The strange lessons Lou Reed can tell us about modern conspiratorial society
Society is like an amoeba, it shifts from its margins rather than the centre. It is from this similar frontier-led expansion that we also get the phrase ‘avant-garde’. This is the term that will most commonly crop up in any dispatches written about the work of Lou Reed. While the philosophising that follows might be pure theory, it would seem that very few artists of the era were quite as attuned to the impact of their work on the world at large as the acerbic New York punk at the heart of The Velvet Underground.
In a musical sense, it is relatively hard to define what people mean by ‘avant-garde’. In the world of song, the label is about as clearly defined as a cloud in Manchester. If a violin boldly ventures into a realm where violins don’t usually belong, then it’s often deemed avant-garde; if the musicians look like secondary school art teachers, then it’s usually avant-garde; if it is horrible and full of dissonant nonsense, then it is usually avant-garde. In short, we’re dealing with a nebulous phrase.
Alas, when you get to its origins, it becomes much clearer. In a military sense, the Vanguard was the leading part of an advancing group of soldiers. However, you wouldn’t want to just send the bulk of your army blindly into the unknown. So, you would send out a few foolhardy scouts in the dead of night to spy out new territories and report on enemy positions. These brave souls advancing where nobody had gone before were known as the Avantgarde.
This French term for a reconnaissance group who gambled into the as yet undetermined might fit the bill for defining the expression in a cultural sense as it links to artists breaking the norms and pushing boundaries as a result. But in actual fact, the usage has an even more direct tie than that. Given the dangers of being a member of the avant-garde, only the soldiers most committed to social reform would volunteer, and often these fellows had a bold, eccentric edge too.
Thus, it only became natural that the trailblazers of social change on the battlefield would soon become linked to art. Often avant-garde soldiers would return to civility and set up clubs—these clubs had social change at their heart, and the art and entertainment on display would follow suit. As the phrase moved away from the art of war and more towards art itself, the idea of progressive, boundary-pushing, non-conformity stood out.
This is why bands like The Velvet Underground are truly befitting of the label. They veered well to the left of norm, and despite only a small cult of followers, soon the vanguard of music followed suit, and the boundaries shifted once more. As David Bowie once said: “Bands like the Beatles (who) were so extremely large in terms of what they sold and the influence they had” clearly had an impact back then but, actually, “very little of their influence is actually felt now.”
Adding: “It was the fringe, strange bands that nobody ever bought, like the Velvet Underground, that actually have created modern music. And you kind of think, where’s ‘Yesterday’ in all this? Where’s its influence on modern music?”. This was an avant-garde advancement in the true military sense. Whether or not Lou Reed knew of this history is unknown – he was a literary soul, so it’s quite possible – but he certainly operated in a fashion fitting of the phrase.
You see, much like the social spaces frequented by the old soldiers, Reed and his cronies had a clubhouse too. He looked to shoulder under the existing banner of Andy Warhol’s ‘Factory’ where he knew a few like-minded folks might get on board with his desire to pull society towards a progressive new future. Therein Reed looked to shock while remaining close enough to the norm to not be entirely unfamiliar.
However, he also realised that sounding a bit different wasn’t quite enough; he had to attack what he perceived as the musical centre too to exacerbate that mark of difference and draw lines. So, he lambasted the sacred Beatles. While many would’ve said, ‘Oh, but The Beatles have millions of fans all over the world and you have a cult following of a few handfuls in a couple of inclined regions’, he would’ve boldly said, ‘So, what? I’m right’.
This stance made him happy to stand aside from any sort of scene besides the Factory. In fact, in music, he was very much an individualist, quipping sore comments about many of his peers and actively delighted to forego the ways of Beatlemania. In some ways, this was prescient. Perhaps he saw the end of the 1960s peace and love collectivism approaching, and as the society around him grew ragged, his songwriting focused on disenfranchised individuals on the edges of society—the Eleanor Rigbys, but rather than old women they’d be deadbeats and transvestites.
And once he managed to attract more eyes, he ventured deeper down the rabbit hole of avant-garde music, teasing fans along with him. In the new age alternative movement, this denotes crank magnetism as people suddenly tumble from being just outside the norm in one aspect – in Reed’s case, his beat poetry and approach to rock arrangements – to opening the door to all sorts of alternative thinking.
With this, he set up an exciting off-shoot of pop culture that the centre slowly moved towards, steadily assimilating The Velvet Underground as one of the most essential bands of the era and rightly revering Lou Reed as a great despite the fact that none of his band’s records even broke the top 100 in the US.
Of course, in Reed’s case, this was always done with a fresh artistic view in mind. The results of his endeavours were magnificent, and while he might have been prickly, he has left a huge, beneficial gift for all of us. Reed was looking at the demimonde reporting back to people, talking to them. However, much of what he did has now been co-opted by an increasingly conspiratorial avant-garde pulling the core of society out of shape; a lot of people following a similar narrative are reporting apropos to nothing of substance and simply talking at people. While the attentive would’ve been drawing parallels between the narrative of Lou Reed’s work and modern times, he inadvertently illuminates darkness beyond the similarities.
Now, more than ever, we are seeing society stretched from the outskirts, sully being thrown towards the traditional media at the centre. With prideful individualism overruling collective empathy, this places society in a dangerous place—that’s one thing in art where danger is invigorating. It is harmless enough for The Beatles to be labelled scapegoats. Still, it carries all sorts of underlying issues in the real world, where people are pushing towards the centre for far less savoury reasons, and the scapegoats are not bands but rather red herrings of a far more consequential nature.
