The tainted legacy Lou Reed wanted to leave behind him
When people think of Lou Reed, they likely think of one of the greatest lyricists to ever live, and that’s something he enjoyed cementing himself as.
Whether he was working with The Velvet Underground or as a solo artist, when Reed could sit there and ponder over lyrics, he was in his happy place. Getting to essentially come up with poetry for a living was one of the high points of his career, and he admitted on different occasions that when he looked back on everything, the thing he was most excited about was some of the lyrics he came up with.
“[The] things I’m proudest of from a career point of view would be writing,” he said, “When I can write a really good line, or at least I think it’s a good line, I get enormous pleasure from that”.
And he certainly did come up with some great lyrics throughout his career. He was always happy to draw from very real emotions when putting songs together, and in doing so, he wrote tracks that tugged on heartstrings far and wide. Of course, when you’re getting attention as a great musician, a lot of that attention you’re going to agree with; meanwhile, there are other moments that you would rather not be attached to.
Perhaps one of the greatest examples of this is the song ‘Heroin’. This was a very real song that Reed was able to write by documenting his own experiences with the drug and with addiction. He managed to reach into the darkness that surrounds such a topic and managed to pull that song out. It was supposed to be real and honest, and for a lot of people it was, but then there were others who used the song for reasons that Reed didn’t agree with.
“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,” he said. “But when I saw how people were responding to them, it was disturbing. People would come up and say, ‘I shot up to ‘Heroin’, things like that. 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.”
Being a great musician comes with a number of labels that said musicians unfortunately don’t want. Once a song is out there, it’s out there, and people are free to misinterpret the meaning of it all they like, no matter how much doing so might be against what your original intention was. There are plenty of legacies Lou Reed was keen to leave behind him: the ideas surrounding the power of his lyrics were one of them, while another was the notion that he had contributed singlehandedly to changing rock music.
While Reed was happy to admit that he could write good songs every now and then, he didn’t like the idea that he was getting all of the credit for influencing the genre at large. He insisted that while he was good at what he did, any changes in culture and the broader musical landscape were the result of multiple people with whom he worked, not just himself.
“I don’t know that I’ve made an individual contribution,” he said, “I was part of a group that, along with Warhol, may have given a little nudge to multimedia, perhaps, and maybe the subject matter that could be written about in rock.”
