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.

It's not Shakespeare!

why your taste in music might -- I said might -- actually suck


Critic
1 a : one who expresses a reasoned opinion on any matter especially involving a judgment of its value, truth, righteousness, beauty, or technique b : one who engages often professionally in the analysis, evaluation, or appreciation of works of art or artistic performances

2 : one given to harsh or captious judgment

If you really, really enjoy music -- if you are, in fact, geeked out about anything artistic, or in the entertainment field -- you've seen it before, this idea that one's taste in entertainment is completely subjective. Facebook lists at least two groups that attempt to explain: Stop Critcizing Peoples Taste In Music and the sedately titled I DON'T HAVE A S**T TASTE IN MUSIC.......IT'S JUST DIFFERENT TO YOURS!!! The fact that one of these groups has two posts total and the other is clogged with spam, and that both are long dead, tells us something further: everyone likes to assume they have great taste in music. They're usually pretty secure in what they like. Or maybe the Internet's just so wide now that dozens of Glee-hating groups exist somewhat peacefully alongside the show's 13 million (!) likers.

What's the word?
Thunderbird!

I'm not here to tell you Glee sucks. You've already made up your mind on that. You either want to take that L finger and shove it up the cast's collective ass, or you've already written me off as a hipster d-bag who hates the show because it's popular, or because it's "fun." And I've got good, close friends with great taste who admit to enjoying Glee, but are smart enough to know that it's not a quality show, just entertainment that expertly pushes some sunny, goofy button inside them. So I am neither here to praise Gleeks nor bury them.

But there is such a thing as good taste. It exists. It's not a religion you can choose to follow or not follow. It can be proven.

By what, you ask? Well, let's put it this way. You wouldn't go to a wine-tasting and knock a glass of '47 Cheval Blanc out of an expert's hand, screaming, "What racehorse pissed this out?! Where's the Night Train?" Okay, that would be funny. But it wouldn't prove you knew anything about wine.

In the same way, a music (or movie, or television, or whatever) critic has a great deal of experience with the genre in question. He's not smarter or better than you, and if he's a good critic, he doesn't pretend to be, but he has lived in the belly of the beast a long, long time. It's his neighborhood. He knows where the best places are. Critics compare what the song is trying to do to what it actually does, and then compare that to similar songs that have already done or attempted the same thing. See? Simple.

It's not personal, I promise. We don't hate you. Or your band. We don't know you. We're not laughing at you. We're not trying to ruin your career. (This is usually said by someone who's career consists of open mic night.) Also, I freely admit to not being smarter than you, you personally, about a lot of things. I had to Google the wine thing. I drink Beaujolais. But I don't confuse it with that other stuff.  

Science uses observation to determine whether something is factual or not, and so do critics. If we don't like something, it's almost always because we've heard it done better somewhere else. A good music critic, a quality one, realizes that this is not the same as personal taste. Like a doctor, he knows where those buttons are inside you, and knows how they need to be pushed. He or she often likes at least a few songs that most critics don't, while realizing that this is because of their own particular receptors and how they operate. He doesn't need to personally love a song to recognize its quality. And you can pick up a knife, but it doesn't make you a surgeon.

"It's a routine procedure,
nothing to worry about."

Yet we hate the music expert, and we don't hate the wine expert. Why? Because wine, as much as we might love it, doesn't push emotional buttons in most of us.

Music is an emotional delivery system, arguably the purest one. A novel is at least somewhat bordered by the limits of language, which has an ordered set of general values, while a film climbs directly into our imagination, gets it drunk, and has violent sex with it. (Which can be fun.) Music, on the other hand, is primal. It relies solely on elements which are difficult to articulate; it uses a series of vibrations, and nothing more, to reach us. Sting once said that telling someone they don't like their song is like telling them they have an ugly girlfriend. It's on that level.

Like scientists, critics don't always agree. I'd probably rather hear Metallica's ...And Justice for All over Ride the Lightning. I'm in the minority on that, which is fine. Most scientists are still arguing over how exactly the universe came to be. But none of them would tell you the Sun moves around the Earth (as ancients once believed), and I'll never try and convince you that Load is a great album (as ancients once believed). Critics' generalizations also change, as one, over time, just like those of scientific research do. Led Zeppelin were once reviled for not being properly respectful of the blues, but that cultural bias disappeared over time, as a new generation of critics found that stance unnecessary. So it was discarded, a natural product of journalistic evolution.      

Like literature, music also has a canon, and critics do, in general, agree on it. Usually when someone farts out some horrible disaster of an artistic abomination -- Black Eyed Peas, Uwe Boll, Stephanie Meyer -- those people whose buttons are easy to push leap to its defense with the cry, "Hey, it's not supposed to be Shakespeare." And every musician can't be, you know, the Beatles. But that doesn't excuse you from being Justin Bieber. Shakespeare, historians tell us, was actually the Quentin Tarantino of his time -- a popular entertainer who mixed high and low art, baiting us with murder and sex but actually delivering substance and style and even some life wisdom along with it. When you say "Hey, it's not supposed to be Shakespeare," all you're really saying is, "Hey, I don't understand Shakespeare."

Most people, critics or not, float along on a vast grey area in the middle of Shakespeare and Tyler Perry, of Beatles and Bieber, recognizing as we do that we don't need to demand total excellence from every single thing we encounter just to make it through another day. Most folks don't wonder how a burger was made while they eat it, but we usually agree that eating nothing but Whoppers isn't good for you. Just because they're delicious and fill you up doesn't make them Porterhouse steaks. You eat too much junk too often, you will get sick. And bad art will wear away at your metaphorical heart just as surely as BK will ruin your real one.

"Stinkin’ like fat ladies shittin’ out logs."

I mean, what's the first thing people do when they come into some real money? They hire people, people in the know, to tell them what's good, what's valuable, what's first-class. Vintage car dealers, home decorators, stockbrokers, goddamn life coaches. Your average Joe is more than willing to let other people consult him on matters of great importance, but don't tell him Nickelback blows or he'll kick you out of his newly-renovated den. This is why, instead of the now-pejorative critic, I prefer the term taste consultant. Let's be honest: Definition 2 up there is steadily overtaking Definition 1. Nation of whiners.

The hipster douches, now, they're the ones to really turn your fury on, the ones who think that music is a secret club that they alone were smart enough to be invited to. Hipsters are differentiated by their psychological need to hoard knowledge -- it fills a giant hole in their self-esteem to know something about a band that you don't, to have been at their gigs first, to have bought the album before anyone. It's what separates the nerd, tugging it sadly in an empty room, from the geek, giving it out like a whore. And, yes, occasionally getting paid.

(Next week I'll introduce this blog's music rating system, once which any non-pro music fiend with a solid depth of knowledge can use to define and explain the general, relative merits of any piece of art.)