Why Martin Scorsese resonates with Lou Reed’s music: “He spoke the language of people”
Music plays a large part in storytelling on screen; the right song can elevate a scene’s emotional stakes or help craft the perfect atmosphere. It’s no surprise, then, that Martin Scorsese, one of the most acclaimed filmmakers of his generation, has created many iconic movie music moments within his work, like ‘By My Baby’ at the beginning of Mean Streets or his frequent use of The Rolling Stones songs.
The filmmaker navigated early adulthood during the 1960s, witnessing rock and roll’s transformation into something sleazy, exciting, political, and all-consuming. People began dedicating their lives to rock music, treating musicians like deities, and doing all they could to emulate their favourite rock stars. Scorsese’s memories of the ‘60s have undoubtedly never left him, and his love for everything from blues to rock and roll – and everything in between – has shaped who he is as a person.
In the documentary Feel Like Going Home, Scorsese once explained, “In the early ’60s, my preference was for Phil Spector, Motown, and the girl groups, like the Ronettes, the Marvelettes, and the Shirelles. Then came the British invasion. Like everyone else, I was floored by this music and struck by its strong blues influence.”
He has directed various music documentaries over the years, like The Last Waltz starring The Band, and various Bob Dylan movies like Rolling Thunder Revue. Scorsese has evidently been around long enough to experience some of the most exciting moments in music history, having the pleasure of seeing many icons live in the flesh. Scorsese has been lucky enough to befriend one particular artist he loved – Lou Reed – although he didn’t meet him until several years after his Velvet Underground days.
Scorsese really resonated with Reed’s lyrics about New York, writing in I’ll Be Your Mirror: “Lou’s lyrics have two lives: as they are sung and heard, and as they are read on the printed page. And I think that they could only have come from someone who grew up in the New York area and came of age in Manhattan, who moved and wrote and sang from the pulse of life in this city. They describe the city as it was, but they also incarnate it.”
The filmmaker has often used New York as a backdrop for his films, like Mean Streets and Taxi Driver – the city practically becoming a character itself – and Reed used it the same way in his songs. With a whole album called Coney Island Baby and tons of other references to the city within his work, Reed’s love for New York was similar to Scorsese’s.
“It’s essential New York speech, and it feels so close to what I was always trying to do in my own pictures, in the way the characters speak to each other and express themselves. You read or listen to the words and you see those people, hanging out or waiting or hustling on street corners or talking in tenement halls or going out on the boulevard,” he added.
Scorsese believes that Reed had the ability to paint portraits of people through his lyrics that were otherwise pushed to the sidelines. Indeed, you only have to listen to a song like ‘Walk on the Wild Side’ to hear Reed’s depictions of transgender women, inspired by the likes of Candy Darling and Holly Woodlawn, and hustlers, referencing Joe Dallesandro. These Warhol superstars weren’t accepted in the mainstream, but in certain New York bars, studios, and venues, they all found a place to call home.
“He actually spoke and sang in the voice of the lowest of the low, the dregs, the ‘least among us’ – the people looking to follow the first thing that gives them the right to be. He spoke the language of people with nothing but their own humanity, and he elevated them,” Scorsese wrote.
