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?
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