Lou Reed New York by: Greg DeGraves Mon:11-Jun-07 Label: Year: 1989 WB rating 67 out of 100

How can she tell a good act from the bad
when she's flat on her back in her room.
How can she do what needs to be done
when she's a coward and a bleeder.
‘Endless Cycle’
Lou Reed

With Lou it’s always been about the sensationalism of what he’s saying. Rightly so too, he sings with the personality of an ashtray, but somehow writes with the authority of a man at street level; the kinda guy who knows more than you do. Whether it be as cult-hero/Andy Warhol neophyte in The Velvet Underground, the glam-rock/Bowie apprentice on Transformer, or the anti-everything/commercial suicide/servant to no-one of Metal Machine Music, Lou is revered for his words and his attitude as much as his songs; the years of smack, bisexual swinging and simply being a good ole fashioned prick have made Lou one of the elite few: a mythical figure.

So what, you say? Good on him, he’s a badass and people love looking at the monkeys as long as they’re caged – we especially love anyone who’s prepared to stick a big index up the establishment, it allows a bit of vicariously living. But all this mythical shit also fucks up the reason we are even talking about the ‘subject’, the music.

Look at Dylan, too many people got in his ear for all those years and he went MIA during the ‘80s; same with Bowie and he’s never really recovered. All these people talking about the man behind the myth and trying to fluff them, if the artist buys into it then they’ll find their head so far up their own arse they can’t see the shit on their shoes that got them there in the first place.

They can’t deflect all of this either, unless they have a hankering for a rock surrounded existence, and even then some bloodsucker will start digging around trying to find a vein. When all this happens, the myth themselves become too busy either absorbing or deflecting, either way they waste their hard earned on something that ain’t the art.

But for the public the myth and the man co-exist and forever as one. No-one looks at Dylan and goes that’s just a sixty-old-guy singing some blues songs. No, it’s the return of the messiah, the bard, the voice of a generation and all that crap. As for Lou, his myth isn’t so pretty – he’s the walking dead, a cooler, meaner and slightly less gaunt looking Keith Richards; best symbolised by dark sunglasses, leather and a banana – but it’s more fatal.

Why? Because people talk shit about Dylan all the time, probably a quarter of the conversations going on in the world right now have something to do with Bob Dylan. But people actually know what Dylan sounds like; they know he wrote ‘Like A Rolling Stone’, ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ and ‘All Along The Watchtower’ (unless they thought Dave Matthews wrote that one). But Lou… punks will tell you he was in The Velvet Underground, but have they heard more than that song on Trainspotting? “Nah”. They’ve seen the cover to Transformer too, they like the eye-shadow and all, but they’ve only heard ‘Walk On The Wild Side’ and ‘Satellite of Love’.

New York isn’t his best, but there’s enough solid grit here for a first timer like yourself to dip your wick in without being scared off. So here’s your chance. Stop reading and go out and buy the album, listen to it and stop all this mythologising. All you need to know about it is in the notes anyway:

“It’s meant to be listened to in one 58 minute (14 songs!) sitting as though it were a book or a movie… You can’t beat two guitars, bass, drum”.