R.I.P. Lou Reed, godfather of weird

MANILA, Philippines - It’s strange to suddenly live in a world where Lou Reed is dead. Ever since forming the highly influential band The Velvet Underground in the mid-‘60s, Reed never really stopped making music or outrageous sound bites. When he wasn’t busy churning out albums almost every other year over the last six decades — the most recent being the perplexing Metallica collaboration “Lulu” — Reed, always the media curmudgeon, was busy terrorizing the music press (he once called a writer from New York magazine a “f***ing a**hole” and “a f***ing piece of sh*t”). A few months ago, he nearly blew up Twitter with his effusive review of Kanye West’s “Yeezus.” He’d been ever-present, alternately bewildering, impressing, and infuriating people pretty much since 1967. Lou Reed finally succumbed to liver failure this week at the age of 71. The party is officially over.

Lou Reed’s death is also strange for a contradictory reason: his legacy has been so secured for so long, his field of influence long coalesced into culture, that it feels as if his eulogy had already been written so many times. His legend grew as his career declined. While his releases became increasingly puzzling, panned and irrelevant — punk rock happened, ‘80s underground blossomed, and ‘90s alternative exploded — his progeny spanned three music generations and counting. He was always referenced and revered, always in the past tense.

To be fair, it’s impossible to overstate the impact that the Velvet Underground had on popular music. Their debut album “The Velvet Underground and Nico” was such an outlier in 1967, a year that saw the Beatles completely shed their boyband image with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club and The Doors unleash their psychedelic rock to the world. Both bands still sounded pedestrian next to the Velvet Underground. Reed’s distinct vocals — that primal, spoken-word drawl — and the sheer otherness of songs like Venus in Furs, Black Angel’s Death Song, and Heroin were unlike anything the world had ever heard. The Beatles and The Beach Boys had dabbled with song textures years before, but never with such abrasiveness, and certainly not in the spirit of hard drugs and urban decay.

Radio hit, critical darling

The Velvet Underground would go on to release three more studio albums with Reed at the helm, none of which would make the Billboard top 100 at a time when record sales were the only available measure of an artist’s worth. The line between “radio hit” and “critical darling” didn’t exist during the heyday of the Brill building, Motown and Beatlemania; the most popular songs then were also the most beloved by critics. The Velvet Underground cut through that line like a blunt razorblade. Lou Reed practically invented the idea of non-chart success, presaging the days when artistic integrity would be equated to obscurity. He was proto-punk, proto-indie, proto-hipster.

Reed’s solo career started off on a promising note with 1972’s “Transformer,” featuring the iconic Perfect Day that has graced a dozen commercials and movies since, Satellite of Love, and the only top 20 hit he ever had — the perversely catchy Walk on the Wild Side. He then released difficult record after difficult record, none more impenetrable than the double album “Metal Machine Music,” an hour’s worth of pure guitar feedback that angered fans and critics alike.

With each odd, frustrating release, Reed’s incapacity to care about other people’s opinions only heightened. His next acclaimed record would come more than a decade after “Transformer” — 1989’s “New York,” but by then, his Velvet Underground influence had already produced a college radio scene that was more than ready to celebrate him. Brian Eno once said that only 30,000 people bought the first Velvet Underground record but every single one of them went on to form their own bands. Some of those bands were already sowing the seeds of yet another pop music revolution by 1989 — Sonic Youth and The Pixies, and even The Jesus and Mary Chain and My Bloody Valentine across the Atlantic. The Velvet Underground reformed a few years later, their reunion tour serving as their long overdue victory lap. They became belated rock gods in a new value system made possible by their own music.

Unpredictable turns

As if uncomfortable with the very notion of acceptance, Reed would revert to his solo career of unpredictable turns, recording a concept album based on the work of Edgar Allan Poe in “The Raven” and collaborating with the antithetical and beyond-washed-up Metallica in “Lulu” — a record that inspired as much outrage as “Metal Machine Music.”

Pop culture writer Jason Hartley once theorized that Reed was never an artist in decline, but rather an advanced genius we were never capable of appreciating. If the Velvet Underground was 20 years ahead of its time, he argued, then every new Lou Reed record should logically be out of step with contemporary music. Whether or not it’s a theory that can be taken seriously, it does point to the essence of Lou Reed: he’s the most self-indulgent musician of all time and the one who cared the least; it’s no coincidence that he happened to change pop music forever.

Lou Reed invented modern cool only to abandon it for much of his life. But within the dream logic of his surreal oeuvre, it all makes perfect sense: writing songs about heroin junkies, transvestites, and sadomasochists in the hippie-era ‘60s is as weird as writing a heavy metal album based on the work of an obscure German playwright in 2011. No one could figure out Lou Reed and that’s why he will always be remembered. The antics of people like Miley Cyrus and Lady Gaga, or even the artistic masturbations of bands like Radiohead will never seem too strange or confounding; not in the world that was subjected to Lou Reed’s exceptionally incomprehensible vision. His death has left that world sad and far more predictable.

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