Lou Reed: Metal Machine Music

A few obvious but necessary statements to begin:

1. Lou Reed is perhaps the ultimate personification of rock ‘n’ roll.
2. Lou Reed is a monumental asshole.
3. Metal Machine Music is unlistenable noise, but not as some have suggested, unendurable noise.
4. I love Metal Machine Music.

Okay. So, the place was New York, 1975. Lou Reed was five years gone from The Velvet Underground. His early albums had made him out to be a glam icon, an image he thoroughly bought into by kitting himself out as a glam pastiche leather-boy, with mirrored sunglasses, leather and studs, and bleached, cropped hair with swastikas cut into it. Out of control on heroin, his last album had been practically made by the record company, with only his own minimal involvement. It was a smash hit, but critics derided it. In his Manhattan apartment, he set up two amps and two guitars and tape-recorded the results. He did not play the guitars, he allowed the feedback loop created between the guitars and amps to play themselves, moving them and recording long stretches of noise over a period of a couple weeks. For the album, he took sixteen of these recordings, each sixteen minutes and one second long. For each of the double LP’s four sides, he merged together two sixteen minute pieces for the right stereo channel and two more for the left, with no bleed in between, creating a horrid quadruple cacophony that has no synchronization across your brain, like a wrecking ball to the senses. The result is an album more discussed than it is heard.

Reed’s intentions are as opaque to us as the mirrored sunglasses he wears, in an aggressive stance. The liner notes suggest that this might be intended as a joke. The back cover lists an absurd set of instrumentation that is obviously false (and he spells Cale’s old mentor LaMonte Young’s name wrong), referring to the sound of the album as ‘Rock orientation, melodically disguised, i.e. drag.’ In his rambling notes on the album, he claims, ‘This is what I meant by real rock about real things,’ and follows that statement with ‘No one I know has listened to it all the way through including myself.’ He goes on to say that ‘Most of you won’t like this and I don’t blame you at all. It’s not meant for you’ and suggests that the album is not meant as a musical work, but rather as an intellectual, literary work. The fourth side’s locked groove meant that it would cycle endlessly, at last in an apparent pattern, until someone realized what was going on and removed it, and likely threw it across the room.

Upon release, critics reacted with shocked indignation, feeling it was a direct attack on their profession. James Wolcott of Rolling Stone famously described it as the ‘tubular groaning of a galactic refrigerator’ and said that he was so disgusted and bored with Reed’s antics that he couldn’t be bothered to shoot the man if he stood in front of him, never mind giving the album a rating. The theory developed that the album was a prank. This was the height of stereo culture, and it is irresistibly comic to picture someone coming home with their new Lou Reed double LP and putting it on their turntable only to be greeted by this vicious, unbelievable squall of impenetrable noise. They wait, thinking maybe the song is just in formation, but nothing develops. Maybe they do a couple needle-drops elsewhere on the LP, and everywhere they go, just this indescribable racket. They test all their connections, they try the other sides, but there is no escaping it, and by this point they’re furious and bewildered. Lou Reed must have pictured it and laughed himself silly. ‘My week beats your year,’ as he concluded in the liner notes.

Perhaps, though, that is too simplistic and obvious. Creative control clause be damned, if it was all a savage burn on the consumer, the record company would have been loath to release such a beast. I have two theories.

The first is that what we listen to with Metal Machine Music is a simulacrum, a copy of an absent original. Lou Reed was always pissed off about something and given the crowd he ran with during his time in the Velvet Underground, he came up against a lot of intellectually dubious experimental artists who were all working at post-modernism, at art that reflected back at the consumer and the art’s own worth. Things like former manager Andy Warhol’s endurance films such as the eight-hour long Empire, a static shot of the Empire State Building. Reed saw these inane, one-note works of fraud and the way the critics fell all over themselves to fellate them. His own albums were derided, and when he tried to make a genuine artistic statement, it was overlooked or ignored. Well, fuck ‘em. They want avant-garde, that’s what they’ll get.

The second is a more complex idea, stemming from that claim in the liner notes that this is intended as a literary form of rock music. While everything Reed writes herein should be taken with a grain of salt, if we take this statement seriously, how can we examine the album? There is complete, forcible separation of the left and right, dividing your brain in either direction, each side of which is also two layers of noise, and all of it is too much to process. Indeed, one of the primary concerns of post-modern literature is the idea that the ‘information age’ and mass culture have rendered us unable to process information and reality anymore such that we are left only with white noise, reality devalued and unmanageable. With the total separation to the two sides leaves a glaring absence in the centre of the listener’s perception, one might say a conscious absence. What upset the modernist movement was Dostoevsky’s question ‘What if there is no God?’ but what the postmodern authors realized, here at the tail end of the incomprehensibly violent and unjust twentieth century, was that the much more terrifying question is ‘What if there IS a God?’ The construction of Metal Machine Music is a piece of sound terrorism, nullifying its creator as a presence but still implicit is his maleficent hand, affectless and belligerent. A grim commentary on the human condition.

When I first listened to Metal Machine Music, I had like many heard in hushed tones about its terribleness for years. I was prepared for it to be awful and unendurable, but what I was not prepared for was that I would enjoy it. I had a terrible headache and I put it on and started to feel better. Those four tracks of feedback criss-crossed through my brain like strands of barbed wire scourging over my cerebral cortex and scoured off the fog of my aching head. It was clarifying and affirming, soothing in fact. I said earlier that it is unlistenable and it is. If you try to actually listen to it, that is akin to trying to battle it. It is not a piece to be listened to, it is a piece to be experienced, to be overrun by, devoured by.

Somewhere Lou Reed is laughing.

****

~ by jshopa on April 29, 2008.