How Lou Reed condensed a nation’s grief into one 2003 song: “Everything I experienced is in that”
It may have been tough to parse at times, but in amongst all of the chaos, it’s hard to deny that Lou Reed had a fascinating way of expressing himself
From his early days as the frontman and de facto leader of the Velvet Underground, it was clear that he was wired differently from your typical rock star, not wont to play by the rules and pander to what audiences wanted to hear. While many people might think that his deliberate disregard for convention was a pretentious way to handle himself, others lapped up the way that he willingly followed his own whims and nobody else’s.
This would continue to be apparent throughout his solo ventures after his band had dissolved, and while there were commercial-sounding records in his catalogue that earned him plenty of acclaim, he’d frequently find himself following them up with something challenging, divisive and confrontational.
Reed essentially pioneered the punk approach in his art, but the fact that he dipped his toes into various other forms as well paved the way for other singular artists, giving them the confidence to operate in less than conventional ways.
Such is his approach to art, whenever you hear an incredibly personal record that sums up virtually every aspect of his being, you know that it’s going to be a beguiling listen, if still complex. However, when the song is not just responding to his own emotions, but also attempting to sum up the nation’s reaction to a major tragedy, then it’s perhaps going to land as some of his most challenging and impenetrable work.
His 2003 double album, The Raven, arrived at a time when Reed was most preoccupied with creating avant-garde, ambient and spoken word-influenced works. Sitting towards the end of the behemoth record’s tracklist is ‘Fire Music’, a song that was written and recorded on September 13th, 2001, just two days after the World Trade Centre terror attacks that killed thousands of innocent civilians, and not only was the work inextricably linked to the tragic events due to how soon after it was made, but the recording was done in a studio only a few blocks away from the site of the attacks.
In a 2003 interview with Uncut, he revealed that while the piece was far from easy to make, he allowed his truest emotions to run wild in the studio. “Everything I experienced is in that piece of music,” he said of ‘Fire Music’ being a response to the events of September 11th. “I really and truly mean that I can’t sum it up in words, that’s what music is for. It’s a very compressed piece, played in real time. It’s not looped. It is the big brother of Metal Machine Music, the next step.”
Even though there are no words in this chaotic noise composition, the complete carnage and disorienting cacophony is meant to symbolise the rage, confusion and utter sadness that Reed was feeling. “What I like is, it doesn’t have a key and the rhythm is always shifting,” he said. “A very free form of music which I’ve been a fan of all the way back to Ornette Coleman and Albert Ayler.”
‘Fire Music’ is hardly his greatest achievement, but it showed that even in the latter stages of his career, he was still able to follow his nose and work on things that were ostensibly more challenging and thought-provoking than anything his contemporaries could dream of producing, and that his desire to create in this always triumphed over the temptation to fall in line and make something that is instantly gratifying. ‘Fire Music’ is just as terrifying as the inspiration behind the song, and that’s exactly the sort of thing Reed needed to get out of himself at that moment in time.
