#101
April 1984
Lou Reed
New Sensations
3.25 out of 5
Highlights:
Fly Into the Sun
My Friend George
Ok.
Here’s your bad take of the month. Your reason to leave the group in a hail of “That guy doesn’t know what the fuck he’s talking about”. I won’t blame you. But here goes:
I think Lou Reed is the most overrated contributor to the catalog of Rock. While I have a great deal of respect for Velvet Underground and I appreciate and agree with their import I just can’t get behind Reed.
Street Hassle? Bad. The Bells? Awful. Growing Up in Public? Interminable. The Blue Mask? Hated it. Legendary Hearts? I’ve never disagreed with Robert Christgau as much in my life.
Until now. He loved that album and he loves this one.
On New Sensations (an album on the cover of which Lou is holding and manipulating a joystick cuz…you know…80s, and he has a song called “My Red Joystick that makes me want to poke my ears with a cheese knife) he presents (to me) as a singer who can’t sing. A musician who can’t play. A wannabe poet who is trying to make his poems into songs when they are obviously not those.
These songs are bad. And each one is played fine by the rest of the band but I find myself wondering what every single one of them would sound like if they had a lyricist who could write well and a singer who could, you know, sing.
But, that’s just me.
I’ll give him points for relative listenability. And, to be honest, after I added up the ratings I was surprised that the album rated as high as it does. Weird…math.
(Sorry to see you go…)
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