Lou Reed - STREET HASSLE

Another all caps, what are the chances? This one is STREET HASSLE. It's the first binaural recording. That sounds fancy, but basically you just get a manequin head and place it in the live room with microphones where its ears would be. The actual thing about this album is whether or not the song I Wanna Be Black is racist. 

Don't worry, it's totally not racist. Don't misunderstand me, the sentiments expressed in the song are blatantly racist, but the song holds up exactly those white, middle-class racist tropes for ridicule in the context of the larger album. You see, the real sociological dilemma of an age of irony (whether it comes after the backlash against the impending age of Aquarius, or after a supposedly right-wing conservative president attempts to ignite a communist revolution), is that the structure is inversable. You get incel-metoo, fascists calling the antifascists fascist, the christian right hoarding all the money to destroy the monetary system... take a look at it again. It's not about black or white at all, it's about whether or not virulent anti-semitism is acceptable. Here's a hint, it's not. It is the same flawed logic that gives us "life will be magically wonderful if i'm allowed to murder the murderers before they get a chance to murder anyone" though, so i would hope the underlying absurdity is painfully obvious: no fair! black people get to hate the jews. Double standard! 

Barf. No they don't, just ask Kanye. You're arguing semantics under the leaky umbrella idea that more murder will lead to less murder. We're right on the edge of my turf here, and i'm in danger of urging you to buy and read my books. You think it's an impending left/right ideological armageddon, but it's not. It's the same old tired stupid confusing world war WE still-birthed from the loins of Jews=Capitalism and its conjoined twin Marxism-Leninism's insistence that advocating for more and violent class struggle is a good thing. That's in contrast to actual Marx who repeatedly writes that it sucks that this is the way human society always evolves, but maybe when it does naturally happen again we'll be smart enough to not let it start all over for yet another round. The cynic in me says no, this is just Timequake and the moment free will kicks back in will be pure Disasterpiece Theater. 

Which brings us back to the album at hand. It was praised as a shocking dose of reality for the time, and blasted for being too irrelevantly and autobiographically mopey by the same people it was intended to offend. In reality, Rock and Roll Heart and STREET HASSLE are yin/yang albums. The former was cynical mockery, this is essentialist honesty. Maybe it's inverted essentialism from where you're standing, but the underlying message is it is what it is because that's what it is and you can't just pretend that it isn't. 

Critics like to say that the album was prompted by the end of his relationship with Rachel Humphreys, but i don't see how that could affect the listening experience unless you're just adamantly/belligerently transphobic. The album is explicitly set up with the statement "gimme some good times," implying that we're about to hear all the reasons why that's categorically impossible. Overdeterming the whole this is the manic delusion that you can just party harder your way past it (spoiler alert, you can't). 

Bottle's Taxonomy has a great name for that. No, this isn't a Random Crap album at all, this is a "this is the kind of shit i have to deal with" album. They're great, but they do have very specific rules. Cynical yes, but specifically cynical toward polite society that thinks itself "normal," like abnormality is a choice you make out of laziness or rebellion or stupidity; that philosophical optimism that says life is naturally wonderful, but you're just choosing to make it harder for yourself by being a loser. Regardless, we have the proper set up: what kind of shit does Lou Reed (real or fictionally real) have to deal with? Let's listen to it that way. 

Fun fact, verse 12 of the title-track suite is sprechstimmed by Bruce Springsteen. No, not joking, that's actual Bruce Springsteen. You see, the end of that verse is "tramps like us, we were born to pay." Forget the fact that earlier he just straight up  attributed I Fought the Law to Bobby Fuller instead of The Crickets (that was literally their first song after Buddy Holly died), the recording engineer said "hey that's the Boss's line, you can't use it like your own," so they literally went down a couple flights of stairs to ask Bruce Springsteen if it was ok and Bruce said "why don't i just come up there and do that entire verse myself?," and Lou was like "free country, dude, i'm not gonna stop you." 

Now back to I Want To Be Black. Does it pass Poe's Law? That's an intetnet thing about English desperately needing a sarcasm font or tense or anything (but no, we have to use a winky face or a sideways face instead).Technically no it doesn't, but you'd have to be a fucking moron to take that song serious. 

I know i've pointed this out before, but i wasn't alive for the first go around of Lou Reed. I honestly don't know what all those people who were expected. At no point in his Velvet or solo career did he seem the least bit interested in creating what any particular mainstream audience would call "good" music. He steadfastly created trashy Rock and Roll with intentionally offensive (for the time and context) lyrical themes, and clearly did not care if you liked it or not. In fact, at times, he seemed genuinely concerned about the mental health of people who genuinely liked it.

I guess, at the end of the day we can all agree to disagree, no matter how non-sequitur it at first appears, that Violent Femmes simply wouldn't exist if Lou Reed hadn't fleshed it out first, and that's more than good enough for me.