One of the most important musical icons of the past half-century has died. Yesterday, Lou Reed passed away due to complications from liver disease. He was 71.
One of the most important musical icons of the past half-century has died. Yesterday, Lou Reed passed away due to complications from liver disease. He was 71. Earlier this year, he’d had a liver transplant, and been forced to cancel numerous performances and engagements as a result. However, the extent of his ill health was really not known until his sudden passing over the weekend.
Reed’s influence on music is nearly incalculable. As the founder of The Velvet Underground, a noisy, art-influenced experimental rock band that released their first album in 1967, Reed collaborated with famed pop artist Andy Warhol to bring the group to national attention. However, their importance ultimately reached far beyond their connection with Warhol. Their unique mixture of droning minimalism drawn from 20th-century classical music with the most basic three-chord rock n’ roll song structures paved the way for punk rock. Reed’s unflinching lyrics dealing with the dark sides of drug abuse, sexual depravity, and bleak depression explored subjects never previously broached within the confines of popular music. There were other sides to the group as well, though, as was proven on sweet, delicate songs like “Sunday Morning” and “Pale Blue Eyes”–both, of course, penned by Reed.
Once The Velvet Underground ended, Reed went on to a groundbreaking solo career, in which he explored everything from ambiguously-gendered glam (Sally Can’t Dance, 1974) to the works of Edgar Allan Poe (The Raven, 2003), creating what was probably the first experimental noise album to be released by a commercial label with 1976’s Metal Machine Music. His signature hit, 1972’s “Walk On The Wild Side,” featured lyrics hailing transgender habitues of Andy Warhol’s Factory; his affectionate tributes to Holly Woodlawn and Candy Darling can be heard regularly on classic rock radio to this day. (Hip hop fans will also recognize its distinctive bassline as the main sample in A Tribe Called Quest’s “Can I Kick It”.)
His boundless creative energy kept him busy breaking new ground right up to the end of his life–2011’s Lulu, a collaboration with Metallica, generated widespread hatred (as well as random pockets of intense love), but the same could be said of Metal Machine Music at the time of its release, so it’s entirely possible that Lulu will be seen as tremendously influential in 20 years’ time. One thing no one can say is that Lou Reed ever got complacent, or rested on his laurels.
Reed’s accomplishments are impossible to sum up within the bounds of this article, but suffice it to say that pretty much anyone playing popular music in the 21st century owes him a debt. His influence cannot be overstated, nor can the magnitude of this loss to the world of music. RIP.
