Lou Reed's death is that it forces us--his fans--to reckon with just how shocking it was that he even existed. His work was at once so outrageous and so brilliant that he seemed to have been made up, or at least to have existed in a different time than those of us who heard him from afar. No actual human could sing an adorable song like "Sunday Morning" and then go off ten years later and make a double album of guitar feedback. That's just not something actual people do. He seemed like a parody of the eccentric artist archetype. There was no way any real person could be as simultaneously batshit and self-aware as Lou Reed was.
It makes sense to mourn because death is a shame no matter who it happens to. That Lou Reed lived was a blessing to all us fans who will be eternally grateful for (most of) his music. But I wonder how much it actually affects people like me, who knew him only through his songs and his public behavior. We didn't really know Lou Reed, so in a sense we don't really know what we've lost. He was and will remain a messiah figure for young musicians, but it's not outrageous to assume that those kids only care about the music he made between 1966 and 1972. As of his death, he hadn't made an album that anyone cared much for (outside of Reed completists and people who are generally weird) since Transformer. As much as I cherish those early records, my relationship with Reed is not altogether different from my relationship with John Lennon--another artist whose music I cherish--who died six years before I was born. (Reed's most awesome latter-day contribution was probably this review of Kanye West's Yeezus, which on its own is about as important a cultural offering as "European Son.")
When I heard the news about Lou Reed's death, the songs that came quickly to mind were (perhaps randomly) two tracks off the Velvet Underground's self-titled third album--"Pale Blue Eyes" and "What Goes On." The former is perhaps the finest example of Reed's lyrical genius and his delicate approach to pop songwriting; the latter shows Reed's ability to make the best three-chord garage rock imaginable. Neither of these songs are very indicative of 1969, the year The Velvet Underground was released. Even less so is the album cover, which has Reed smiling and looking like a perfect choirboy, clean cut and wearing a sweater over a collared shirt. Moreover, the tame nature of the record has no discernible relation to the burst of noise that was White Light/White Heat, released the previous year. That's what was so amazing about Lou Reed: not only did his existence make no sense within the context of the world in which he was living; it didn't even make sense within the context that he himself created.
These are my thoughts on Lou Reed after his death. They are exactly the same as my thoughts on Lou Reed while he was alive.
When someone famous dies, our initial reaction is to genuflect before all the good that they did (unless that person is famous for doing bad things, like, say, Kim Jong Il). But Reed's artistic contributions were so plainly weird that we'll still have plenty to catch up with even fifty years from now. Reed's legacy may very well wind up being more associated with subversion and individualism than musical brilliance. The most interesting thing about Lou Reed was that he was Lou Reed. And Lou Reed was an improbable human being. Which is why losing him seems both impossible and inevitable.
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