The musician who achieved what Martin Scorsese “was always trying to do”
Lyrics only tell half the story of a song, just as dialogue only tells a fraction of a film. Music, at its best, twists words and melodies in magical ways, one hand-washing the other in a marriage of meaning and mystery. In the Nick Cave classic ‘Mercy Seat’, the protagonist might plead their innocence, but the building fever pitch of the screeching melody implies an implosive end is neigh. The pervasive eeriness of Martin Scorsese‘s Shutter Island, likewise, makes it clear that more than a mere investigative thriller is unfurling—there is what is said and what is left silently signing.
This tightrope of sentiment and statement is what separates the wheat from the chaff in the world of art. A pretty melody with pretty lyrics might amount to a pretty song, but it’ll never be anything more than that if one doesn’t galvanise the meaning of the other, making the results more than the sum of its parts. The meaning that Martin Scorsese searches for in many of his movies is the heart of New York City.
In order to grasp the true soul of Manhattan, he not only fine-tunes its denizens into relatable characters or frames its streets in the right sort of light; he doesn’t even just faithfully collate the right soundtrack, fashions or frissons to furnish the scenes and their sentiments, he looks to seize upon the secret poetic meter of the city. While some directors might idly choose to set a movie in New York – perhaps with a few fancy backdrops in mind – Scorsese looks towards the mantra that if the movie could happen anywhere, it matters not.
You don’t have to live in New York City to know that The King of Comedy nails Manhattan’s underbelly of wayward ambition. You don’t have to have set foot in Queen’s to get a perfect feel for the place from Mean Streets. You might never have left Hydra, Hartlepool or the Outer Hebrides to be able to relate to the city in New York Stories. Other than focusing on depth, how does Scorsese achieve this? Well, he looks to other artists from the city who have done the same—and he sees Lou Reed as the leading light.
“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,” he wrote for the Guardian. “They describe the city as it was, but they also incarnate it. You feel it in the rhythms.”
“He actually spoke and sang in the voice of the lowest of the low, the dregs, the ‘least among us’.”
Martin Scorsese on Lou Reed
To prove that point, he picks out a classic, perhaps Reed’s greatest song and certainly his most overlooked: “The driving rhythm of ‘Street Hassle’ set by the string section.” Other than the seedy and stern tale at the heart of the anthemic song, there is also a swooning romanticism. Only New York could find orchestral poetry in the overdose of a young girl at a house party. In most cities, that’s a grossly unattractive page-five story in a cheap, salacious tabloid; in the boho ‘Street Hassle’, it is street-Shakespeare.
As Scorsese continues, “You feel it in Lou’s voice, and you feel it in those words – really, they’re all one and the same. 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.”
His music is as cinematic as it gets—just look at Berlin (or rather listen to Berlin, though it might feel like you’re watching it), and that’s not even set in his most familiar realm. Reed’s ability to create fully-formed, almost voyeuristic vignettes that are nevertheless full of affected drama, is something that has been a huge inspiration to Scorsese and a great many others.
He nearly even starred as Pontius Pilate in Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ before David Bowie snapped up the role and the filmmaker came close to turning ‘Dirty Boulevard’ into a movie. None of this might have happened, it scarcely matters given how naturally the duo influenced each other anyway.
As Scorsese mused, “He was a great singer, a great writer, a great New York artist… a great artist, period. 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.”
Humbly concluding, “He spoke the language of people with nothing but their own humanity, and he elevated them. His words and his music – sometimes as close to everyday life as breathing – inspired many, many people over the years. I’m one of them.”
