Guernica Mag: Remembering Lou Reed

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People said he couldn’t sing, and later it was true, but on the first Velvet Underground album Lou Reed’s voice is no worse than Dylan’s was. Like Dylan, he covers his deficiencies by drawling the problematic notes. This is a useful trick that not only allows the singer to hit the target sideways but creates suspense as well, carving out an interval in which the listener waits, in almost sexual anxiety, for the word to come fully into being. The word that might change everything. “Suuuunday morning.” “Aaaaaahmm waiting for…” “Aaaaaah wish thaaaaat…”
Who is he waiting for? What does he wish?
You could devote an entire book to the drawl in rock ‘n roll. It was the music’s answer to melisma in soul or the shrieks and hollers of R&B. Very few rock singers outpace the beat. Van Morrison famously does it on “Mystic Eyes,” racing ahead of those drums, bass and keening organ like a convict fleeing hounds; Jagger does it on “She Said Yeah” and “Get Off My Cloud”; and then come the punks, whose contempt for rhythm was an extension of their contempt for everything else.
Most singers either ride the beat or sing against it. Drawling is one way of singing against it (another is cramming too many words into the measure, as Dylan does in his early songs, setting a precedent for what rappers would start doing fifteen years later). It’s sort of a vocal brake shoe—like the ones on the cars of the 7th Avenue subway, which, as they grind to a stop, have been heard to play the opening notes of “Somewhere.”
If rock began as dance music—music for which the highest praise, according to a fan on American Bandstand, was that “it’s got a good beat and you can dance to it”—drawling was one of the techniques that made it dramatic music as well. To the charge of rhythm it added the charge of feeling.
There aren’t that many Lou Reed songs you can dance to (though the Velvets recorded a lot; check out the YouTube video of them playing “Venus in Furs” at a gig at the Factory, with a spastically tweaking Gerard Malanga practically skipping rope with his whip), but nearly all Reed’s make you feel something. You just may not always like what you feel. His drawl—which, depending on how he modulated it, could be a sneer, a snarl, a purr, or a suppressed, mirthless laugh—was his dramatic instrument, and he used it well. He drawled the way James Brown screamed.
--Read more: https://www.guernicamag.com/daily/peter-trachtenberg-slip-away/ ...I'm not old enough to remember Lou Reed at the height of his musical prowess, but I am old enough to know that Lou Reed was one of those musicians whose music you can listen to and, as the writer says above, it makes you feel something....which is most assuredly something missing from most music nowadays.
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