{"id":2681,"date":"2013-11-14T16:25:53","date_gmt":"2013-11-14T16:25:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/raulmourao.com\/blog\/?p=2681"},"modified":"2013-11-14T16:25:53","modified_gmt":"2013-11-14T16:25:53","slug":"lou-reeds-new-york-was-hell-or-heaven-by-michiko-kakutani","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.archive.raulmourao.com\/blog\/?p=2681","title":{"rendered":"Lou Reed\u2019s New York Was Hell or Heaven By Michiko Kakutani"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"lou_reed_nyt\"<\/a><\/p>\n

no site do NYT.<\/a><\/p>\n

Lou Reed<\/a>\u2019s New York was a tough place. It was a place of \u201cdark party bars\u201d and neon lights, a \u201cfunny place\/Something like a circus or a sewer,\u201d despite the \u201cnew buildings\/Square, tall and the same\u201d \u2014 a place as distinctive as Chandler\u2019s Los Angeles or Baudelaire\u2019s Paris. He wrote about New York with a mix of journalistic observation and deeply felt emotion, a poet\u2019s tenderness and a bad boy\u2019s street cred, creating a soundtrack to the city that resonates decades after Times Square has been hosed down and scrubbed clean, and the Village and SoHo and TriBeCa have been transformed from grungy bohemian haunts into destination stops on luxury real estate search engines.<\/p>\n

(A public event,\u00a0\u201cNew York: Lou Reed at Lincoln Center,\u201d<\/a>\u00a0is scheduled for Thursday afternoon at the Paul Milstein Pool and Terrace at Lincoln Center, near where Reed and his wife, the musician and performance artist Laurie Anderson, joined Occupy Wall Street protesters some two years ago.)<\/p>\n

For some of Mr. Reed\u2019s older fans, his portraits of New York are like old black-and-white snapshots (or the monochrome covers of old New Directions paperbacks), summoning memories of a time when they were young and defiant and searching for some elusive something. For generations of younger fans, too, his gritty view of life on the edge and his primal, uncompromising music remain an inspiration. He was \u201can early calling card to New York and how to be an artist,\u201d Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth told Rolling Stone magazine. \u201cHe was like the Empire State Building to me.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mr. Reed was a pioneer on rock\u2019s frontier with the avant-garde, translating lessons he learned at Andy Warhol\u2019s Factory, and the disruptive innovations of the Beat writers \u2014 Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs and Hubert Selby Jr. (\u201cLast Exit to Brooklyn\u201d) \u2014 to the realm of popular music. He not only embraced their adversarial stance toward society and transgressive subject matter (in songs like \u201cStreet Hassle\u201d and \u201cHeroin\u201d) but also developed his own version of their raw, vernacular language, while adding a physical third dimension with guitars and drums. His early songs for the Velvet Underground \u2014 delivered in his intimate, conversational sing-speak \u2014 still sound so astonishingly inventive and new that it\u2019s hard to remember they were written nearly half a century ago.<\/p>\n

If Mr. Reed provided a literary bridge to the Beats (and through them, back to the Modernists, and the French \u201cdecadents\u201d Rimbaud and Verlaine, and even Poe, the subject of his 2003 project \u201cThe Raven\u201d), he also created a bridge forward to punk and to glam, indie, new wave and noise rock. He would become a formative influence on musicians like Talking Heads, Patti Smith, Roxy Music, R.E.M., the Sex Pistols, Sonic Youth, the Strokes, Pixies, and Antony and the Johnsons. As his friend the artist Clifford Ross observed, \u201cLou was the great transmitter\u201d \u2014 of ideas, language and innovation.<\/p>\n

What gave Mr. Reed such a broad artistic wingspan was the extraordinary emotional and sonic range of his work: his access to both the sunlit and darkly shadowed parts of his psyche, his magpie\u2019s love of so many genres of music and his willful determination to continually experiment. His music from album to album (sometimes from track to track) often seemed deliberately to subvert expectations. His 1972 album, \u201cTransformer\u201d \u2014 which mixed rough street reportage with playful, trippy musings in classics like \u201cWalk on the Wild Side,\u201d \u201cPerfect Day\u201d and \u201cSatellite of Love\u201d \u2014 was followed by his dark, ambitious song cycle \u201cBerlin,\u201d and a few years later by the deliberately difficult \u201cMetal Machine Music\u201d (1975), a howling hour-plus-long barrage of feedback and electronic noise.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not that he didn\u2019t care what people thought,\u201d his longtime producer and collaborator Hal Willner said last week. \u201cHe cared. But it wasn\u2019t going to change what he did.\u201d<\/p>\n

Though Mr. Reed was famous for his aggression, for the intensity of songs like \u201cWhite Light\/White Heat\u201d or the snarling perversity of \u201cSister Ray,\u201d he was equally the master of hauntingly beautiful ballads like the deceptively simple \u201cPale Blue Eyes\u201d or \u201cOh! Sweet Nothing,\u201d a moving hymn to the lost and dispossessed. His work tended to move between polarities: between anger and vulnerability, angst and empathy, sarcasm and yearning; between screaming guitar riffs and pretty doo-wop harmonies; between dissonance and melody; between belligerent head-fakes and earnest soul-searching.<\/p>\n

At the same time, Mr. Reed found a way to use the dynamic between words and music, pairing, say, lyrical melodies with corrosive tales about violence, suicide and drug use; swirling, ecstatic guitars with minimalist lyrics. In performance, his inflection and delivery added to the contradictions, underscoring both his own chameleon moods and the beauty and pain that make up what he called \u201cthe vertigo of life.\u201d<\/p>\n

Over the years, Mr. Reed\u2019s work seemed to grow more directly autobiographical. Albums like \u201cThe Bells\u201d (1979), \u201cThe Blue Mask\u201d (1982) and \u201cSet the Twilight Reeling\u201d (1996) delved into many of the same subjects (the weight of family history, questions of identity, the transience and intractability of time) that had animated the poems and stories of his teacher Delmore Schwartz \u2014 whom he regarded as a formative mentor \u2014 and that pointed up these very different artists\u2019 emotional affinities.<\/p>\n

In a 1987 interview, Mr. Reed talked about seeing his record albums as chapters in one huge, long novel: \u201cThey\u2019re all in chronological order,\u201d he said. \u201cYou take the whole thing, stack it and listen to it in order, there\u2019s my Great American Novel.\u201d \u201cPass Thru Fire,\u201d the recent volume of Reed\u2019s collected lyrics \u2014 dedicated to \u201cL.A.,\u201d Laurie Anderson \u2014 provides another version of that novel, and even without the essential soundtrack, the lyrics possess a remarkable organic coherence, charting a harrowing journey through the bohemian underworlds of New York City, through the ravages of heroin and speed, and emotional terror, fury and aloneness \u2014 and toward something like grace.<\/p>\n

Whether it\u2019s Candy who hates \u201cthe big decisions\/That cause endless revisions in my mind\u201d or the lost souls in \u201cAll Through the Night\u201d yearning \u201cfor a bell to ring\u201d when \u201cthe daytime descends in a nighttime of hell,\u201d the people in his songs are all searching for something \u2014 a dream, a fix, someone to hold \u2014 that might see them through the midnight hour.<\/p>\n

In the volume\u2019s final song, written in 2008 and clearly addressed to Ms. Anderson, Reed wrote about finding a balm for the negativity that had once hobbled him \u2014 his propensity to think about the past instead of \u201cwhat could be,\u201d the rain instead of the sun.<\/p>\n

The magic ability of love to help us transcend loss and self-doubt is the fulfillment of a wistful hope, sketched decades ago, in one of his early and loveliest songs, \u201cI\u2019ll Be Your Mirror\u201d:<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ll be your mirror, reflect what you are<\/p>\n

In case you don\u2019t know<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll be the wind, the rain, and the sunset<\/p>\n

The light on your door<\/p>\n

To show that you\u2019re home.\u201d<\/p>\n