Fifty years in the past this month, Lou Reed close toly destroyed his personal profession with one double album. Metal Machine Music offered 100,000 copies during the three weeks of summer 1975 between its launch and its elimination from the market. Various of the numerous purchaseers who immediately returned it might have been count oning somefactor like Sally Can’t Dance, Reed’s solo album from the previous yr, whose slickly professionalduced songs went down easier than anyfactor he’d reported with the Velvet Beneathfloor. What they heard after they put the brand new album on their turntables (or inserted the Quadrophonic 8‑monitor tape into their decks) was “nothing, absolutely nothing however screaming feedagain noise reported at various frequencies, performed again in opposition to various other noise layers, cut up down the middle into two wholely sepacharge channels of utterly inhuman shrieks and hisses.”
That description comes from voluble Creem rock critic and avowed enthusiast of decadence Lester Bangs, who additionally happened to be certainly one of Metal Machine Music’s most fervent defenders. At one level he declared it “the niceest report ever made within the history of the human eardrum.” (“Number Two: Kiss Alive!”)
A lot of what we all know concerning the intentions behind this baffling album come from Bangs’ writings, including people who purport to transcribe conversations with Reed himself, who’d been one of many critic’s learniest verbal sparring halfners. The inspiration, as Reed defined to Bangs, got here from listening to composers Iannis Xenakis and La Monte Younger, who dared to transcend the certainaries of what most listeners would consider music in any respect. Reed additionally insisted that he’d deliberately inserted bits and items of Mozart, Beethoven, and other classical masters into his sonic maelstrom, although Bangs clearly didn’t purchase it.
“Metal Machine Music doesn’t appear so bizarre now, does it?” requested an interviewer on Night time Flight only a decade or so after the album’s launch. “No, it doesn’t, does it?” Reed says. “In mild of Eno and all these items that got here out now, it’s not close toly as insane and loopy as they stated it was then.” Certainly, it sounds virtually of a bit with an influential work of ambient music like Brian Eno’s Music for Airports, although that album was meant to calm its listeners moderately than drive them from the room. Over the half-century since its launch, Metal Machine Music has accrued sufficient appreciation to be paid tributes just like the reside performances by German ensemble Zeitkratzer which have continued lengthy after Reed’s dying. The legacy of his “electronic instrumalestal composition,” as he stated after one such concert in 2007, additionally features a titlesake clause in reporting contracts stipulating that “the artist should flip in a report that sound just like the artist that the report company signed — not are available with Metal Machine Music.”
Related content:
Teenage Lou Reed Sings Doo-Wop Music (1958–1962)
David Bowie and Lou Reed Pertype Reside Together for the First and Final Time: 1972 and 1997
Lou Reed Creates a Listing of the ten Greatest Data of All Time
Based mostly in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His tasks embody the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the guide The Statemuch less Metropolis: a Stroll via Twenty first-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social webwork formerly referred to as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
