Watch Julian Casablancas cover Lou Reed’s ‘Walk on the Wild Side’
Art isn’t necessarily meant to be perfect, nevertheless, few works can claim to be as faultless as Lou Reed’s counterculture anthem ‘Walk On The Wild Side’. It is a song that you’ve likely heard a thousand times over, but invariable a moment springs out of the blue and it’s like you’re hearing it for the first time once more and the masterpiece dawns all over again—that is one of the finest feelings that music has to offer up. Covers can gladly conjure them too.
In this counterculture anthem, Reed uses James Dean as a way of embodying the adventurous side of pursuing individualism and braving the fringes of acceptability that you might be cast out to as a result. By the same token, Reed also explores the redaction of icons becoming archetypes. “Jackie is just speeding away, Thought she was James Dean for a day, Then I guess she had to crash Valium would have helped that bash,” is a perfect way of pointing at figures of culture forming costumes that people simply slip on and off.
The whole thing ties together the thread of culture and helped to establish Reed as a voice of bristling depth. His legacy on this front was profound. Case in point is the following classic quote from Brian Eno: “I was talking to Lou Reed the other day, and he said that the first Velvet Underground record sold only 30,000 copies in its first five years. Yet, that was an enormously important record for so many people. I think everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band! So I console myself in thinking that some things generate their rewards in second-hand ways.”
Casablancas also ratified this claim in an interview with Rolling Stone, when he remarked: “The Velvet Underground were way ahead of their time. And their music was weird. But it also made so much sense to me. I couldn’t believe this wasn’t the most popular music ever made. In the beginning, the Strokes definitely drew from the vibe of the Velvets.”
In fact, Julian Casablancas touted much of the success he has had in his music career as being down to The Velvet’s winning out over The Beatles for his attention. “I have that maybe advantage that I didn’t like or listen to the Beatles,” he said in a 2018 interview with Virtue. “I feel like that’s almost like the branch of, like, 98% of stuff you hear. But then there’s the Velvet Underground. I know Lou Reed hated the Beatles.”
With that in mind, in 2018 he set out to honour his hero with a sumptuous cover of Reed’s classic track. You can check it out below.
