The genre Lou Reed totally gave up on: “I don’t enjoy that”
A man who perfected the art of being miserable, Lou Reed was rarely known to be a ray of sunshine during his heyday – the extent of his outspoken ‘likes’ being Tai Chi, 1950s doo-wop, and his wife, Laurie Anderson.
If you can sit through enough archival interviews of Reed, from across the entirety of his career, you get a rather mixed picture of the man who changed music forever. He was a famously combative interview subject, with a habit for making budding music journalists awake in cold sweat, but a lot of that came down to the songwriter’s unique sense of humour. Namely, the Velvet Underground frontman would be deliberately contrarian wherever possible, for little reason other than to mess with whomever he was being interviewed by.
During the peak of his solo career, during the 1970s, that combative nature was, of course, spurred on by his increasingly erratic nature and debilitating drug problem. Even during his more mellow years, though, you could never quite tell what Lou Reed was saying in earnest and what he was saying in order to gain a reaction.
One notable exception to that rule was Reed’s 1989 interview with Rolling Stone, in which he seemed genuinely candid and willing to discuss his musical past and present, something of a rarity for the songwriter, who didn’t typically enjoy discussing either during the earlier stages of his career. In that interview, among various other things, Reed claimed to have lost his love for rock and roll entirely.
At this point, those who have witnessed many Lou Reed interviews might chalk up his comments as one of his infamous attempts to make an interviewer squirm or say something deliberately outrageous. However, within the context of the interview, there didn’t seem to be any hint of hyperbole or provocation in his comments.
“I’m the last person in the world I’d have thought should be on a stage,” he declared, over two decades into his stage career. “Some people really like having a spotlight on them. I don’t. What I like is the song and performing it. Doing it for people who like it.” Reed then derisively added, “I want out of the rock and roll thing. I really do.”
“It’s a little late now,” he admitted. “But I don’t enjoy that end of it. Yet there I am, up onstage, performing my stuff. Certainly, part of the reason originally was because no one else would. And I still think that to some extent. I do me really well.”
Exactly why Reed fell out of love with the rock and roll that had first inspired him back in the 1960s and 1970s, he did not disclose. However, given the genre exploration of his later solo career and, in particular, his move towards the realm of the avant-garde, perhaps Reed simply viewed rock and roll as retreading the same ground.
Not many artists manage to amass a discography as extensive and enduring as Lou Reed’s, so it isn’t overly surprising that, during that discography, his musical allegiances changed somewhat as he strived for new sounds and influences. Every artist, even one as grumpy as Lou Reed, needs some degree of variety in their output, after all.
