On Lou Reed

            I realize I’m fairly late to the punch here, but man oh man I am bummed about the passing of dear Lou Reed. He was someone I always heard about through proxy – Rolling Stone Magazine, Spin Magazine, my record-junkie friends – but not someone I seriously considered as such an important and influential musical figure until his recent passing. I always liked Transformer – and it got its just dues, as did the eponymous Velvet Underground & Nico album, but they never really resonated with me until recently.

            Now that I have further educated myself, I’ve come to find that without Lou Reed there really would not have been a prevalent alternative music scene until, well, who knows? Would David Bowie have gotten his toehold in the U.K. without Lou? It’s unlikely, in my opinion.

            It’s funny though, for now I think to myself, “What didn’t I like about Lou Reed before? Why was I so dense in years past?” In my pondering and overthinking, I then got a wild idea – were Rolling Stone and Spin and the like padding their lists with Velvet Underground and Lou Reed because they truly saw his genius, or was it a sort of risk-management on their parts to include a legend when died so they can claim they always championed him from the get-go.

            Hang with me here. Lou Reed was never the healthiest guy – in fact, it’s kind of a wonder he was around this long considering how he spent much of his youth. Furthermore, Lou has always been a formidable musical presence, but much more so in the U.K. than the U.S. – it’s just how it went down, and it was also likely due to Brian Eno and Bowie. To that end, Velvet Underground and Lou albums have never been huge commodities here. Lou was always very alternative, underground and subversive.

            So once again I ask – was Lou Reed’s constant appearance in large magazines in recent years oddly prophetic and risk-management-like? Certainly no one could have predicted his death years ago when new revisions of Rolling Stone lists came flying out with Lou’s name almost always on them. Though, there he almost always was, with a celebrity playlist or inclusion on “The 100 Greatest Singers of All Time.”

            The skeptic in me thinks that Rolling Stone didn’t want to be known as the corporate music giant that has no stakes in artistic integrity outside of Lady Gaga and Elton John, therefore they had Lou and Velvet Underground so largely proliferated in their publications. Just in case the ex-heroin addict, liver-transplanted, unhealthy musician were to leave us they made sure they idolized him and his influence.

            Listen, this is all heresy and conjecture, I’m sure multiple people on the staff are big Lou Reed fans and always vied for his position on the lists. Yet at the same time, it seems slightly odd, doesn’t it?