#57
February 1985
Velvet Undergound
VU
Genre: Rock
2.75 out of 5
Highlights:
Stephanie Says
Temptation Inside Your Heart
This is going to be really hard for me. I loathe Lou Reed. It’s rare that I can stand anything that comes out that guy. And, sure I appreciate the Velvets but I’ve never been an acolyte. I was much too young to them to be fresh for me and had moved on so I never went back to them the way I did The Rolling Stones when I was trying to determine if I’d missed anything with them (I did, for sure).
So, how to look at this? This is a collection of songs written and recorded in 1969, but rediscovered and remastered and released in 1985. It really shouldn’t be part of this retrospective because the purpose of this is to see if there was anything released that I missed to plug those holes. And, yes, this WAS released in 1985 so there’s that but it’s not music OF 1985.
It’s like listening to The Door’s Greatest Hits in 1980 and learning to appreciate something you missed. I did exactly that, because that was what you did in High School at that time but it didn’t turn me into a Doors fan. Just a fan of some of their songs.
So, I really have no context to compare these songs to anything except Lou Reed’s 78-85 output and what VU stuff I’d been exposed to.
It says a lot that the best song here “Foggy Notion” is the best track. It’s written by the entire band, sounds like a jam (which is a genre of music I like less than jazz fusion) and at least sounds like a freewheeling group having a good time. It’s on “Temptation Inside Your Heart” that I really hear the Gordon Gano that people talked about at the time. And I like the band’s interchange but not because it adds to the song but because they are kind of slagging each other for their limitations.
Here’s my takeaway:
Lou Reed sucks unless he has people who are smarter and more talented than him to put him in check and help him. He’s like a blind guy and they are his seeing eye dogs. The dogs prevent him from running into the street and getting hit by a car. On his own Lou walks right into 5th avenue and dares the taxis to hit him. And they do, over and over again.
This isn’t really changing my mind about Lou Reed. Sorry, guys.
Since we are playing “Let’s listen to music from 34 years ago that was recorded 15 years before that!” let’s project 15 years later and imagine a young Lou Reed is a contestant on the first year of American Idol and he auditions with “Ocean”. He definitely gets put through to the next round to see the judges. But not because he’s amazing. Mostly because he’s a remarkably bad singer. Not “Rock and Roll” bad. Like, shitty, unlistenable, can’t hold a note without sounding like he’s struggling to just sustain one at all and tortured by the next one, bad.
I would love to see 2000 Simon Cowell take this pretentious fuck down.
How’s that?
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