The true meaning behind The Velvet Underground song ‘Sweet Jane’
While the band only released four albums with any of the original members still intact, and the less said about the ill-fated fifth album the better, there are still far too many songs to choose from to definitively say what the best track The Velvet Underground ever released was.
Many might look towards something from The Velvet Underground & Nico, given how influential the album has proven to be in the near 60-years since its release, and while the following two albums have plenty of highlights between them, their fourth record, Loaded, has a handful of their finest moments.
From ‘Rock & Roll’ to ‘I Found A Reason’ to ‘Oh! Sweet Nuthin’, there is a bounty of golden tracks on the last record to feature Lou Reed, Sterling Morrison and Maureen Tucker, but perhaps one sits above the rest.
‘Sweet Jane’ is not only one of the finest songs of the band’s catalogue, but also one of the most mysterious. While the band were sometimes keen to obscure the true meaning of songs and made them ambiguous, they courted plenty of controversy when they were at their most explicit, with ‘Heroin’ being a frank discussion of drug use, and ‘Sister Ray’ being a debauched jam session that ventures deep into a world of depravity.
Unlike these examples, the true meaning of ‘Sweet Jane’ is still something that is debated by fans of the band, yet still manages to have the same impact as the more lyrically transgressive moments in their discography. That being said, there are plenty of theories that have circulated that would suggest that despite being a lot more ‘acceptable’ in terms of its content, Reed was still trying to shoehorn in clandestine references to taboo subject matters.
Throughout the song, we’re introduced to three different characters; the titular ‘Jane’, her companion, ‘Jack’, and Reed’s unnamed narrator who is “in a rock ‘n’ roll band”. This automatically makes it clear that we’re listening to a song sung from one person’s perspective as he views another couple from the outside, but when that person’s perspective continually shifts, it then becomes hard to decipher what the true meaning is.
It’s often suggested that one angle is looking at shifting attitudes within society, with the first instance of this being that the traditional gender roles of Jane and Jack have been reversed, with Jack wearing the feminine corset and Jane wearing a more masculine vest as their chosen attire. Reed also mentions the idea of “different times” in the following lines, suggesting that some sort of societal shift has taken place, but then in the second verse, we’re told that the duo have traditional gender-based jobs, with Jack having the power as a banker, and Jane being his junior as a clerk.
These shifts in time appear to be in reverse, but it’s possible that Reed is warning the listener that all the work done to create gender equality could be undone if the world begins to follow conservative values. On the other hand, there’s still the idea that ‘Sweet Jane’ could be, yet again, a reference to drug use, with Jane often being used as a euphemistic term for marijuana, and it wouldn’t be out of place for Reed to address such topics in his music considering his prior track record.
Reed never let on the real meaning of the song, and since there are multiple different recorded versions of the song, it’s entirely possible that his idea of what the song was about shifted multiple times during the process of making it, and was only ever intended to keep the audience guessing. Regardless of the subject matter, it remains one of the most captivating songs that The Velvet Underground ever released, and a fine example of how Reed managed to evolve his lyrical style to become more cryptic over the years.
