The 1990 album Lou Reed was convinced nobody liked: “Interesting to me”
Since the dawn of popular music itself, artists have been torn between fulfilling their own artistic ambitions and creating something that will appeal to the commercial masses. Lou Reed typically landed in the former camp, but that didn’t mean he was free from disappointment when his most artistically ambitious works failed to gain much mainstream traction.
Reed, to be fair to him, nailed his flag to the mast of non-conformity early on in his career. After a bizarre job writing hit records for Pickwick International, the New Yorker formed the archetypal underground band, The Velvet Underground. At almost no point during the Underground’s existence did they ever chase mainstream success or commercial appeal; in fact, it often seemed as though they were making an effort to do exactly the opposite of that.
That theme continued into Reed’s solo career, too, even if some degree of commercial success had become more of a necessity by then. After all, artistic integrity wasn’t paying the bills, and after the total failure of his inaugural self-titled solo album, the songwriter was at risk of being dropped by his label, RCA.
Luckily, the cult status he had been afforded during his Velvet Underground days served him well, causing the likes of David Bowie to be outspoken about their adoration for Reed’s work.
With records like Transformer, then, the songwriter successfully managed to toe the line between artistically innovative cult artist and mainstream success. Ultimately, though, that same degree of success didn’t follow him throughout the entirety of his illustrious solo career. 1992’s Magic and Loss, for instance, was born from a sense of disappointment over the reception to his previous work, Songs for Drella, which he felt wasn’t given its due by the musical mainstream.
“We’re doing all of Magic and Loss on the tour,” Reed told Hartford Courant back in 1992. “Which is really an extraordinary thing to do. Extraordinary and beautiful.”
Clearly excited about the ambitious nature of that underrated early 1990s LP, the songwriter went on, “It’s presented as a unified musical whole. Which is something that isn’t happening a lot today in music.”
Similarly, Songs for Drella had been something of an outlier, too. An expansive song cycle devoted to the life of Andy Warhol, the album saw Reed reunite with his fellow Velvet Underground founder, John Cale, but even that didn’t seem to aid its commercial prowess. “After doing Songs for Drella, I thought people might pick up on the idea of musical biography on CD,” Reed shared. “Which seems interesting to me, but nobody did.”
Although Songs for Drella did reasonably well in the UK market, peaking at number 22 in the album charts, it was almost entirely ignored in its native US – a fitting tribute to the work Reed and Cale had created together a few decades prior. Nevertheless, in the years that followed, the LP conjured up something of a cult following, spurring on its high-profile reissue in 2020, although Reed wasn’t there to witness its resurgence.
In contrast to that 1990 album, Magic and Loss ended up becoming an unlikely commercial smash for Reed, peaking at number six in the UK album charts, making it his most successful album as far as chart standings are concerned. In the end, then, it seemed as though the musical mainstream was catching up to Lou Reed’s experimental mastery, rather than the other way around.
