How Lou Reed gave the sexual revolution a voice
Before the arrival of Lou Reed, sex and music had always been bedfellows, with rock ‘n’ roll pioneer Little Richard producing shock and awe via the kinky parameters of 1955’s ‘Tutti Frutti’ and providing a pathway for sensual sonic exploration. However, in the following decade and into the 1970s, Lou Reed became the loudest voice for the American sexual revolution. As the frontman of The Velvet Underground and a solo artist, he tore back the curtain on the rigid, God-fearing social mores. He helped popularise that, as a consenting, law-abiding adult, sexuality is natural.
A taboo-busting artist who discussed society’s sexual underbelly more forensically than had ever been done by a musician before, Reed’s work is often discussed as musically groundbreaking. From John Cale’s drones to Reed’s storied Ostrich guitar tuning, Velvet Underground churned out culturally earth-shattering material. As with anyone ahead of the curve, their work took a while to catch on, with the story of one of the most prominent acts of the day, Cher, walking out of a Velvet Underground show in which they played with their backs to the audience lasting long in the memory. “It depressed me,” she reportedly said. “It will replace nothing, except maybe suicide.”
Whether Cher knew it or not, The Velvet Underground’s music was the soundtrack of the new age. Not only did the music have a tangibly dark edge, just like the New York City it was written in, providing a much-needed counterbalance to the relatively light psychedelia that took hold in 1967, but thematically, it gave listeners something tangible to latch onto.
In one of Reed’s greatest strokes of genius – a combination of natural flair and artistic proclivity – he peeled back the curtain on what was happening behind many closed doors across the country. BDSM, drug abuse, prostitution and gender identities were all covered with poptastic flourishes. In contemporary times, these topics might feel like meat and drink for musicians and listeners alike, but when The Velvet Underground arrived with their debut record in 1967, they were not.
The ‘Summer of Love’ engulfed the counterculture in 1967, with prominent acts of the day, such as The Rolling Stones, touching on premarital sex with ‘Let’s Spend the Night Together’, and Pink Floyd addressing a clothing fetishist who enjoys wearing women’s clothes in ‘Arnold Layne’, but for all of the importance of exhibits such as these songs, they were largely flashes in the pan. Of course, the Stones frontman Mick Jagger’s androgyny was significant, but it always landed with a relatively light-hearted thud.
With Lou Reed and The Velvet Underground, the material was X-rated, and if Tipper Gore and the PMRC had been around at the time, you could have expected to have seen a big fat ‘Parental Guidance’ sticker slapped across the face of their records. Reed, especially, channelled the burgeoning sexual freedom of modern life and gave it a voice. The sexual revolution and The Velvet Underground were so inextricable that they took their name from the 1963 book of the same name by journalist Michael Leigh, a mass-market paperback about the secret sexual subculture of the era.
Leigh explored “aberrant” sexual behaviour between consenting adults – anything outside of simple intercourse conducted in privacy by heterosexual couples within his work. The book includes partner swapping, group sex, orgy parties, sadomasochism, and homosexual activities. Leigh also reports on how these practices are solicited, such as clubs and newspaper adverts, and follows the leads to speak to participants.
The journalist aimed to display that a shift in sexual attitudes was taking place in American society, which not only allowed a considerable portion of the population to take part in non-traditional sexual practices but also normalised them as healthy. This was monumental, and Lou Reed took this idea and ran off into the sunset.
From the dark droning ‘Venus in Furs’, which includes the starkly sexual themes of sadomasochism, bondage and submission from the book of the same name by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch to ‘Lady Godiva’s Operation’, a song about a transexual. ‘The Gift’, meanwhile, fuses sex and violence in a truly horrifying way, and one of Lou Reed’s finest lyrical moments, ‘Sister Ray’, addresses homosexuality, transvestism as well as drug use and violence; it’s not hard to see how close Reed’s work and the sexual revolution sit together.
Importantly, all the aforementioned tracks feature on the group’s first two albums from 1967 and 1968. Yet, all were groundbreaking thematically and would pave the way for the likes of David Bowie and more influential artists of the future to fully express themselves without fear of reproach.
After quitting the band in 1970, Reed would continue on this path, with his solo work still addressing the sexual revolution. His most famous effort, ‘Walk on the Wild Side’, taken from the glam landmark album Transformer, ironically produced by Bowie and Mick Ronson, might be the most important. The work offers a close peek at the lives of Andy Warhol’s transgressive ‘Superstars’. Still, later efforts such as ‘Street Hassle’ continued to show Reed’s deep link to the sexual revolution.
Although it is widely overlooked, Lou Reed played a significant part in other artists breaking down sexual taboos with their work and moving the discussion from the underground into the mainstream. The work is now noticeable across various elements of society, from the headlines of the redtops to lessons taught in schools. It’s interesting to consider culture without Reed’s efforts as – directly and via proxy – they were invaluable to the course it took.
