“Walk on the Wild Side” (Lou Reed)

In memory of Lou Reed, written on 27 October 2013

The eulogies are pouring in today, and everyone is name checking Metal Machine Music (1975) and the Metallica collaboration, Lulu (2011), as evidence of Lou Reed’s enduringly perverse and antagonistic relationship with his audience. But it’s important to remember Take No Prisoners (1978), too, where his hostility is forcefully redirected at his own work, and, in particular, at his most beloved trax, “Walk on the Wild Side” (1972). Its very success is the target here, and no fan’s nostalgia will escape this act of self-trashing. The problem with the original trax is obvious. Noirish, smoky, and luded out, its call to the other is romantic and touristic through and through, as Reed strolls past the Factory’s collection of transvestites, straight and gay hustlers, drug fiends, and Norman Mailer’s “White Negroes.” (It’s a kind of companion to “Perfect Day”: let’s take an evening constitution where we will “feed animals in the zoo, and then later a movie, too.”) So, on this night at the Bottom Line in New York, Reed tells us that Nelson Algren’s original novel, Walk on the Wild Side (1956), is about a bunch of ludicrous “cripples” in the “ghetto” and written by a know-nothing Chicagoan. He claims the song was written at the prodding of some awful, off-Broadway theater producers, who later dumped him in order to produce Mahogany. “Better to be a garage mechanic,” he says, than write tripe for the Man. As for the famed quartet of wild side denizens, Reed claims he didn’t know Candy Darling very well, but she was nevertheless a dumbfuck because she got “leukemia from a silicone tit”: “And I’m supposed to feel sorry? I don’t have enough heart for 14,000 assholes.” Joe Dallesandro, another loser, has “an IQ of twelve”: “he can barely tie his shoelaces and dress.” And the less said about Joe Campbell’s pathetic love life the better. In the end, according to Reed, Andy Warhol withdrew from the Factory scene because of all these jerks and lowlifes. Who needs all this fake radicalism and posturing, this cheap imitation of the “wild”? But beyond all of this, remember: all coked up or not, “I am not trustworthy.” I am composed of “several selves,” and “Lou No. 1” is just getting around to meeting “Lou No. 5.” One Lou writes the song the whole world sings, and another smashes its pretensions. If there’s a takeaway from this scattered, broken, jumpy, and even peppy take on the song, it comes from the nihilistic Lou No. 5: “Nothing is in style, man. Haven’t you gotten into nothing yet?”

“So Bored” (Wavves)

“Bored” is enunciated like the end of each couplet in Robyn Hitchcock and The Egyptians’ “Balloon Man.” Much like the latter, the trax centers on staging an example. (Unlike Hitchcock, it’s not concerned with identity production and explosion.) Alternating between first and third person limited, we witness the staging of ennui. Malformed embodiment: “skin like dirt” that’s both “sun kissed” and “burnt.” Neither actively pursuing nor straying far from whiteness. Overdriven instruments and vocals sound primarily in the midrange. Shared nostalgia for dissatisfaction, reanimating the realization that “life’s a chore.”

“Legend of Paul Revere” (Paul Revere and the Raiders)

From humble origins in Idaho, the little band that could makes good in the world, through sheer power of earnest pleading to radio stations to “play our record.” Homespun, twangy. Then Dick Clark arrives. And: “Come to think of it, our business manager’s our biggest fan.” Charting the fall into the market. But, following Shershow, a false nostalgia for popular culture’s “original” outside position disenables meaningful politics. Legerdemain.

“Picture Book” (The Kinks)

Key trax on The Village Green Preservation Society (1968), and one of a handful considering questions of saving and archiving the evanescent past. The trax’s impact has been muted in recent years because of its frequent, celebratory use in Hewlett Packard ads. What can still be heard, however, remains bracing: the photograph is designed to “prove” to “poppa” in his old age that he and “momma” “loved each other a long ago.” And Ray Davies is even clearer in the album’s last trax, “People Taking Pictures of Each Other,” where amateur photo fans also seek “to prove that they really existed” and “that they mattered to someone.” None of the above, of course, can be proven by snapshots of family and friends, and that’s part of Davies’ point: the personal photo involves a kind of nostalgia for nostalgia. Added to the archive as a “picture book,” however, such artifacts are mute until questioned and turned into “facts” (see Ricoeur’s History, Memory, Forgetting). What, eventually, will the “picture book” prove? We can’t yet imagine all the possible questions, but Davies suggests a serious psychological reversal: your incessant shutterbugging is itself the shadow of a doubt.