Beginning to See the Light: Sex, Hope, and Rock-and-Roll

Velvet Underground

Velvet Underground This essay originally appeared in Stranded, an anthology of critics' responses to the question "What rock and roll album would you take to a desert island?" I L L L E T Y O U B E I N M Y D R E A M AChange of fantasy: I have just won the first annual Keith Moon Memorial Essay Contest. (This year's subject was "Is Ecstasy Dead?") The prize is a fallout shelter in the bowels of Manhattan, reachable only through a secret entrance in CBGB's basement. It is fully stocked: on entering the contest I was asked to specify my choice of drugs (LSD), junk food (Milky Way), T-shirt ("Eat the Rich"), book (Parade's End), movie (The Wizard of Oz),* rock-and-roll single ("Anarchy in the U.K."), and rock-and-roll album. The album is Velvet Underground, an anthology culled from the Velvets' first three L.P.s. (My specially ordered version of this collection is slightly different from the original; for "Afterhours," a song I've never liked much, it substitutes "Pale Blue Eyes," one of my favorites.) The songs on Velvet Underground are all about sin and salvation.As luck would have it, * On second thought, I'd rather have Gone With the Wind, or maybe The Harder They Come. no Velvet Underground I am inspecting my winnings at the very moment that a massive earthquake destroys a secret biological warfare laboratory inside the Indian Point nuclear power plant, contaminating New York City with a virulent, radioactive form of legionnaire's disease. It seems that I will be contemplating sin and salvation for a long time to come. I L O V E T H E S O U N D O F B R E A K I N G G L A S S In New York City in the middle sixties the Velvet Underground's lead singer, guitarist, and auteur, Lou Reed, made a fateful connection between two seemingly disparate ideas—the rock-and-roller as self-conscious aesthete and the rock-and-roller as self-conscious punk. (Though the word "punk" was not used genetically until the early seventies, when critics began applying it to unregenerate rock-and-rollers with an aggressively lower-class style, the concept goes all the way back to Elvis.) The Velvets broke up in 1970, but the aesthete-punk connection was carried on, mainly in New York and England, by Velvets-influenced performers like Mott the Hoople, David Bowie (in his All the Young Dudes rather than his Ziggy Stardust mode), Roxy Music and its offshoots, the New York Dolls and the lesser protopunk bands that played Manhattan's Mercer Arts Center before it (literally) collapsed, the antipunk Modern Lovers, the archpunk Iggy Stooge/ Pop. By 1977 the same duality had surfaced in new ways, with new force, under new conditions, to become the basis of rock-and-roll's new wave. There are important differences, both temperamental and musical , that divide today's punks and punkoids from the Velvets and other precursors and from each other; American punk (still centered in New York) and its British counterpart are not only different but in a sense opposed. Yet all this music belongs to a coherent genre, implicitly defined by the tension between the term "punk" and the more inclusive "new wave," with its arty connotations. If the Velvets invented this genre, it was clearly anticipated by the i i i O U T O F T H E V I N Y L D E E P S Who: Pete Townshend, after all,is something of an aesthete, and Roger Daltrey something of a punk. It was not surprising that the impulse to make music that united formal elegance and defiant crudity should arise among working-class Englishmen and take shape among New York bohemians; each environment was,in its own way, highly structured and ridden with conflict. And as a vehicle for that impulse, rock-and-roll had unique advantages: it was defiantly crude, yet for those who were tuned in to it it was also a musical, verbal, and emotional language rich in formal possibilities . The Who, the Velvets, and the new wave bands have all shared this conception of rock-and-roll; their basic aesthetic assumptions have little to do with what is popularly known as "art rock." The notion of rock-as-art...