Lou Reed
Berlin

THE REVIEW

Pure Central European decadence.

Strange parameters, already compared to the irreverently displayed glamour in the previous, unforgettable Transformer: Lou seems to say farewell to the previous album in the spirit of Kurt Weill, or perhaps Marlene Dietrich ("Goodnight ladies" - "...it's time to say goodbye...") like a Kubrick who forewarns the viewer of starting a different journey (the costume finale of A Clockwork Orange anticipates the themes of Barry Lyndon). Berlin enjoys a dual reputation: being universally regarded as one of rock's absolute cornerstones, and at the same time having the most terrifying impact that music could carry. Reed is certainly no stranger to this type of fierce and iconoclastic reality - think of the lyrics of "Heroin" for example - but here he daringly surpasses himself. The operation doesn't evoke enthusiasm in everyone; in fact, it outrages the trendiest specialized magazines for the album's "vulgarity," or perhaps the baroqueness of certain tracks or (even) its ideological ambiguity (in a raving skinhead manual from a few decades ago, it ranked first, along with Bowie's "Heroes," as an authentic prototype of the defense of the Aryan race). But these discussions have become irrelevant now: I care to express an opinion on an album that is certainly not pleasant and relaxed; in fact, I confess that each time I listen to it, the temptation to end the melodramatic - or heartbreaking, depending on one's taste - atmosphere is very strong. An unattainable album that forces the listener to immerse into the coils of a gloomy atmosphere, in the narrative the author provides: a sort of psychodrama involving a dissolute woman and the marital crisis with her husband (it seems the mental health of the album's producer, who had gone through a similar story, was shaken), the subsequent removal of the children, and the allegory of the woman's suicide.

A sort of Douglas Sirk movie if it were a film. Or an artistic feuilleton if it were a novel. Instead, it is a music album, where Reed confirms all his love for Weill, but also Broadway (two opposite worlds...but only to a point), for German melodrama and French theater. Listen to "Berlin": a piano that anticipates the ideal drama (?), a corrosion between tradition and pure desecration, almost like Liberace playing Tchaikovsky. Is it pure kitsch? Let it be: the sublime "Lady Day" could be read by everyone as a tribute to another unfortunate woman, Billie Holiday. And "Caroline Says" then? Divided into two parts, pre/post drama, something that expresses the fickle ritual of a party sunk into pure pain exile. But the imminent becomes something unsustainable, because such is the uninterrupted crying of children claiming their mother (see: the kids): "they took the children away because they said she wasn't a good mother": it's a nightmare that can lead to infantile psychic torments even if not experienced. It's a sign of an immense emotional bond, of a cynical feeling (that of the husband) that disregards the reaction the children may have... In the early seventies, Reed dared to express all this to the public, the fans: the reinvigorated image of the maternal womb, the expiation of the male forced to comment in monologue on his human and emotional defeat ("Sad Song"). Berlin is a record that wounds, shocks, destroys. It's the last frontier of a rock that dares the undareable, appropriating an artistic and "literary" language as adult as ever, without the need for ennobling itself with fierce and masturbatory classical sessions à la Keith Emerson. It probably remains the connecting link, the ideal crossroads, between punk's nihilism and "Pure" tradition. A family portrait in hell.