Two Macaulay Culkin stories pointing in opposite directions

This sounds positive:

Macaulay Culkin's new girlfriend Jordan Lane Price has reportedly helped him beat drugs after threatening to walk away.

... but I'm not sure it's worked:

We Saw Macaulay Culkin’s Pizza-Themed Velvet Underground Cover Band Last Night

Lou Reed: A quick round-up

The front page of USA Today this morning records the passing of Lou Reed:

'Underground' visionary dies at 71

The quote marks round underground probably a reflection that underground artists tend not to get front page coverage on their passing.

(Also: when someone is about to be buried, probably want to use word other than 'underground' to describe them.)

A lot of writers struggle to describe Reed's style - obviously, you know it when you hear it, but when you're trying to capture that for future generations, how do boil it down? The New York Times' Ben Ratliff attempts to pin it to Lou's early days deviating from doo-wop:

Not too long after his first recordings, made at 16 with a doo-wop band in Freeport, N.Y., Mr. Reed started singing outside of the song’s melody, as if he were giving a speech with a fluctuating drone in a New York accent. That sound, heard with the Velvet Underground on songs like “Heroin” and “Sweet Jane” and in his post-Velvet songs “Walk on the Wild Side,” “Street Hassle” and others, became one of the most familiar frequencies in rock. He played lead guitar the same way, straining against his limitations.

In the LA Times, Randall Roberts opens by admitting that, actually, it's all been said before, and much better, and more succinctly:

Those looking for one version of Lou Reed's life need look no further than to the late critic Lester Bangs, who presented a particularly harsh, if affectionate, take on the artist's story in a single sentence.

"Lou Reed is the guy that gave dignity and poetry and rock 'n' roll to smack, speed, homosexuality, sadomasochism, murder, misogyny, stumblebum passivity, and suicide, and then proceeded to belie all his achievements and return to the mire by turning the whole thing into a monumental joke ...," wrote Reed's longtime sparring partner Bangs in 1975.

It doesn't stop Roberts from having a go at adding to the pile himself, though:

Reed was the snake with the apple, bringing into rock's lexicon new thematic temptations — "Venus in Furs," "I'm Waiting for the Man," "Lady Godiva's Operation," "The Gift" tackle harsh truths — and fresh textures of noise.

Over at Slate, the occasion of Reed's passing is seen as the perfect moment to try and slap a label on his sexual orientation:

Soon after Lou Reed’s death at age 71 on Sunday, Rostam Batmanglij of Vampire Weekend tweeted that the legendary rock star was “maybe the first out songwriter,” an allusion to his purported bisexuality. During his lifetime, Reed was famous for his sybaritic pursuits and unorthodox lifestyle. But was he bisexual?

This piece is headed "Was Lou Reed the first openly bisexual rock star?" That the piece doesn't earn its question mark by considering if there were any earlier openly bi musicians pretty much undermines its whole point: if you're asking a question if someone was an out bisexual, then pretty much not out. Reed, specifically when asked by Lester Bangs about bisexuality, said this:

The notion that everybody's bisexual is a very popular line right now, but I think its validity is limited. I could say something like if in any way my album helps people decide who or what they are, then I will feel I have accomplished something in my life. But I don't feel that way at all. ... You can't listen to a record and say, “Oh that really turned me onto gay life, I'm gonna be gay.” A lot of people will have one or two experiences, and that'll be it. Things may not change one iota. ... By the time a kid reaches puberty they've been determined. Guys walking around in makeup is just fun. Why shouldn't men be able to put on makeup and have fun like women have?

That quote, by the way, taken from the Slate article itself.

Clearly Lou had sex with lots of people, and didn't use gender as starting point. But equally clearly, he never chose to identify himself as bisexual. Ergo, he wasn't the first out bisexual rock star.

The Daily Mirror dips into Twitter to round-up reactions, and it's possible they read some of them before publishing, too:

Comedy writer David Quantick tweeted: “RIP Lou Reed. This, by him with John Cale, is one of the most beautiful things ever made.”

They don't have the video, or even a link to it. Without which, it doesn't make much sense, and does mean that the Mirror has effectively left Quntick as saying 'RIP Lou Reed'.

This is how that tweet should have looked:

RIP Lou Reed. This, by him with John Cale, is one of the most beautiful things ever made: http://t.co/YyQyCEwvfT

— David Quantick (@quantick) October 27, 2013

Still, that's not the worst thing about the Mirror's coverage; while most Twitter reaction is lobbed onto a single page, one expert commentator's tweet gets a whole page to itself:

Lou Reed: Simon Cowell tweets that he is "so sad" to hear about death of music legend

Cowell's tweet followed another on his account which read: "you realise without great people you have nothing"

Having Cowell's opinion on Lou Reed is like hearing from a persistent stain what it feels about Persil.

Alexis Petridis in The Guardian tries an opening which is, in effect, a get-out-of-jail for any following overstatements:

When a famous rock star dies, there's a natural tendency among fans and journalists alike to overstate the late figure's importance: the former out of grief, the latter because it makes better copy.

In Lou Reed's case, that's almost impossible to do, just as it's almost impossible to imagine what rock music might sound like had the Velvet Underground never existed.

Almost impossible to overstate...

Elvis, Beatles and Dylan fans might be wont to disagree, but there's a compelling argument that their 1967 debut The Velvet Underground And Nico is the single most influential album in rock history. Certainly, it's hard to think of another record that altered the sound and vocabulary of rock so dramatically, that shifted its parameters so far at a stroke.

Vast tranches of subsequent pop music exist entirely in its shadow: it's possible that glam rock, punk, and everything that comes loosely bracketed under the terms indie and alt-rock might have happened without it, but it's hard to see how.

... but let's give it a go anyway.

Rolling Stone also really, really rates that 'and Nico' album:

"Produced" by Warhol and met with total commercial indifference when it was released in early 1967, VU’s debut The Velvet Underground & Nico stands as a landmark on par with the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and Bob Dylan's Blonde On Blonde. Reed's matter-of-fact descriptions of New York’s bohemian demimonde, rife with allusions to drugs and S&M, pushed beyond even the Rolling Stones’ darkest moments, while the heavy doses of distortion and noise for its own sake revolutionized rock guitar.

Oddly, last year Rolling Stone was able to think of twelve better albums when compiling its greatest albums of all times. But of course Reed hadn't just died at that point. (It did allow it was bit better than Abbey Road, although not as good as Rubber Soul, and nowhere near Sgt Peppper.)

So, a lot of use of the word "dark", quite a bit about sex, a sudden elevation from 'fairly influential' to 'pretty sure he invented music, if not metal and also machines'. Reed always was a difficult person to nail down without breaking out Capstan-strength cliche.

The award for the worst piece of writing on the day of his death, though, must go to sportal.com.au, in its rugby league coverage:

Tenuous links to the World Cup
Lou Reed's death was felt by distant relative (we think) Jack Reed. The Brisbane and England centre (Jack, not Lou) was ruled out of the World Cup due to injury.

Even allowing for the admission of a tenuous link in the headline, that makes no sense at all.

Presidentobit: Vaclav Havel

He was the first president of the Czech republic. But what really marked out Vaclav Havel, who has died at the age of 75, was his passion for the Velvet Underground:

Moe, Moe, how could you?

You have to go more-or-less to the end of this clip about Tea Party events in Georgia, but there you'll see Maureen Tucker, complaining about taxes:



Is it Moe? The Maureen Tucker from the Velvets does live just an hour's drive away in Douglas, so it's her 'local' gathering of confused patriots against government spending on things they don't agree with. What are the chances of two Maureen Tuckers being in the area?

[via Guardian Music]

A Weekend In New York: Dirty Blvd

Twenty years ago - between May and October 1988 - Lou Reed was tucked away in studio B of Media Sound, recording New York. The songs would eventually be released early the following year on Sire records in, as Lou observed on the sleeve notes, pretty much the order they were recorded.

Coming at a time when it was almost illegal to not bow down before the Velvet Underground - who would have gone a blind date without wearing a Velvets banana tshirt and expected to cop off in the late 80s? - it was a refreshing surprise for Reed to turn out an album that didn't sound like contemporary (in the sense of not sounding like his greatest work). It even pulled off the trick of memorialising Andy Warhol in terms that suggested that, actually, he might have wasted his talents in the pursuit of the popular.

In Halloween Parade, there was an AIDS song - this was 1980s New York, after all - which sits alongside Loudon Wainwright's Sometimes I Forget in capturing not loss, but the confusion of emptiness that follows. The need to put "AIDS" in brackets after the song title on the lyric sheet perhaps shows how Reed can underestimate his audience, as does the instruction that you listen to the album in order, like a book, on the back of the sleeve. But for all his grumpy cussedness - this is Lou Reed, after all - the album is an outpouring of love. Love that has been tried; love that is disgusted with what its heart's desire has had done to it, allowed itself to become. But love, nevertheless.

I can remember the first time I heard any of it - in a Halls of Residence room, on a Sunday afternoon, listening to On The Wire on BBC Radio Lancashire. Fenny introduced a track - this one, I'm pretty sure - by reading a slice of lyrics from the song. My ears pricked up: This is good. What is this? Then he just finished with "I am Lou Reed" before cueing the track.

Lou Reed?

Really?

Could it be?

It was.

The purchase was more or less essential from that moment.

One of the great albums of the 80s. One of the great albums by a legend not coasting on being a legend. And, sort-of-two-decades on from the mid-point of the making of the record, this weekend No Rock celebrates some of the tracks through the majesty of YouTube.

It's funny listening to it now how a lot of the names which were only vaguely familiar to a English teenager have become more fixed in my consciousness. Rudy Giuliani, for example, has had a profile much, much higher since that decade; Jesse Jackson wasn't exactly unknown in the UK but you wouldn't have got much money on him still causing upset in American Presidential elections in 2008.

I think I was only half sure what a TV whore might be, come to that - I knew what it sounded like, but couldn't be certain it wouldn't turn out to be something else entirely in the US.

On the other hand, I was certain what Moron Downey Junior was; at the time, his show was a regular subject of columns in British media supplements. But he vanished almost as soon as he earned his Lou Reed namecheck, helped along his route to obscurity by a false claim about being attacked by Nazis; an attack he'd staged in a bid to try and keep his shock-yak show on its syndicated stations. He's dead now - as is Kurt Waldheim and the specific Pontiff of Good Evening Mr Waldheim.

So, then: This isn't the sound of New York, but it is the sound of Lou Reed's New York. And it isn't in the order of recording, either.

This is where I started: On the Dirty Blvd.



More
New York on Wikipedia
New York to buy
New York on Last FM
Rolling Stone review

More tracks over the weekend
Romeo Had Juliette
Beginning Of A Great Adventure
Halloween Parade
There Is No Time