Lou Reed, New York, New York

 

I was thirteen years old when I first heard Lou Reed’s album New York. It was the first record of his that I had eagerly anticipated. The others I already owned, both from the Velvet Underground and his solo work, had come out years earlier, even before I was born. It had been more like musical archaeology than a fan waiting for a new album from his favorite artist. That day, my parents were taking me, as they did every weekend, to my grandparents’ house. I asked my dad if we could get to the record store earlier. As soon as the car stopped, I jumped out, ran across the shopping mall at full speed, and bought that cassette, which had taken weeks to arrive.

I didn’t get out of the car at my grandparents’ house. I stayed inside, sitting in the back seat with headphones on, playing the entire album on my walkman. It left me stunned. It was exactly the kind of production I had always wanted to hear on a Reed record. Some criticized it for sounding simplistic, but there was his powerful voice front and center, more of a narrator than ever, like a preacher walking through the center of the city of sin. Behind him came simple, direct guitars, full of conviction. New York was like a book or a movie for the ears. I’m sure Lou had always wanted to sound like that.

Lou had left behind those raw tales of transvestites, drug addicts, and perverse sex that had defined his earlier period. Now he confessed that he had become addicted to the news, reading it obsessively. The album’s songs dealt with the hypocrisy of the politics of the time, the violence that hung in the air on the city streets, and the AIDS epidemic that was destroying lives while no one seemed to care enough. He even found room for a sharp mention of Trump, along with other names that defined that New York of the late eighties and Reagan’s America.

Reed was coming off a decade with some really strong albums: Growing Up in Public, The Blue Mask, Legendary Hearts, Live in Italy, and New Sensations. The Velvet Underground legend and Reed’s name were more relevant than ever in that part of the 1980s. Although Mistrial had been a clear stumble in his career, New York surpassed everything. When you achieve a victory as glorious as this one, past sins are almost automatically forgiven. Here Lou sounded a bit more like Dylan, with that ability to tell stories that truly hurt. At the same time, he recovered something of the minimalism and rawness that had made the Velvet Underground unique.

In 1973 he had recorded Berlin, an album about a city he didn’t know but imagined with all its darkness. In 1989 he made an album about the city he knew best, the one he lived and breathed every day. and with it he created his best work of the entire decade. It was as if he had taken the spirit of Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and brought it straight into music. It wasn’t hard to imagine Travis Bickle listening to these songs in his yellow cab or in his lonely, empty apartment.

If Lou had released New York in the seventies, it would have been the perfect soundtrack for that film. Although for that, there was already Street Hassle, which also fit perfectly into that atmosphere of loneliness and contained rage.

What still moves me today is how Reed managed to channel his anger and turn it into something so precise and human. He wasn’t shouting just to shout. He observed the city he both loved and hated at the same time, saw it bleeding out from AIDS, from the indifference of politicians, from the corruption seeping into every corner, and he put it all into songs that sound like honest conversations amid the noise. New York is not just an album. It is a testimony from an artist who refused to look the other way while his world was falling apart. And when you listen to it, you can feel that dirty, wounded New York pulsing somewhere.