MONOLITH OR MONOTONE?

I have a few theories concerning this new Lou Reed album:

1. In general, Lou is not excessively fond of other members of the human race, so this album is, or wants to be, some kind of ultimate antisocial act. When the MC5 debuted, John Sinclair said that they and their music would “make you feel it or leave the room.” Lou wants to make music that’ll make you feel it and leave the room. That way he can be happy: alone, with his machines. Has he succeeded? No. Everybody stayed put when it came on. They chuckled at it and went back to their chores. (If Lou really wants to get into irritation scientifically, he should study the work of somebody like Sparks.) He has succeeded in taking a hissing muzak whiz. Perhaps I should also mention that I like this record. Why? Because I am an Insect Death buff.

2. Just because it’s only an A-head playing around with electronics and tape recorders doesn’t mean it isn’t valid. There is a rising line of aggression running through “European Son,” “I Heard Her Call My Name,” “Sister Ray” and the Stooges’ Fun House album which finally achieves psychosis in Metal Machine Music, and Lou plays amplifier about as well as he plays guitar.

3. You know when you get so tense and anxiety-ridden that all the nerves at the back of your neck snarl up into one burning ball? Well, if that gland could make music, it would sound like this album.

4. This is what it sounds like in Lou’s circulatory system.

5. Most of the people who buy Metal Machine Music are going to be pretty mad at Lou, but it’s an even bigger joke on RCA, and the ultimate fall guy is the artist himself. Because what we are witnessing here is commercial suicide. Sally Can’t Dance was the first, and probably only, Lou Reed album to go Top Ten. The collection of outtakes from Rock ’n’ Roll Animal he marketed last spring was proficient but too ballad-y for a live album and generally inferior to its predecessor. Even hardcore fans like your reporter, who is something more in the realm of a fanatic, found themselves playing it a couple of times and filing it. Animal was a real sleeper on the charts, helping to break Lou on radio in many areas previously hostile to “glam rock” like the south, but Live, after resting at a hardly awe-inspiring 62 for a couple of weeks, died fast. Now he’s put out this migraine, which will get zero radio play and bomb so bad it’ll make Berlin look like an Elton John album. All of which will ensure that the buyers will stay away in droves when he releases his next set of “songs,” Coney Island Baby, in September. It’s refreshing that the guy’s not content to merely grind out one album a year, but do you suppose that all this frenzied pseudoactivity is Lou’s terrified reaction to having, just once in his life, climbed far enough from his “street punk” roots (pretensions) to make Top Ten? In any case, a death wish is being fulfilled...before our eyes, corporately.

6. Anybody who doesn’t jack off at least three times a day is a queer.

Published September 1975