‘Dirty Blvd’: Lou Reed’s mid-career lyrical peak
“Andy [Warhol] didn’t think there should be any lyrics to songs, they were so dreadful,” Lou Reed told The Washington Post in 1989. Fortunately, for the sake of the Velvet Underground, Reed won that particular debate.
For as much as people responded to the aesthetic elements of the Velvets and Warhol’s influence on their style, Reed’s lyrics elevated the band from a glorified art project to something far more interesting.
Making records during the rise of psychedelia, it would have been all too easy to align the group’s messaging with hippie mind expansion, or something more complementary to Warhol’s “Exploding Plastic Inevitable”. Absurdist, satirical, or ironic. But Reed, who studied English at Syracuse University and came up through Tin Pan Alley, was a proper storytelling wordsmith at heart, more influenced by the ’50s Beat poets and early rock n’ roll than the new avant-garde.
“I really like rock,” Reed told the Chicago Tribune in 1992. “It’s party stuff, dance stuff and R&B stuff that we all grew up on and loved. But I wanted something that would engage you mentally, that you could listen to on another level. I just thought that would be the perfect thing in rock and roll.”
One could argue that Bob Dylan arrived at a similar idea and got there a bit sooner, but whereas much of Dylan’s work in the mid to late ‘60s feels like a man enthusiastically trying on a lot of different hats and moving beyond his earlier years of political statement-making, Reed was consistently writing more at the street level, the pothole and manhole cover level, unafraid to discuss difficult and gritty realities, including those from his own life experiences.
That’s not to say his best songs were always about drugs, outcasts, and urban decay, either. This was, of course, also a man capable of penning some of the prettiest and most deceptively simple love songs of the 20th century: ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’, ‘Pale Blue Eyes’, ‘Perfect Day’, etc. For a rockstar often viewed as unapproachably cool, he knew how to communicate human vulnerability.
As a poet, though, Reed always sounded most authentically like himself when he was playing the role of the New York City beat reporter, a “job” he returned to throughout his career, and really mastered on his 1989 return-to-form album, titled simply New York.
Considering he already sounded like a grizzled observer of the Big Apple’s underbelly back in 1968, an older, wiser Reed was extremely well equipped to give voice to the rough state of his city in the late ‘80s, not merely by asking “what the fuck happened to my town?”, as Chrissie Hynde did a few years earlier on the Pretenders’ ‘My City was Gone’, but by putting himself in the headspace of the people now most impacted by the problems plaguing New York.
“Pedro lives out of the Wilshire Hotel,” begins the third track on New York and one of the best of Reed’s solo career, ‘Dirty Blvd.’ “He looks out a window without glass / And the walls are made of cardboard, newspapers on his feet / And his father beats him because he’s too tired to beg.”
‘Dirty Blvd.’ (Reed was too school to spell out “boulevard” in the song title) deals directly with the haves and have-nots, contrasting the glitz of Manhattan’s Lincoln Center or the patriotic symbolism of the Statue of Liberty with the rampant injustice of America’s economic system, its thieving landlords, and the hopeless outlooks of so many of its citizens.
“Your poor huddled masses, let’s club ’em to death,” Reed talk-sings, paraphrasing the plaque on the Statue of Liberty, “And get it over with and just dump ’em on the boulevard.”
The song is quite blunt, maybe even heavy-handed, but it packs a haymaker of a punch as much in 2025 as it did in ‘89; when it was an unlikely sort of companion piece to NWA’s LA-based Straight Outta Compton, released a year earlier.
“Listen, I write about the stuff that’s around me and I hold no allegiance to anyone or anything,” Reed said at the time, sounding every bit like Ice Cube.
As for offering solutions to the problems he observed on ‘Dirty Blvd.’, Reed joked, “We only had an hour. We’ll get into solutions on Volume 2, maybe.”
