Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste - Lester Bangs [93]
Lou Reed went on the radio here in New York the other night to play some of his favorite records by other people and take calls from listeners. One kid called in and said, “That girl who died in ‘Street Hassle,’ was that someone you knew?” “Why?” said Lou. “Well,” said the kid, “I mean did that really happen, did somebody really die in real life?”
“Would that make it a better song?” asked Lou Reed.
Now it's very easy to just write that kid off as an asshole, until you start to ask yourself just why you would want to listen, all the time, to a song about someone dying from an overdose of heroin. You might then begin to wonder if you are not the junkie, a junkie for the glimpses of the pit, half in love with easeful death at best—at worst, vicariously getting off on other people's pain and calling it cute decadence.
The only trouble is that there is so much beauty mixed in with the ugliness. So what we have is a simultaneously transcendent and twisted work of art by a creative force whose vision has been itself twisted by circumstance, but because of that, and because the intertwining of beauty and horror runs so deep, the creator perversely keeps pursuing an admixture of his basest and purest elements. And if you are the type of person who likes being around such art as a regular thing then you are going to end up a little twisted too, if you weren’t in the first place.
In which case you will have a minor problem which you will never be able to share with most people. A minor problem and a minor jewel. A jewel with facets of disease running all through it. You can turn it any way you like, look at it in any light or from any angle, but you can only escape being … sullied? by the grace of what amounts to the soft hand of death by turning your back entirely.
And that too would be unfair, in a sense, to both yourself and the artist. Because in raising the base or crippled or tormented or mutilated to such a level, the artist has it seems done something at once noble and rather evil. In loving it you too become culpable, and then will try to seduce others, secretly hoping the whole world might one day come to wear your stigmata. Hence this article about The Marble Index, an LP by a German woman who calls herself Nico, with arrange-ments by John Cale. Like Lou Reed, both of them used to be in the Velvet Underground, though neither has ever attained anything close to his media attention and record-rack popularity. There are reasons for that, of course: whether he's creating good art like Street Hassle, or crap like Rock and Roll Heart, Lou Reed seems to be an idea of the negative which most people can accept, or even find funny.
I think The Marble Index is the greatest piece of “avant-garde classical” “serious” music of the last half of the 20th Century so far. The other night I played it for my new girlfriend, and she pronounced it “depressing.” That doesn’t particularly alienate me from her, because it's not like the only alternative for her was Peter Frampton, but more especially because her reaction was perfectly reasonable and even, in being negative, perhaps ultimately correct. Great art has always confirmed human values, but what are we to do when the most that our greatest works of art can affirm is that the creator fears he or she may be slowly, but surely, losing humanity entirely, along with the rest of mankind?
I don’t know if I would classify it as oppressive