“The beauty you are”: Five emotional lyrics that prove Lou Reed was a true poet
There are many things that make Lou Reed special, and the fact that he never remained still during his career, forever electing to take risks and explore new avenues, was certainly a facet of his artistry that helped him excel.
Of course, not all of these experiments worked, with some of them proving to be controversial decisions among fans and critics when they were first released, and some continuing to be polarising to this day.
However, in spite of all of these digressions, he always remained true to himself in terms of lyrical content and used this as a means of expressing himself, whether intentionally in the first person or through a character.
Reed’s lyrics were always bold, whether he was in a playful and jocular mood, a plaintive and ponderous one, or downright despairing, but it’s always been clear that he had a way with words which he never shied away from displaying in his work. Whether you want to laugh, cry, or experience a confusing combination of both emotions and everything in between, there’s a Lou Reed or Velvet Underground song perfect for the occasion.
While the humour gets highlighted a lot, we’ve taken it upon ourselves to highlight five emotionally cutting lyrics that prove that Reed was, at heart, a poet above all else, and one who could flip the entire meaning of a song on its head with just one line that changes the context.
Five lyrics that prove Lou Reed was a true poet:
‘The Blue Mask’
“I get a thrill from punishment, I’ve always been that way / I loathe and despise repentance, you are permanently stained.”
After the release of his 1973 album Berlin, Reed’s output became less unanimously praised, and divided the opinions of both his most loyal supporters and the discerning music critics of the era. Coney Island Baby was a high point flanked by the releases of Metal Machine Music and Rock and Roll Heart, two of his most widely criticised records, and this trend of following brilliance with disappointment continued throughout the 1970s and into the following decade.
However, it’s fair to say that Reed didn’t care for any form of criticism that was levelled at him, and by the time he came to release The Blue Mask in 1982, he was sick of having to explain his constant decision to alter his course. The album’s title track is full of barbed statements aimed at his detractors, and if he couldn’t make it any clearer, it acts as a gigantic middle finger for anyone who wanted to stop him from pursuing what he wanted to. This is a ‘fuck you’ straight from the heart.
‘Caroline Says II’
“Caroline says as she makes up her eyes / ‘You ought to learn more about yourself, think more than just I’”.
Throughout the course of Berlin, Reed creates a narrative around the disintegrating relationship between the concept album’s two protagonists, Jim and Caroline, as they confront many obstacles in their personal lives. While any track from the record could have reasonably been selected as a glowing example of his emotive lyricism, it’s ‘Caroline Says II’ that has the line that hits home the hardest.
‘Caroline Says II’ is part of a triptych of songs where things descend from bad to worse with regards to the collapsing romance, but while many of the ways in which Reed depicts this go into graphic detail with their depictions of domestic violence, self-harm and suicide, here we hear Caroline directly confront Jim over his failings. She doesn’t beat around the bush in telling him how he’s the one at fault, and highlights all of his shortcomings in one succinct sentence that is meant to stay with him as he deals with the guilt over her demise.
‘I Found A Reason’
“I found a reason to keep living, and you know the reason, dear, it’s you / And I’ve walked down life’s lonely highways, hand in hand with myself / And I realised how many paths have crossed between us”.
There are plenty of excellent love songs in Reed’s back catalogue, both in his solo career and during his time with The Velvet Underground, but the sentiments of ‘I Found A Reason’ are perhaps as strong as his desires for someone else are ever felt in a song. While the band’s existence was on the ropes around the release of Loaded, it still features some of Reed’s finest songwriting and serves as an excellent coda for his spell with the group.
As for the lyrics, the character that Reed is singing from the perspective of appears to have reached rock bottom, and is considering ending it all in the ultimate act of desperation, but amidst this personal crisis, he realises that the object of his desire is a perfectly good reason to persevere and work through the hard times. To realise that life is worth living simply because of the existence of someone is to say that they mean the world to you, and for them to have changed Reed’s outlook only underlines how much passion he has for them.
‘Perfect Day’
“Just a perfect day, you made me forget myself / I thought I was someone else, someone good”.
While many people see ‘Perfect Day’ on a surface level and assume that it’s another love song, it reaches a point just after halfway through where it becomes evident that not everything is as it seems, and that the relationship Reed is describing has a darker and more complicated side to it.
As much as he seems to be in a state of bliss having spent the day with someone, doubts begin to creep in, and it’s here that you realise that he’s not describing a human relationship, but his push-and-pull relationship with heroin use.
Through his use of the drug, he’s able to become ignorant of the world around him and banish all negative thoughts about himself to the back of his mind, but when things wear off as the day moves on, he realises that he’s trapped in a world of addiction and spiralling as a result of it. The culmination of all of this leads to the song’s final repeated line, “you’re going to reap just what you sow”, which when twinned with the pivotal line above, makes for a gut-wrenching realisation of the song’s true nature.
‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’
“I find it hard to believe you don’t know the beauty you are / But if you don’t, let me be your eyes / A hand to your darkness so you won’t be afraid”.
Not all of Reed’s best lines were ones that he delivered, and perhaps the most touching of all of them was gifted to Nico on the band’s debut album, where they collaborated with the German singer. While many of the selected lines that have demonstrated Reed’s poetic excellence have been rooted in desperation of some kind, ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’ subverts this expectation, and through allowing someone else to sing the line, it’s almost as though he’s the one receiving advice on how to change his ways.
While these may be affirmations that he’s essentially giving himself, using Nico as a vehicle for expressing them makes them hit home harder, with it directly addressing Reed’s propensity for self-loathing and destructive behaviours. He clearly knows that he has the capacity to change – he wrote the lines, after all – but he needs to hear it from someone else in order to act upon them, and having the external voice of Nico offer this comforting truth is ultimately what guides him through.
