Very strange timing for the PS4 ad campaign as well, but i guess we'll be hearing a lot of that song for the next year or so, unless sony opts to pull the ad.
It's weird, but on Satruday I was thinking about Lou Reed and thinking that I hadn't heard anything about him in a while and wondererd if he would be the next one of my favourite mucisians to die (I even imagined a thread on CP about it). I'm not sure why I thought about it, but it spooked me a little to wake up Sunday and hear that he died.
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"A pessimist thinks things can't get any worse. An optimist knows they can."
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.
Quote:
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.
Laurie Anderson remembered her late husband Lou Reed in a short obit for the East Hampton Star, a small newspaper from a town on Long Island that Reed and Anderson often visited.
To our neighbors:
What a beautiful fall! Everything shimmering and golden and all that incredible soft light. Water surrounding us.
Lou and I have spent a lot of time here in the past few years, and even though we’re city people this is our spiritual home.
Last week I promised Lou to get him out of the hospital and come home to Springs. And we made it!
Lou was a tai chi master and spent his last days here being happy and dazzled by the beauty and power and softness of nature. He died on Sunday morning looking at the trees and doing the famous 21 form of tai chi with just his musician hands moving through the air.
Lou was a prince and a fighter and I know his songs of the pain and beauty in the world will fill many people with the incredible joy he felt for life. Long live the beauty that comes down and through and onto all of us.
— Laurie Anderson
his loving wife and eternal friend
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I was at a music festival in Mountain View, CA on the Sunday when he passed and this was a great tribute by My Morning Jacket, Neil Young, Elvis Costello and a few other artists that were playing that day:
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Val Kilmer @ValEKilmer 28 Oct
I once tickled Lou Reed. I regretted it for the longest while as he spoke to me few times after that dinner. But I'm glad now. He needed it.
Lou and I played music together, became best friends and then soul mates, traveled, listened to and criticized each other's work, studied things together (butterfly hunting, meditation, kayaking). We made up ridiculous jokes; stopped smoking 20 times; fought; learned to hold our breath underwater; went to Africa; sang opera in elevators; made friends with unlikely people; followed each other on tour when we could; got a sweet piano-playing dog; shared a house that was separate from our own places; protected and loved each other. We were always seeing a lot of art and music and plays and shows, and I watched as he loved and appreciated other artists and musicians. He was always so generous. He knew how hard it was to do. We loved our life in the West Village and our friends; and in all, we did the best we could do.
Like many couples, we each constructed ways to be – strategies, and sometimes compromises, that would enable us to be part of a pair. Sometimes we lost a bit more than we were able to give, or gave up way too much, or felt abandoned. Sometimes we got really angry. But even when I was mad, I was never bored. We learned to forgive each other. And somehow, for 21 years, we tangled our minds and hearts together.
To paraphrase the great Willie Nelson: "Ninety percent of the people in the world end up with the wrong person. And that's what makes the jukebox spin." Lou's jukebox spun for love and many other things, too – beauty, pain, history, courage, mystery.
As meditators, we had prepared for this – how to move the energy up from the belly and into the heart and out through the head. I have never seen an expression as full of wonder as Lou's as he died. His hands were doing the water-flowing 21-form of tai chi. His eyes were wide open. I was holding in my arms the person I loved the most in the world, and talking to him as he died. His heart stopped. He wasn't afraid. I had gotten to walk with him to the end of the world. Life – so beautiful, painful and dazzling – does not get better than that. And death? I believe that the purpose of death is the release of love.
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They say you die three times. First when your heart stops. Second is when you're buried or cremated. And third is the last time someone says your name.
