Review: Lou Reed and Metallica, "Lulu"

Lulu
Lou Reed and Metallica
10.31.11
Warner Bros, Vertigo

Lou Reed has made a whole side career out of pissing people off. A former art student trained in music theory and a pop songwriter who chained himself to a cubicle and cranked out four-chord hits before he entered the Velvet Underground, Lou has always been a case study in how to use noise to manipulate others. As a result, there's probably not a single Reed fan who loves everything he's ever done: for every languid exercise in decadence like the Velvets' "Some Kinda Love" or "Venus In Furs," there's a caustic act of ear rape like "European Son" or "Sister Ray."

When he went solo, at a time in the music industry when seemingly all things were allowed, the divide got worse. Metal Machine Music was the big fuck you, a full hour of absolutely nothing but white noise feedback scooping out your brains, no songs, no beats, but Berlin has entered the historical horse race recently due to its extreme uncomfortableness masquerading as a rock album. Doomed lovers are a staple in entertainment, but you don't often get to hear their children crying as they're taken away. What Lou lacks in melodic range, he's always more than made up for in big clanging balls.

At first, Lulu looked like another exercise in sonic terrorism, and it is. But Lou's always taken an aesthete's approach to even the most rudimentary rock and roll -- he has to build up from a concept. He's also been one of the most literate guys to ever wear a leather jacket and snarl at a mic, and while that instinct doesn't fail him here, getting Metallica to back him while he spits out his spoken word results in his wobbliest foundation since Sally Can't Dance. Which, as you Lester Bangs disciples might remember, failed artistically because Lou was barely present when it was recorded.

Same goes here. The old man enlisted Metallica for this project after performing with them two years ago at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame 25th Anniversary ceremonies, feeling their sound was as tough as his aesthetic. So far, so good. And the project he put them to work on -- an adaptation of two German plays from the turn of the last century, which involve a socialite's descent into prostitution -- seems right up Reed's aesthetic alley. But Metallica are no improvisational art-rock band; their brutality is measured out in harsh barks, and even the more melodic, slower movements are repetitive and functional. The new songs, which are harsh and ugly in the extreme lyrically, are free-flowing musically; the result sounds for all the world like two radios being turned on in the same room. Metal Machine Music was a sonic assault unlike anything before or since, but the feedback was only competing against more feedback. Here, the brutality is at cross-purposes with itself. When it's dragged out to cinematic lengths, like the 11-minute opi "Cheat On Me" and "Dragon," the result is actually painful. And I've listened to all of MMM. For fun.

The few moments where James Hetfield breaks through and takes control, like the choruses on "The View," only remind us what might have been -- there's a pretty good, unselfconscious, old-school Metallica album buried under Lou's rants, and those rants might have made a compelling libretto backed by a band that values noise over riffs -- Sonic Youth, for example, who are from roughly the same period, share his New York roots, and know how to milk the drama of the spoken word to maximum advantage. Ironically, the master of '70s shock probably picked a band that was too tame to fulfill his vision, even as he no doubt envisioned roping in a whole new set of fans. As for his new friends, they ironically wound up stuck in a jumbled mess because they needed some direction. It's just as well no one's buying the result. What would have been next? Megadeth and Leonard Cohen?

Graded using the Third Eye Method:

Impact: 36. Two interesting ideas fighting each other to a very noisy standstill.
Invention: 50. It's not for nothing that spoken word experiments like "The Gift" and "The Murder Mystery" are everyone's least favorite Velvets tracks. And they only competed with themselves. 
Integrity: 24. Beatallica has more.