Lou Reed: A True Rock’N’Roll Original

“I believe in the power of punk.” So said Lou Reed in September 2013, just a month before he passed away. Reed used this phrase throughout his long career. It was a statement that he made often and one that was a key part of rock music. Lou’s music continues captivate and fascinate audiences all over the globe, even after his death.

Reed’s version of punk began with the Velvet Underground, the band he formed with John Cale, who said of Reed’s death. “The world has lost a fine songwriter and poet … I’ve lost my school-yard buddy.” While the Velvet Underground achieved only modest success in the 1960s, when their albums were released, it was as a band that influenced so much that followed. As Brian Eno They were referring to their 1967 debut. Nico and The Velvet Underground “Everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band.” Others have called it “the single most influential album in rock history.”

Lou Reed’s best songs can be heard on Apple Music Spotify.

Idiosyncratic solo career

Lou Reed, who had lost the band, began his solo career in the early 1970s. He was friends with David Bowie and released albums, including “Lou Reed.” Transformer Berlin. Reed’s success, and his importance, lay not in sales but in the influence he had and the thought processes he brought to bear on all things rock. He was not one of those people who sat in a comfortable sycophantic relationship to the media, but he was a man who was open to confrontation on an industrial level. Rarely, if at all, was a journalist able to interview Reed without being hurt. But almost every journalist came away with an understanding of why rock music is such an important art form and undoubtedly the best in the world.

Principal architect of punk

The artistic melding of classically trained John Cale with Reed, who famously said that “if you played three chords, you are playing jazz,” gives us insight as to what helped to make him one of the principal architects of punk. His complex personality and often complicated music would have prevented punk from happening without him. His ability to understand everything, from doo-wop and thrash metal, before it was even called that, was essential to punk’s success. It allowed music to move from the safety of charts to the unknown, new, and challenging.

While some of Reed’s songs seemed light, whimsical almost, they almost never were. Reed’s songs were a journey on the dark side that covered subjects that have been ignored by almost everyone. Reed was not the first to use imagery in rock music. But he elevated it to a new level.

His influence on Bowie Roxy Music Reed helped push music into art, to toss out the rules and create what we call glamrock, again.

The man who believed in punk’s power left another legacy. post-punk Movement, the dark side gothThis helped New York, even if not directly, to become the hippest city on the planet in the late 1970s.

While Reed lived comfortably in New York, he practiced Taiji with Bowie’s long-time producer Tony Visconti for many years. “We heard the news in our Taiji class this afternoon. We are devastated,” said Visconti. Reed’s albums never sold in the same numbers as those of his contemporaries. But that didn’t seem to matter. It’s possible that he considered it a positive thing.

Lou Reed is one such musical phenomenon that seems to have come out of nowhere. Hendrix was a great example of someone who has things to say and forces people to listen. They make people think differently and change the way they do things. We’ve seen few people that even vaguely come close to Lou Reed in the last thirty years. Arguably we’ll see fewer still in the next few decades. We have become accustomed to conformity and are now safer than safe.

Original release as a CD-box set The Velvet Underground’s The Complete Matrix Tapes made its vinyl debut as a limited edition, eight-LP, 43-track box set that can be bought here.

Check out this site for the most recent music news and exclusive features uDiscover Music.

Universal Music Group (UMG), operates uDiscover Music. UMG has some artists mentioned in uDiscover Music.