i'm not much of a fan. i don't really see how the velvet underground were, sonically, that different than the byrds. i don't hear the novelty, i just hear rather substandard mid-60s hippie folk bullshit. nor was i able to connect with reed's later music or writing very well - it just moved so slowly, and with such pomp. really, i'd consider him to probably - bar none - be the single most over-rated artist of the 20th century.
however, i can hear and acknowledge the direct and substantial influence he had on a large proportion of the artists that i hold in the absolute highest regard. michael stipe. sonic youth. swans. throbbing gristle. peter gabriel.
i guess he's like that distant grandfather that you only met a few times and didn't really connect with, but that you heard stories about your whole life. i may not feel his absence, but i think i can feel his departure - whether actually or merely as a symbolic date, an era very seriously just ended.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-lou-reed-dead-20131027,0,4221650.story
i'll acknowledge that part of it is a generation gap. i'm so far removed from the 60s pop sound that....it's just entirely alien. i have no first hand experience. neither of my parents listened to this stuff. nor did my grandparents. it was something i'd seen in movies, and never had much of an attachment to.
so, the subtle and supposedly revolutionary differences that existed between the byrds and the vu are just glossed over as minor production differences, which is in truth what they actually are; the velvet underground are only radically different from the byrds if you've been living a reality saturated with byrds-like pop, mass produced as a product, for the last five+ years. if you have no measurable consciousness of anything at all until 15 years after they broke up, and no reference point to approach the era with, the vu and the byrds seem to be remarkably similar.
certainly, the velvet underground seem to have more in common with the byrds than they do with any punk band.
i've tried. a few times. but in the sense that it acts as a precursor to 70s, 80s, 90s acts i like, it fails because it's far more rooted in an era that i don't remotely understand - the 60s - than it is in anything that i do.
i guess it's sort of ironic. you put on an old beatles or hendrix or floyd or crimson record and it still sounds modern. it could have been recorded last week. however, you put on the velvet underground and you're instantly transported to 1966. it is far more tied to it's temporal surroundings than any of the other major, influential acts of the period.
influential or not, they sound far more like their era than they do like anything that followed - meaning that you have to understand and/or like 60s hippie folk pop in order to connect.
...and that it should be understood more in relation to what existed around it, which is what it was in truth a part of, rather than in relation to what followed from it, which it in truth was not a part of.
to put it another way...
the vu are often understood in terms of what they were reacting against. in order to really understand a reaction, you have to understand the whatever that's being reacted against. that's the part of the whole thing that falls apart and that i suspect may fall apart for most people in the long run. i was never normalized to the byrds, the mamas and the papas, the animals and whatnot (i was normalized to the beatles, the who, the pink floyd, frank zappa, led zeppelin, cream, hendrix, king crimson, yes, genesis... ), so the jump from normal to abnormal is entirely lost on me - it just all sounds the same.
but that inherently links them to the 60s, and seals their fate as a "60s folk band" rather than some kind of proto-punk act.
zappa is not a bad comparison as he did the same thing to heavy blues on some level. a flower child may not really hear the difference between zappa and zeppelin, but somebody that likes "progressive music" would instantly.
i'm just showing my ignorance, right? why don't i go listen to those old byrds records over and over so that i can understand them properly so that i can react to the velvet underground properly? if i had any respect for the classics....
but, can't you see that i'd be intimately familiar with those byrds records if they had any legitimate claim to being labelled classics?
so, why should i go listen to bad pop music from an era that ended before i was born in order to properly understand the reactions to it?
see, these are some of the problems inherent in canonizing the velvets. i don't think the music holds up on it's own, and the context is too convoluted to reconstruct. the canonization is premature; within a generation, they will be forgotten.
well, maybe not forgotten entirely, but reduced to a footnote as an influence on more radically creative music.
just to point a last thing out - a lot of the things that the vu get credit for were actually done by pink floyd first, or borrowed from people like reich and xenakis. i don't doubt that the velvets were directly influential. but even if you strip out the "it really just sounds like a byrds 8-track that got warped in somebody's car" criticism, there's *still* not much novel there....
it's really floyd that gets the "first underground rock band" award. and if you've never heard early floyd from this period, you probably wouldn't recognize it.
this is a taste, afaik the only thing that ever made it out to record.
(note that floyd would cite zappa, who would cite varese. but also that there was a fair bit of free jazz produced in the period.
i know, i'm missing the point, it's the lyrics.)
ok. to be balanced. and to backtrack to the "official narrative" of the velvets influencing punk. it's convoluted. i think it should be largely rejected, except in the local scope of the velvets influencing the new york "downtown" scene.
see, you can give the velvets and their members some credit for helping form a bridge between the beat movement and what got labelled the new york punk movement, although it's never been clear to me exactly what new york "punk" had in common with british punk or detroit "proto-punk". don't get me wrong. i like a lot of bands that came out of new york in the mid to late 70s, although maybe more so the stuff that came out in the very late 70s and early 80s. if you toss out the stuff like the ramones, new york "punk" was always very consciously difficult in whatever form it took. that makes it rather unpunk, relative to the initial british meaning of the term.
it's not like i'm the first person to draw a contrast between british and american punk. but it's less pronounced if you're discussing the ramones v. the clash, or the damned, or the sex pistols. there are a lot of similarities there. but going a little under the surface, if you try and draw a comparison between patti smith or television and crass then it's clear you're not in the same genre anymore. "punk", in this context, becomes a sort of buzzword without meaning. the new york "punk" scene, in this context, is hard to understand as anything other than an art rock scene grasping onto a trendy term. but, it was an art rock scene in an artistically dead society; in england, it was more like over-stimulation. so it's not just different genres, but reactions to fundamentally different pressures. in time, ironically, it was the new york sound that dominated london (see joy division), while the uk sound got shipped out to california.
see, if punk in britain was a mod movement about rejecting prog and getting back to the basics of rock then new york was a different thing altogether, partly because prog wasn't as entrenched in the united states. instead, you had disco. and new york punk was definitely explicitly anti-disco. so, there was a shared sort of theme there, but very different in scope. in new york, it almost seemed like there was a push to become *more* prog in rejecting the vacuousness of disco - which became post-punk/industrial - after it accepted a shared theme of beat-driven music *from* disco. yet, a lot of the early new york bands were more a type of art-rock, and it's that art-rock that eventually developed into what became alt rock through the influence of new york "punk" bands like sonic youth.
(although sonic youth is the exception, here. they were initially punk as fuck, even if they were clearly influenced by psych rock and maybe, in the end, became a psych band.)
all that to say that there's a continuity from ginsberg through to ranaldo that passes through lou reed, and that the velvets had a role to play in keeping that "downtown scene" alive during those dark days when disco dominated. but it's a relatively minor role - a curator role.
but, yeah. i like this. you can quote me on it.
"the banana record? yeah, it sounds like somebody took a byrds 8-track and left it out in the sun."
i know, i know - “i think there was a lot of elegance in the lyrics he wrote.”
yeah, i'm familiar with the material, and i know that's what people get out of it. and i've been inspired by a lot of people that he inspired, so i'm getting a lot out of it second hand. i cited stipe and ranaldo specifically.
it just seems to me like he's writing from behind this sort of dramatic screen that exists, that he's presenting very carefully worded works of fiction and passing them off as experiences. it's not just him, i have this criticism of a lot of folk music. it seems like it's an act, in other words. well, of course it's an act, on some level - all art is, and if i was walking around rejecting everything on that level i'd be rejecting all art, which i'm not doing. it's just that, with him, it seems really transparent. so, you're claiming it's honest and naked and whatnot, but what it strikes me as is very produced to *seem* honest and naked and whatnot. which is sort of the definition of contrived.
i'm kind of arguing in the form of a conspiracy, though. the more evidence you present that it's raw, the more contrived it's going to seem. but, isn't it a conspiracy, seriously, when you really analyze it?
i'm getting kind of meta and confusing, but i think what i'm trying to get across there is clear.
i guess relating to it sort of relies on giving in to the fantasy, and ignoring the truth that it's an act. which i'm not usually able to do.
“i think a lot of his lyrics are really personal.”
well, if you work in the warhol perspective, which is deeply relevant in reed's case, it sort of cheapens it by reducing it to a product. it doesn't help that he's so deadpan all the time - it just sort of stresses the feeling that it's constructed.
”maybe his lyrics don't seem lived in because they're often observational and in the third person.”
i think it's more his presentation, but, putting that question aside, i don't generally find myself at all interested in the subjects he's exploring, either, which is more of a subjective criticism. but i have a general disinterest in music that's focused largely around discussing relationships or largely focused around drug addiction. if i were to name my 100 favourite artists or something, almost none of them would be that type of songwriter or exist in the singer/songwriter/folk kind of category. i could probably ignore the deadpan, perceived lack of sincerity and generally not particularly interesting music if i could relate to his topics of choice a little more readily. when i look at what he influenced that i can relate to, it's often more in the writing style than the subject matter. stipe, for example is quite political; ranaldo is very introspective. stuff like swans and throbbing gristle took the nihilist themes to a different level, and inserted the emotion that reed tends to lack...