Reed should be remembered not just for the music he made, but for the music he influenced. There's the cliche that everyone who saw VU started their own band, and most of them echoed his attitude more than anything. I love him because he made punk possible.
I read this on another music forum, and the poster Evil Dr K sums up his importance more than I ever could.
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Lou Reed came across as a unlikable, incorrigible pain in the ass and his output after the Velvet Underground was hugely inconsistent, even his accepted 'classic' Transformer is half unlistenable tripe, although I should say my own personal opinion is that Transformer is not his best solo record.
Much of the reverential bleating about 'Art', 'Experimentation', 'pushing music to the Limits', all present in the encomiums, has a strong whiff of bull#### about it. The Beatles pushed far more limits in music than the Velvet Underground ever did and in lyrical precociousness, Bob Dylan broke the ground there and was better in any case.
However Lou Reed was important.
Before there had been The Beach Boys, The Byrds and Creedance Clearwater Revival. Lou Reed's importance is as a personification of the shadow that blotted out the sun of the hippy dream. Whither prescient or accidental, Lou Reed's attitude, demeanor and image chimed perfectly with a historical, societal and artistic rupture. He represents, perhaps more potently than any other figure, the stygian wonderland of The Underground, the refuge of the castigated creatives, the outcasts and the weird.
What Lou Reed did was give white American music a credible rock n' roll mythos for the first ever time through a sort of 'mad, bad and dangerous to know' recycling of the Byronic hero and the Romantic half genius/half insane kapellmeister transposed from the dark Germanic woods at the foot of the Alps to dark alleyways at the foot of the towering skyscrapers of New York city.
It was that mythos that appealed and fired the fevered imaginations of so many others, although mostly, it has to be said, years later when music had already started to consume its own tail.
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