Hear the comical moment Lou Reed reads porn ads
If you look up the word iconoclast in a dictionary for the feeble-minded, then the definition cited will merely be a picture of Lou Reed. Amid the age of liberation when rockers, writers and luminaries broke boundaries, Reed was the man who proclaimed that there were no boundaries to break, everything should be at arts’ disposal.
With that fortified downtown attitude firmly in place he sang, or rather snarled of sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll, creamed jeans, transvestites, the transubstantiation of a kid with a guitar into an underground idol, the crooked bourgeoisie and the even more crooked kids scurrying around beneath them. He was a purveyor of the demimonde of civility, and he found it absolutely thrilling.
Thus, of all the rockers who have ever darkened the doorstep of society, it is perhaps no surprise to hear Reed lend his timbre to sentences like, “insane penetration is a fucking baseball bat, no bullshit,” and “Mr J Watson of Akron writes, I increased the length of my penis by three inches in one week; girth by two inches. My wife is delighted and so am I with your invaluable product.”
The comedy comes from the fact that Reed brilliantly keeps a fantastic straight face. Even when he does crack up it seems strangely deadpan as he cackles, “That’s beyond, even for me”. It’s definitely one of his better latter-day performances, and all with a gravity-defying toothpick implausibly dangling from his lip. There are certainly some nettlesome shades cast throughout, but you have to take it with a pinch of salt when it’s all in amongst the absurdity of moms shoving whole refrigerators up their butts.
This wild clip is a DVD extra of the HBO documentary, Thinking XXX: Extended Cut. This strange feature saw Vanity Fair photographer, Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, turn his camera towards famed porn stars both in the nuddy and in prim and proper dress. The intent was to humanise these bedroom-based stars. The resultant photobook, XXX: 30 Porn-Star Portraits, also featured copy by the likes of John Malkovich, Gore Vidal, and, of course, Reed.
So, that’s how this insane piece of footage came into existence. He was given an assortment of obscene porn ads to read, and he read them in style. Both wild, hilarious and disturbing, this is not the sort of thing you’d want to listen to with headphones on public transport for fear that they’ll somehow slip out and you’ll broadcast an esteemed avant-garde musician babbling, “squirting c——-ts and cooking pancakes at the same time,” to a busload of innocent civilians. Enjoy responsibly.
