Fifty years in the past this month, Lou Reed close toly destroyed his personal profession with one double album. Metal Machine Music offered 100,000 copies during the three weeks of summer 1975 between its launch and its elimination from the market. Various of the numerous purchaseers who immediately returned it will have been anticipateing somefactor like Sally Can’t Dance, Reed’s solo album from the previous 12 months, whose slickly professionalduced songs went down easier than anyfactor he’d documented with the Velvet Belowfloor. What they heard once they put the brand new album on their turntables (or inserted the Quadrophonic 8‑observe tape into their decks) was “nothing, absolutely nothing however screaming feedagain noise documented at various frequencies, performed again towards various other noise layers, break up down the middle into two completely sepaprice channels of utterly inhuman shrieks and hisses.”
That description comes from voluble Creem rock critic and avowed enthusiast of decadence Lester Bangs, who additionally happened to be one among Metal Machine Music’s most fervent defenders. At one level he declared it “the niceest document ever made within the history of the human eardrum.” (“Number Two: Kiss Alive!”)
A lot of what we all know in regards to the intentions behind this baffling album come from Bangs’ writings, including those who purport to transcribe conversations with Reed himself, who’d been one of many critic’s learniest verbal sparring halfners. The inspiration, as Reed defined to Bangs, got here from listening to composers Iannis Xenakis and La Monte Younger, who dared to transcend the surearies of what most listeners would consider music in any respect. Reed additionally insisted that he’d deliberately inserted bits and items of Mozart, Beethoven, and other classical masters into his sonic maelstrom, although Bangs clearly didn’t purchase it.
“Metal Machine Music doesn’t appear so bizarre now, does it?” requested an interviewer on Evening Flight only a decade or so after the album’s launch. “No, it doesn’t, does it?” Reed says. “In gentle of Eno and all these things that got here out now, it’s not close toly as insane and loopy as they stated it was then.” Certainly, it sounds virtually of a chunk with an influential work of ambient music like Brian Eno’s Music for Airports, although that album was meant to calm its listeners somewhat than drive them from the room. Over the half-century since its launch, Metal Machine Music has accrued sufficient appreciation to be paid tributes just like the stay performances by German ensemble Zeitkratzer which have continued lengthy after Reed’s demise. The legacy of his “electronic instrumalestal composition,” as he stated after one such concert in 2007, additionally features a titlesake clause in documenting contracts stipulating that “the artist should flip in a document that sound just like the artist that the document company signed — not are available with Metal Machine Music.”
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Lou Reed Creates a Checklist of the ten Finest Data of All Time
Based mostly in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His tasks embody the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the e book The Statemuch less Metropolis: a Stroll by Twenty first-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social internetwork formerly referred to as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
