“It was weird”: the album that finally broke Lou Reed’s cold heart
Lou Reed knew what it’s like to not get approval. For a decent portion of his career, you could argue that he actively sought out rejection from certain groups just as a way of proving his countercultural brilliance and superiority.
The Velvet Underground were hardly a popular group at the time when they were active, and only really got their flowers retrospectively. Having continually chosen to go against the grain and create something that was years ahead of its time, it shouldn’t have come as a surprise that they struggled to gain attention for their efforts until other acts began to cotton on to their groundbreaking ideas and make music in a similar vein, but that never stopped Reed from pursuing his craft in his own way.
His solo career then produced some classic albums such as Berlin and Transformer, although not all of his solo ventures were exactly easy listening either. To put it simply, Reed was still doing exactly what he wanted to do, and not paying any mind to what others thought of his transgressive attempts to topple the status quo.
On top of this, you have albums like Metal Machine Music, an album made in a deliberate attempt to wind people up with its abrasive waves of industrial noise and prepared guitar. Again, this release was arguably ahead of its time, but was universally decried upon its original release for how it all but obliterated every ounce of commercial promise that Reed had built up with some of his previous albums.
Reed simply didn’t give a fuck, and was ice cool throughout all of the many ups and downs that his career produced. It’s admirable to see an artist remain so unwavering in their beliefs and values that they never opted to compromise on what would make them an easy living, and the New Yorker was arguably one of the finest examples of an artist who lived by this ethos.
However, it would appear that by the end of his career, he was finally at a point where he craved the approval of critics, and his last studio album, a collaboration with Metallica, released in 2011, was hardly the fanfare he wanted to bow out on.
Lulu was hated for its wild combination of avant-garde metal and Dadaist poetry; a mixture that shouldn’t work on paper, and didn’t work in practice as far as critics were concerned. He’d previously made contact with the thrash metal stalwarts after performing together at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s 25th anniversary concert, which ultimately led to the two parties knocking their heads together to create a confounding slog of a record.
Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich would later confess that while they were disheartened by the overwhelmingly negative response that the album received, Reed was devastated by comparison to how his bandmates took the criticism. “We’re pretty thick-skinned,” he told Rolling Stone in 2017. “We’ve been through ups and downs for years… but I think he was really saddened by the response to [Lulu], and I felt it was weird. The roles changed at the end where I became almost more maternal to him, and had to like sort of comfort him through this very difficult month when the record came out and it just got fucking slammed.”
It seemingly took a lot to break down Reed’s unshatterable sense of self-confidence, but even though the facade crumbled away in an instant when people reacted negatively to Lulu, Reed can still say with pride that he did exactly as he pleased with his creative output until his final days on earth.
