Glory of Love:

Lou Reed doesn't want to be your friend. You can send him roses, you can buy his records, you can tell him that he's your best friend and that you'll love him for ever and ever and ever. And you know what, I still think that Lou Reed wouldn't give a shit. In fact, Reed has built an entire career on not giving a shit. While everyone else in the world were being cockteases with their sweet, sentimental Paul Anka romantic rock and roll songs, Reed threw our frail sensibilities to the wind and made sex messy. In fact, while Justin Timberlake is out there singing about "bringing the sexy back" and other such nonsense, I would contend that if anyone brought sexy back when hipsters most needed it, it was Reed. Some of Reed's greatest compositions are those that remind all of us that sex isn't about putting on that frilly black lingerie, listening to a Prince album, and busting out the camcorder. Sometimes, sex is just sex. High heels, prostitution, ball gags, disjointed sounds, sex. You don't have to be a hot, young teenager to be doing the nasty. Shit, you don't have to be some square either.

But even while breaking the musical space/time continuum with the Velvet Underground, Lou Reed was already spitting in everyone's faces. He went from the cacophony of vast electrical universes of sound (c'mon baby, White Light/White Heat) to the bleak loveliness of The Velvet Underground. And if that wasn't enough of a slap in the face to the original, manic fans of White Light and the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, imagine how they must have felt after picking up Loaded from their local record store. Jesus. There are more sins of deliberate obtuseness to attribute to good ol' Lou, too, sins that date all the way to today. Who else remembers that infamous performance on Letterman, where he rehashed "Sunday Morning" with a falsetto male back-up singer that sounded eerily as if Mariah Carey was using a taser as a dildo? And what about that string section, huh, Lou? Or if that doesn't jog your memory, remember when he released a concept album about Edgar Allen Poe's "The Raven"? Now I see some righteous anger coming from the crowd.

Here's the thing, though: for every bitch slap, kick in the face, and stab to the ribs Reed dishes out to his audience, he serves up a piece of musical ambrosia which forces people to love, love, love him. Even if Reed had somehow died after Loaded (not out of the question, given his legendary drug consumption), it would have been all right. He had already written "Sunday Morning," "Sister Ray," "Lady Godiva's Operation," "Stephanie Says," "Pale Blue Eyes," "I Found a Reason," "Rock & Roll," "Sweet Jane," and I could probably continue type-testifying to all of you until my hands fell off. But what about his oft-underrated solo career? While there were plenty of high points (Transformer, Metal Machine Music for the more masochistic fans, and Berlin), there was also, for me, the highest point: 1976's Coney Island Baby. The one album where Lou isn't an entirely infuriating son of a bitch.

Granted, he's still not the kind of guy you want to bring home to mama or anything, but who isn't completely crushed when Lou Reed sings "Coney Island Baby"? Gone is the legendary asshole who scares the shit out of music writers, and all that's left is a lonely high school baby boy trapped in the agonizing magnifying glass that is teenage love. You want Lou to lose the pimples and fall into the warm pink sunlight of "the glory of love." And if you're balking at Uncle Lou becoming such a sentimental pile of mush, then what about "She's My Best Friend"? Who doesn't want someone to feel that way about them? You want the friend, you want to be that friend. And if that's not it, there's at least that patented drift away into the sunset chorus which begins the song.

But don't worry, before things get entirely queasy in the room, let's not forget "Kicks" or "A Gift." "Kicks" is the gruesome, sleazy Lou Reed evidenced as far back as "Sister Ray." While it's nowhere close to the "rip out your teeth and watch them dance on the floor" madness that comprises that infamous track, it's brimming with the lecherous subtext of sex, violence, and leather that keeps Lou Reed, Lou Reed. Adding to the seedy disconcertment are the spliced-in conversations which float disembodied beneath the music, making a listener feel as if they were forced into the private hell of a Lou Reed desperate for heroin, desperate for violence. Of course you could probably fend off even a violent Lou Reed, but who in their right mind wants to be abandoned in a room with a smack-crazed maniac and his guitar? And while "A Gift" isn't violent, it is a glimpse at the same megalomaniacal Reed who surfaces frequently in interviews. Yes, the Lou Reed who forces even his loyal armies to be glad that he'd settled on music instead of conquering countries and keeping attractive people locked in his bordellos. Myself, I'm thankful for that fact every day; I'm fairly certain that under his regime, anyone associated with music journalism would have been among the first against the wall.

Honestly, though, the typical string of complaints about Lou Reed could go on forever. Even just reading the new, dramatic liner notes that Reed penned for this new expanded edition of Coney Island Baby is infuriating. The minute I read the line "but my Thunder had been muted," in reference to his alleged missed opportunity to join Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue, I was ready to throw the CD up, up, up into the air and shoot it out of the sky as if I were a world-class skeetshooter. But the point is, we're not meant to like Lou Reed as a person. We are not supposed to idolize him or worship him. There are never any guitar hero antics coming from him; he does not spare us with words of whimsy, or cute bunnies and golden glass melodies. All we receive is the dire truth. Lou reminds us, some of us will fuck hookers. We may well end up waking up some morning next to a woman who has not yet entirely relinquished her masculine past. But who cares? This is Lou Reed, giving us the truth. Letting us be everything with him and that Coney Island snarl. And no matter what he does next, be it a series of albums based on the poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley or Metal Machine Music Part 2, there will always be those shining six minutes and thirty-eight seconds when you, me, and Lou Reed are floating above the ocean and the island, staring down at the ferris wheel, reliving angst, and blasting through the clouds and sky to realize that there will always be the "glory of love."

Official Site
Buy the 30th Anniversary Edition of Coney Island Baby from Amazon
See Also:Don't Eat Him, Jack!
See Also Also: OK, OK, so maybe Lou Reed just hates questions.