Domnotlooking
Posts: 249
Joined: 8/11/2013
Status: offline
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Hey, Moonhead:
Thanks for talking. I gotta go make some $$$$. Your taste is not my taste, but at least you have taste and can talk about it.
I think the old, arty bohemian thing is soon to be gone and we'll all be poorer for it. A lot of it is student driven and these days, kids just don't have the leisure time to listen to the Joy Division box set 52 times.
Also, people like Lou Reed seem a little passé with their then-daring bisexual alluding in the era of gay marriage. The young will wonder what the fuss was all about.
Likewise, the presentation of drugs as having some seedy glamour. No one thinks going up to Harlem to buy smack is something they'd want to do anymore (and they'd just find a Starbucks and Bed, Bath, and Beyond, anyway).
Back circa '69, there was a tiny outlaw artiste class and a vast audience of nice middle class people with their nose pressed against the glass drinking in the sheer thrill of it all (note nerd song ref.). A lot of that audience stayed with him, but how many people under 45 are in this thread?
The Lou Reed of '69, would be agog at the soma-like options for pleasure we have today. He had a paperback book called the "The Velvet Underground" (a real piece of shit, BTW). We have THIS -and a few thousand other options. Like I said, we mourn not just Lou, but the loss of raw newness.
I think of another groundbreaking, transgressive artist of his day: Bing Crosby. He crossed the color line, put jazz in the mix, and was (after Jolson) pretty much the first superstar. But his context (the war, the big bands, etc.) vanished. And now his cd's go unlistened to, to even at the one cent price that Amazon offers them for. I just read a bit about Lou Reed's New York, which of course is gone -even gone -er then the big bands.
First the context vanishes, then there's the big history re-write (Lou was a wonderful humanitarian, not a tortured, difficult person who had too many shock treatments), and then the big fade. I was reading about a Glam Rock box set and of course, bad old Garry Glitter has been neatly airbrushed out of the history and the compilation. Stuff like Noel Coward and Jaques Brel is included instead as influential. Will future generations really believe that Slade were namechecking Noel Coward? You get the history you just sorta get.
The only thing that usually survives down through the ages are the songs and a truncated snapshot of the artist.
The songs tend to lack a beat or tunefulness. You appreciate them rather than enjoy them. Not a recipe for a longevity guarantee.
The image will shrink down to the sunglasses and the sneer -a brainer Sid Vicious. Lou saw this in his own lifetime. He may have loved Delmore Schwartz, but Delmore was likewise forgotten before Lou ever started touting him -and to no avail. Who here ever bought a Delmore Schwartz book, even while loving Lou? Not me.
The only thing that keeps on keeping on is the urge for adventure, the hunger for the shock of the new and that seems to have taken a beating in recent decades too. Kids today seek shelter from the income distribution storm, not so much to go out and challenge it.
Although I've moved well past Lou (and Souxie, and Leonard, and most definitely Eno), I'd be thrilled if my step kid listened to Lou Reed.
But she wouldn't, even if bribed. He doesn't sound like a proper singer to her, he sounds like bad karaoke.
< Message edited by Domnotlooking -- 10/30/2013 9:45:09 AM >
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RE: RIP Lou Reed. - 
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