The funniest song Lou Reed ever heard: “Made me fall down laughing”
The power of lyrics can never be understated. Artists like Lou Reed and Bob Dylan have damn near changed the world with their use of words.
The two are incredibly different songwriters, as Lou Reed was a realist in how he approached lyrics, meanwhile, Dylan used imagery a lot when putting together songs. There is no right or wrong way to put together a track, both of these styles can work, and they have cemented the two songwriters as some of the greatest to ever do it.
Lou Reed never wanted to paper over the cracks. His words were on the nose, surface-level, and acted as a reflection of the world in which they were written. He would draw from personal experiences in a bid to create an image that was so realistic it looked like a photograph. Tracks like ‘Heroin’ still resonate on an incredibly deep level because of how effective Reed is at embracing the darkness surrounding topics like drugs.
“I meant those songs to sort of exorcise the darkness, or the self-destructive element in me, and hoped other people would take them the same way,” said Reed. “But when I saw how people were responding to them, it was disturbing. Because, like, people would come up and say, ‘I shot up to ‘Heroin’, things like that.”
He continued, “For a while, I was even thinking that some of my songs might have contributed formatively to the consciousness of all these addictions and things going down with the kids today. But I don’t think that anymore; it’s really too awful a thing to consider.”
Bob Dylan had a different approach to lyrics, as while he also wanted to use his songs to reflect the world around him, he laced them with metaphor, to the extent that there are a lot of Bob Dylan fans who have been left somewhat confused by his songs. They have spent elongated periods of time pondering over his words in a bid to work out what he is actually trying to say.
Lou Reed was a big fan of Bob Dylan’s, but he was aware of how different their approach to lyrics were. “It was a different area, completely different area,” he said when discussing the folk icon. “You know, more surreal images and metaphors and similes and that kind of voice. More story-oriented scenes, little vignettes, tryna make little movies.”
One of his songs, which people have struggled to fully understand, is ‘Foot of Pride’, which has themes of religion and hypocrisy running throughout, but is also tricky to attach a full narrative to. Dylan plays around with narrators on this track, as the perspective from which he writes is constantly changing, and he fills the song with religious imagery. It’s incredibly poetic but equally confusing. A lot of fans consider this song to be Dylan’s scathing assessment of a number of religious organisations that abuse their power for selfish needs, but the songwriter hasn’t confirmed or denied whether this is the case.
Lou Reed, on the other hand, found the song incredibly funny, so much so that he performed a live version at Dylan’s 30th anniversary show. When discussing why he opted to play that song over all of Dylan’s catalogue, he said it was due to the humour of it. “I did that because I thought it was one of the funniest songs ever written,” he said.
Concluding, “I was listening to it almost every day because it made me fall down laughing. Did he make it to the top? Well, yeah, but then he dropped.”
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