The 1967 song David Bowie called the future of music: “It was serious and dangerous”
Even those with a passing understanding of The Starman, David Bowie would know that what he might have lacked in musical technicality, he made up for in swathes of cool. But perhaps his most underrated skill was understanding that the crashing waves of cultural tides begin as small ripples in somebody else’s mind.
The music of tomorrow isn’t written by the trends in music. No matter how much something might seem en vogue in the first few months of any given year, it usually takes someone completely outside the norm to turn the entire industry on its head and pave the way for a new sound that leaves fans dumbstruck. Even though Bowie is one of the few artists who could claim to have changed the course of rock history a few times throughout his career, he knew that he had heard the future the minute he listened to The Velvet Underground and Nico.
The band behind the cataclysmic record are perhaps one of the most underrated groups of all time. Now, you might be muttering to yourself about how beloved the Velvet Underground are, and you’d be right to assert that they get a bouquet of flowers every now and then. But the gardens of petunias they deserve would outweigh the heft of most small armies.
Born on the back sof the mercruial Lou Reed and the steadfast sound of John Cale, the group, propelled by the artistic vision of Andy Warhol, would create a run of records that, arguably, changed the world of music as we know it today. They were the pebble in the musical pond that caused the tsunami of sound we hear today. Even more impressively, they were miles ahead of most people.
Whereas Bowie was still strumming away writing hippy-adjacent folk tunes in 1966, Lou Reed was up to something entirely different half a world away. Bowie had made songs that fit into the popular zeitgeist of the ‘Summer of Love’, but Reed was living in an art-rock world in the New York underground, and the last thing he wanted to do was make the new trendy single.
When you listen to a song like ‘I’m Waiting for the Man’, there is no way that anyone is going to play it on the radio. Sure, the tune was catchy enough and had a decent driving rhythm, but singing a song that’s explicitly about getting some product from your dealer on a random street in Manhattan wasn’t going to go over well with the Beatles fans of the world.
Once people picked up the album, they were greeted with even more weirdness on the back half. Even though songs like ‘Sunday Morning’ and ‘Femme Fatale’ were absolutely gorgeous, hearing a track like ‘Venus in Furs’ or the massive drug trip on ‘Heroin’ was enough to get as many listeners scared as there were those getting enthralled.
Bowie hadn’t quite dialled in what he wanted, but as soon as he heard the Velvets play, he knew he had found what he wanted, saying, “My friend gave it to me and he said, ‘This is crap. You like weird stuff, so maybe you’ll enjoy it.’ I played it, and it was like, ‘Ah, this is the future of music!’ I was in awe. It was serious and dangerous, and I loved it. And I literally went into a band rehearsal the next day, put the album down and said, ‘We’re going to learn this song. It is unlike anything I’ve ever heard.’ I must have been the first person in the world to cover a Velvet Underground song.”
Although Reed didn’t get to enjoy his time with his group for very long, Bowie would continue the tradition of pushing the envelope with rock and roll. There were still the classic tropes left over from Reed’s old outfit, but projects like Station to Station or “Heroes” borrowed from Reed’s model in concept rather than sound, as ‘The Starman’ tried dismantling what the genre was supposed to be in the first place.
While Reed eventually got a bit of a glam makeover from Bowie when working on albums like Transformer, it was never at the expense of him trying to sound trendy. For both Bowie and Reed, music was about artistic freedom rather than writing for a market and starting with ‘I’m Waiting for the Man,’ the dawn of art rock’s golden age was officially underway.
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