Lester Bangs on Lou Reed

*from Untitled Notes on Lou Reed, 1980

(shout out to Kurt for this one.) Thanks Kurt!


Last spring I was going out with a girl who road-managed a rock band. When she told them she was seeing me they said, "Aw, all Lester wants to do is suck Lou Reed's cock."
I would suck Lou Reed's cock, because I would also kiss the feet of them that drafted the Magna Carta. I leave you to judge that statement as you will, because it is not to Lou Reed but to you that I surrender myself, you who read this. I care about almost nothing, but I know I'm always in good hands with you.
I'm a realist. That's why I listen to Lou Reed. And that's why I idolize him. Because the things he wrote and sang and played in the Velvet Underground were for me part of the beginning of a real revolution in the whole scheme between men and women, men and men, women and women, humans and humans. And I don't mean clones. I mean a diversity that extends to the stars.
Everybody assumes that mind and body are opposed. Why? (Leaving aside six thousand years of history.) The trog vs. the cerebrite. How boring. But we still buy it, all of us. The Velvet Underground were the greatest band that ever existed because they began to suggest that such was not so, in the very actfact of the tragic recognition of such opposition at the at the most groundfloor extreme angles. Angles? Ha! What is the difference between the curve of a breast on a sex goddess and the bones in the thighs of a stud and the fins on a '57 Chevy? The introduction of the Chevy into the comparison was America's idea, which Andy Warhol later perfected, which is why he is prophet of our doom. Lou realized early on that all you need to do is touch the other's cheek and just give them some small recognition and then let them be and maybe record it and thereby perhaps justify their tragedy through art. And all art is an act of love towards the whole human race. Aw, Lou, it's the best music ever made, the instrumental intro to "All Tomorrow's Parties" is like watching dawn break over a bank of buildings through the windows of these elegantly hermetic cages, which feels too well spoken, which I suspect is the other knife that cuts through your guts, the continents that divide literature and music and don't care about either.
Two nights ago my friend John Morthland was over and we talked about Iran and the future of this embassy we live in. We ended up agreeing that we were expatriates in our own homeland, and where did that leave us? Exiles on main street. Which is exactly where you always were, Lou, which is not a bad place to be. If you felt at home there, you'd really be psychotic. But you knew that a long time ago.
We will end up there in one way or another, probably sharing bar beers with our parents at our side, and they will know what no one else must know, that the unspeakable sin, the love that dare not speak its name, the dope addict, finally came home to roost.