Lou Reed – ‘Berlin’
Of all the odious oddities in pop culture, Lou Reed is perhaps the oddest. The end of his many multitudes is listless; he was a beloved bastard, a revered intellectual who struggled with long paragraphs, a progenitor whose prime pioneering ways shifted a mere 30,000 records and an ardent journo-basher loved by every single one of them. His music follows suit, abiding by its own laws, and Berlin is no different.
Firstly, you start a rock ‘n’ roll record with a blitzkrieg of drums or the gathering storm of a few sweet breezy half notes — you do not start with a slurring German in a bar from hell. The title track is an extraordinary opening in every sense. It is 43 seconds into the record when the ambling racket of drunken field recordings acquiesce to a surprisingly beautiful piano refrain and the soft almost-effeminate croon of Reed describing a girl he saw by the Wall.
Suddenly, the dirty, clamouring outside world of misanthropissheads slurring chants into the night air dissipates as though you have locked out the gaudy chaos of reality in a darkened cinema room. Now, you slide down comfortably into a dogeared red velvet chair ala Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver, and the movie of Reed’s dangerous imagination begins to unspool with dark, literary Last Exit to Brooklyn abroad energy.
Reed himself was born amid the gaudy chaos of North America’s very own expanded Berlin: New York City. He, too, would shut out the world and slink into the art around him for a snippet of salvation from the endless panic attacks he suffered through. Albeit Reed was dyslexic, books were an appealing escape for him. As a teen in the late 1950s, this invariably meant Jack Kerouac and the beat literature craze.
It is Kerouac, in fact, who illuminates a very similar pastiche to Reed’s opening ‘Berlin’ stanza when the novelist wrote: “A pain stabbed my heart, as it did every time I saw a girl I love who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world.” On both counts, we have, of course, a self-absorbed fantasy. Like On The Road, Reed’s Berlin is ostensibly about a young man getting out into the doomed world and the sights he sees, but ultimately it is far more insular than that. This insular notion is highlighted by the fact that on track four, we finally hear from another character, Caroline, and she, too, is thinking of herself.
Before we reach that point, rock ‘n’ roll finally arrives in an album of mood swings. In a jarring change of pace, the album suffers its first switch-up, and that blitzkrieg of drums that usually opens proceedings can suddenly be heard. Reed’s (or rather our twisted protagonist Jim’s) pipe dream of meeting an innocent beauty by the Wall is smashed to smithereens as she waltzes into a bar and delves into a debauched routine as he despairingly watches on. This exhibitionist show is foretold with brooding organ sounds that precede the catastrophe, as though the protagonist knew he was indulging in a fantasy all along.
The grimness of reality shows that fairytales are facile indulgences for a wayward adult, as Reed-the-songwriter launches into this heady world along with his protagonist like a demimonde cannonball. With ‘How Do You Think It Feels’, things get a little bit messy. Energy and atmosphere are at the fore as big band music meets the underground. Everything slides and wavers, including Reed’s grip on the narrative in a postmodern flourish. Jim/Reed has been up for five days in a frenzy of indulgent self-pity and substance abuse—the music matches that crooked disposition.
By track eight, ‘The Kids’, this sorry slide of sodomy and sin is regathered and reconciled from afar. The new chapter of the rock opera is written with the most distance. We see the introduction of a fresh voice: the Waterboy. Although as open-ended as a Netflix series finale that is clearly holding out for a sequel, it would seem that the Waterboy watches on from the sidelines like a member of society beyond the spiritual Skid Row, where our former protagonists have now slunk.
As he observes this world, he is sad to see despairing mothers have their children taken away, but his heart is full of his own problems, and he is too tired to pass firm judgement. All out of empathy, he figures it is probably for the best anyway because that’s the easiest thing to think, mirroring society’s uncaring nature at large. This is a hard thing to convey even in a near-eight minute epic, so Reed’s music turns towards a sort of apathetic proto-punk, ironic, waltzy raggedness that sounds something like polka grunge. It creates the perfect soundscape for the decrepit story, barely abating to offer melody beyond the bassline. And the fact that producer Bob Ezrin’s kids scream in a harrowing fashion proves how unflinching Reed could be in this regard.
The final chapter is the darkest of dark inevitabilities, only spared from being forgone by the usual hope that lingers in fiction. The final twist, if there is one, is not the fateful suicide but the postmodernist nature with which the protagonist deals with it; neither haunted nor despondent, just a little bit dazzled and dazed—once more reflected by the off-beat musicology.
‘Sad Song’ then offers a touch of angular closure, but as the title suggests, it isn’t all that cathartic. This embodies both the beauty of Berlin and the very slight asterisk that applies to the album. It should, by rights, be pored over by screenwriters, novelists and anyone hoping to create anything with a hint of an edge. It is a masterpiece with character-building that many million-word novels and three-hour films have failed to match.
But it should also perhaps be noted that a touch of sunshine helps to even highlight the black-and-white despair that Berlin offers. It is supreme high-art, but it doesn’t prove to be spiritually transcendent owing to its one-track outlook. As such, it may be a high watermark in the history of modern songwriting from an objective point of view, but ultimately, if you could only listen to either Berlin or Loaded for the rest of your life, more people would choose the latter.
