Lou Reed
Metal Machine Music

I wanted to avoid writing reviews about albums that have already been reviewed.

Chapter 1: How musical is man, John Blacking. A text that all of us art scholars have read to shatter the very word art, shifting the focus to the empirical process of man-society-music. Music is "humanly organized sound," and in this phrase, which sounds like a game-changer, a number of situations especially in the 20th century fall under it, having changed - quite significantly - the relationship between man and music: from intonarumori to the proletarian factories of Luigi Nono, from Cage's New York traffic to the sound of a hairdryer, from romantic discourse to a new wave of situations that have overwhelmed and revolutionized musical syntax.

Chapter 2: Musical practices, over the centuries, have always created Manichean dualisms: monophony against polyphony, sacred against secular, highbrow music against utility music, consonance against dissonance, word against music, and music against word. And also sound against noise.

Chapter 3: Lou Reed was the bluesman, the "popular", the jeans and t-shirt of a band that also included some members from the Theater of Eternal Music of La Monte Young: stories of drones, ragas, incredibly cool avant-garde. Metal Machine Music is dedicated to La Monte Young because, in the end, this album also has an aesthetic meaning: it is a drone of feedback that has revolutionized the new course of music, definitively delivering to rock some executive practices that, until then, were relegated to an avant-garde that was starting to spin around on itself, except for a few exceptions (Church of Antrax by Cale and Riley, for example, and the entire extraordinary German atmosphere summed up in the term krautrock).

Chapter 4: When talking about Metal Machine Music, one ends up in the limbo of: fraud record or stroke of genius? Are you showing off if you say you like it? Drugs? Lester Bangs' review? The post-Sally can't dance f*** you? Well. It almost seems like the story of Pink Floyd recording The Wall after telling their fans off for always asking them to play Money. I find it hard to believe Lou Reed giving the middle finger. And lastly: "But did you really listen to it all?"

Well. I listened to it all. What does "all" mean, I don't know. I correct: I listened to it, just as I could sit for three exhausting hours with a hairdryer on and enjoy that sublime drone. It will seem strange to most, but this speech about making it to the end, I make it when talking about the Radetzky March or the "La Campanella" performed on the piano by some virtuoso Belarusian typist. This little tune of the struggle to reach the end reminds me of Frescobaldi's Toccata, where the struggle, in this case, was about the difficulty of performing the work. If Lou Reed created a project where the virtuoso who effortlessly reaches the end is the listener and not the performer, what could I reiterate? What could I reproach? Bringing to CBGB or a punk concert some practices that risked being stranded in the avant-garde?

Final chapter: When Lou Reed passed away, amid a "Sunday Morning," a "Perfect Day," and a "Walk on the Wild Side," the Suicide decided to pay tribute to Lou by sharing "Metal Machine Music." So, ask the Suicide, the Talking Heads, the Sonic Youth, the Crass, if this is a sham album that only makes noise.