Lulu: The Greatest Album of All Time
Lulu is a 2011 Avante Garde album written and performed by Lou Reed of The Velvet Underground and solo success, and the highest-selling metal band of all time, Metallica. Lou Reed was at the tail end of his influential and troubled career during this time. Before collaborating with' Metallica, the Walk on The Wildside singer had released his final solo album of Meditations called Hudson River Meditations to a limited fanfare. A departure from his rock n' roll roots, it appeared that Mr. Reed was all but finished with the genre he helped expand from the 1960s with songs such as Venus in Furs, the beautifully horrific Heroin, and the euphoric Sunday Morning with the Velvets.
Lou Reed claimed that he lost most of his fans after 1975, after recording a beyond-common-understanding album, Metal Machine Music, an entire album of guitar feedback. It must have been disheartening for him to be mocked by the music community at large for releasing a bodacious albeit widely panned album and to be known as a faded star for the next 25 years. Furthermore, Metal Machine Music would go down as one of the worst records ever recorded in the 1991 book The Worst Rock' n' Roll Records of All Time by Jimmy Guterman and Owen O'Donnell. However, it would set the stage for him to create another avant-gard album that I dare claim to be
THE GREATEST ALBUM OF ALL TIME.
You would have to be the most oblivious individual on God's earth to not know or at least heard about Metallica. To date (2024) 'tallica has sold over 163 million records. Emerging in the mid-80s, they rode a wave of unbelievable success leading into the 90s before really hitting the mainstream (or selling out), surviving the aftermath of grunge leading into the new millennium, reinventing themselves, firing their long-time bassist and documenting the most publicized band drama in the documentary Some Kind of Monster, releasing some good not great albums in the 2000s, then leading us to 2008's Death Magnetic. By the time Death Magnetic was released, Metallica had just entered the gates of the legendary part of their career and had nothing to prove, standing on top of the corpses of all the other bands that did not make it through grunge.
Of course, Death Magnetic sold a reasonable number of albums. However, there were some whispers in the rock and metal community that the boys were past their prime and just another grandfathered rock act. Their music was just part of the mainstream, washed up, and though they sold more albums than a band like Slayer, they are simply not as good as their contemporaries.
Alas, something incredible happened in 2009.
It was the 25th anniversary of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and to honor one of the greats Metallica played behind Lou Reed himself. What started off as a one-off performance materialized into a collaborative effort 2 years later between the 2 giants. The result would leave a big black splat on the history of music.
Ultimately, this would be the spark that would create the Big Bang.
Lou Reed is the reason I started writing poetry and making music.
Thousands upon thousands of people have said that very statement for more than half a century.
"Everyone that listened to the 30,000 sold copies of the Velvet Underground & Nico started a band."
That's the Velvet Underground thing.
I did not begin listening to the Velvets or Lou Reed's solo work like most people had. It was no sooner than October 31, 2011, that I consciously said, "Lou Reed?"
Storm Simpson was the only other kid in the entire Atlanta area who did not listen to rap music. He was a metalhead and die-hard Metallica Fan. One day in class, he said to me.
"Dude, Lou Reed and Metallica released an album dude, it's the funniest fucking piece of shit ever."
I was like, "Dude! No way!" and acted like I knew who Lou Reed was because I wouldn't have been a real metalhead had I not known about Metallica.
In Ms. Dean's business essentials class, we used a headphone splitter to neglect our work, listen to this trash-ass album, and get in on the fun.
Ummm, except not really
The first song we heard on the album was "The View," track 2. It was the only song with a music video. Within the first seconds, I listened to the most raw and unsettling poeticism I had ever heard.
Track 2: The View
I AM A CHORUS
OF THE VOICES
THAT GATHER UP THE MAGNETS SET BEFORE ME
That hit me like a bomb of darkness. I shall continue
I WANT TO SEE YOUR SUICIDE
I WANT TO SEE YOU ON THE FLOOR
AND IN A COFFIN
YOUR SOUL SHAKING
I WANT TO HAVE YOU DOUBTING EVERY MEANING YOU AMASSED LIKE A FORTUNE
THROWN AWAY
I WANT TO SEE YOU GIVE IT UP
GIVE IT UP.
Whoa… Not only was he not in time, but he wasn't singing. He was an old groveling, grinching, shriveled man with his aged tar-layered lungs fixing to expire before the end of the record
This song is Different.
It's not the trendy kind of different as wearing blue hair and having a septum ring. No, this is really unsettling and unexplored, and when heard with the other music, it does not match up.
It is calling to a higher purpose than simple melody and rhyme. Lulu is a new reality brewed in the demented, probably dementia mind of Lou Reed. You are not only dead, but you are in the ground; you're not just in the ground, you're in a coffin; your soul is still in the coffin-shaking hell. Give up your life and give up the lowly trappings of "good." Pure excellence
TRACK 1 Brandenburg Gate
The acoustic guitar strings a few times, and then Lou comes in with
I WOULD CUT MY TITS AND LEGS OFF
WHEN I THINK OF BORIS CARLOFF
AND KINSKEY
MADE ME DREAM OF NOSFERATU
TRAPPED IN THE ISLE OF DR MOREAU
OH WOULDNT IT BE LOVELY
Then comes 'Tallica, with the heavy off-character subdued heaviness, who is attempting to match Lou's cadence with James Hetfield's chanting.
SMALL TOWN GIRL…
Haha, what the fuck is he saying? It doesn't make sense, it's just all weird and off the rocker ain't it?
Haha, sure is, I said outwardly; however, inside, I was intrigued beyond any reasonable degree.
This is the beginning of the story for Lulu, who began as a stripper and then moved up in society, only to end up as a stripper—a small-town girl.
Track 3: Pumping Blood
Best line:
If I pump blood in the sunshine
And you wear a leather box with azaleas, and I pump more blood
And it seeps through my skin
Will you adore the river?
The stream, the trickle
The tributary of my heart!
As I pump more blood
And it seeps through my skin
Will you adore the river?
The stream, the trickle
The tributary of my heart!Supreme violation
Blood in the foyer, the bathroom, the tea room, the kitchen, with her knives splayed
I will swallow your sharpest cutter
Like a colored man’s dick
Blood spurting from me!
What the hell is this man saying? This isn't music; this is absurdist and brash and borderline brilliant?
I've never heard this before. Metallica is the biggest metal band of all time, playing backup for an old bitter toad of a man, an old ham, and a living cigarette. Are you amazed yet?
The setting of depraved sex acts and blood and colored dick. Would you give love to this coagulating heart?
loving it yet? Good.
Things get exciting when people need to learn how to categorize something outside the mainstream. When you don't know what to call something, you must name it, and after naming it, you must define it to cut short all the preamble.
Something I covered in a previous poem about being too nuanced for your time, I know that history favors those who did something differently, even if the people. Of their time do not. Think of Galileo, Van Gogh, And Aristotle. Only in death will the best of us be vindicated. I reckon the same will be said of Lulu in the decades to come once someone makes a strong enough case for its brilliance. I've seen it happen before within and outside of music, wherein a reviled work is crucified by the public to only emerge as a paragon of creative excellence once somebody has made it fashionable to say so.
Y'know, kind of like Velvet Underground
An entire universe of possibilities spread her legs to me and let me crawl in to be reborn.
Track 7: Frustration
The brush strokes
Kiss your breasts and toes
I cry icicles in my stein
The heartbeats flutter
With an abnormal rhythmThe pain shoots through my body
A sword between my thighs
I wish that I could kill you
But I do love your eyesYou’re feeling less whore but you stimulate
The hatred smolders in your eyes
I’d drop to my knees in a second
To salivate in your thighsBut all I do is fall over!
I don’t have the strength I once had
In you and your prickless lover
And his easel in his eyesI feel a pain
Creep up my leg
Blood Runs from my nose
I puke my guts
Out at your feet
You’re more man than I
To Be Dead
To Have No Feeling
To Be Dry and Spermless
Like a girl.
I want so much to hurt you
I want so much to hurt you
Marry me. I want you as my wife
Spermless like a girl
More man than I.
This is the most excellent puking poetry EVER recorded to metal. It couldn’t be better. Indeed, hundreds of albums far exceed this sloppy, drawn-out, monotone, verbally grotesque album. It is great in its pure audacity, the utter nerve, the CHUTZPAH.
The need is for artistic BRAVERY in music today. The need is for avant-garde theater, nuance, and maybe a little discomfort. Something that can't be explained on Genius or easily categorized by the TikTok generation as anything other than "bad."
The songs are long, with the longest song being Junior Dad (20 minutes), repetitive, and uncomfortable. After listening to the entire album, you would have gone through a litany of conflicting feelings and thoughts.
Your bearings are gone, and your sense of time is gone. Was this profound, profane, mundane, brilliant, or idiotic? Do you feel happy or sad? Or terrified?
I cry icicles in my stein.
Mistress Dread
Mistress Dredd is a truly terrifying tune, sounding like some dark European doctor performing open heart surgery in a dark alley with rusty tools, high on speed. With some truly disturbing visualizations of degrading sex acts, sadism, BDSM, and abuse. This is as if Lou Reed is getting all of his crudeness out, and refusing to pay attention to the meter, just putting up a giant fuck you.
Tie me with a scarf and jewels
Put a bloody gag to my teeth
I beg you to degrade me
Is there waste that I could eat?
I am a secret lover, I am your little girl
Please spit into my mouth
I’m forever in your swirl
You are heartless and I love that
You have no use of me
But I open the sticks, sticky legs I bear
And then insert a fist, an arm
Some lost appendage
Please open me, I begYOU ARE MY GOLIATH , YOU ARE MY GOLIATH
And I am your Mistress Dread
Gross…… GONZO. The once school girl has now become a full on sex toy, begging to be split open with anything appendage you please, with any part of the body. Depravity, the nasty shit that people got exposed to when 50 Shades of Gray was released. The "chugga chugga" and the fran-tic-tic-tic pace. Nothing like this exists in the realm of music.
Iced Honey
If you can’t put a butterfly in a jar
If violence marks your final hour
If you make others feel like jam
Poured on a piece of charbroiled lamb
If it’s all mixed up and you cannot shout
And your oxygen starts to run out
If your final gasp has the recipe wrong
And instead of hello you say so long
If your energy starts to leak out
And people wonder what you’re all about
A heartbreaker with an unattached heart
The story of love gives them all a start
And me, I’ve always been this way
Not by choice, just this way
See if the ice will melt for you.
Dragon
You’re way above caring
Your heart on your sleeve!
A red star of idiocy
An idiot’s idiocy
My caring!
My caring for you!
My caring for you!
You’re way beyond caring
Your heart on your sleeve
A red star of idiocy
An idiot’s idiocyou think I’m a book or a table
You can rest your fucking feet on
When you’re able
The taste of your vulva, everything on it
The hair on your shoulders
The smell of your armpit
We do love you, to look upon your perfect body
We love you regal, we love you haughty
Oblivious to caring!
Oblivious to caring!
Caring
Caring
Oh my dear
Oh my dear!
Oh my dear!
Oblivious to caring…
Are we really dead now?!
Are we both dead now?!
Junior Dad
The window broke the silence of the matches
The smoke effortlessly floating
Pull me up
Would you be my lord and savior, pull me up by my hair?
Now would you kiss me, on my lips?
What the hell is a Junior Dad? I do know Junior dad is a fucking workout of a song. About 20 minutes in length and more than half of it is the drone of a viola. The same kind of drone that John Cale perfected back in the late 60s with Lou Reed in the Velvets. Also you can hear what would be the last recording of Lou Reeds voice a deep and long humm. An acention into musical heaven.
You see, Lou Reeds career came full circle beginning as a renegade fighting against the more digestible easy listening rock and being outcast at the time, only to be placed high on any list of greatest song writers of all time. From writing epic tales of drugs, sex, isolation, all behind a New York noir filter, to 20 albums including 2000s Ecstacy when Lou was instructed to masturbate behind a Curtain to capture the raw essence of unashamed ecstacy, then a modest little album of meditation music, then finally.
LULU
Lou Reeds Magnum Opus of a career stomped marinated in the essence of the ugly beauty of New York. The ultimate fuck you to the people within the 5 decade span of his career, and beyond the grave, and into the universe. There is no other person that could have created an immaculate horror of words and rock music like Mr. Reed. Who else could been reviled their entire career almost as long as rock had been rolling and end it with unhinged poetry and artsy nuance by the biggest band in the world.
Im Not sure.
But what I am sure of is…
Lulu is The Greatest Album of All time.
And if choose to disagree, try a Walk on the Wild Side.
Closing Remark
On October 27 2013 on my 19th birthday, Lou Reed died. Just like that.. He was dead less than 2 years after Lulu meaning it was less than 2 years since I had ever heard of the man. I felt such a strong unshakeable connection to Mr. Reed. I watched the next hall of fame induction ceremony some time later, and when they got to the dead artists part of the show I patiently waited for Lou Reeds face. I cried like a little boy who had lost his favorite uncle or a neighbor you've known your whole life.
The day he died on my 19th birthday I listened to every Lou Reed song and album, bought 2 books that were written by him, and watched any video of The Velvet Underground, Lou Reed, and Loutallica. It might be a little absurd to spend so much time advocating for an album that is clearly not perfect or digestible, or normal, or even good.
Well if you read all of this you might as well watch them perform basically the whole album in Germany of all places
I give you Lulu LIVE!
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