Lou Reed, “Metal Machine Music” and (car) rock sabotage

“This record is not for parties/dances/background romanticism. This is what I understood with true rock, real things. Nobody I know listened to it all the way, including me”. So wrote Lou Reed in the cover notes of “Metal Machine Music” in 1975
“My Week Beats Your Year,” he concluded, challenging his listeners.
But the biggest challenge was the album itself.

It has been defined both as one of the ugliest albums in the history of rock, and as an unprecedented punk gesture. It is an insult to the musical industry, and a self -tank of the career, and a mockery of the fans. The album was released in the summer of 1975, but this week he was reprinted for his 50 years in a luxurious and silver version for the record store day. A new edition that makes the story of this album even more surreal.

History

It was 1975 and Lou Reed, after the success of “Transformer” and “Rock’n’roll Animal”, had conquered the general public: the latter, his first live album, had cemented his image of icon. After publishing “Sally Can’t Dance” in ’74, Rocker agreed to publish another live in the wake of the success of the first, “Lou Reed Live”.
But instead of giving fans what they wanted, Reed released a double pure noise album, distorted guitars and feedback.

Four facades theoretically of the same duration, 16 ‘and 01 “, with the last one closing himself in a” locked groove “, with the gamble of the vinyl that ended up turning perennially in a circular furrow, noise to the infinite, if the listener had not stopped the turntable.
As Will Hermes tells in the monumental biography “King of New York” (reviewed here): “Metal Machine Music was an instrumental album made up of chiseled buzzing of feedback and came out in the same month as live. But instead of helping to solve Reed’s economic problems, that aggressive and hypnotic disc created new ones. (…) the stratified noise wall of” metal machine music “, built, built With guitar brooms recorded on ribbon, accelerated, slowed down, reversed and filtered through various devices, it was not even too unusual for an experimental guitarist who had conceived the riffs of a single note of ‘The Ostrich’ and the stratified solos of ‘What Goes on’. ‘Revolution #9’ and ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ (…)’ Metal Machine Music was also a rapid solution to the requests of the RCA, as well as an avant -garde chubby to all those types in a jacket and tie that were buffering it. Reed must have thought it was a fantastic conceptual move. But it didn’t work. “

Anthony Decurtis, in another biography, describes him as “a punk gesture on a scale never seen before, a string fuck not only at his record company, but also to his fans”.

The ambiguity of the disc

The cover of the disc plays with the misunderstanding: Reed posing with leather jacket and black background, an image that recalls “Rock’n’roll Animal”, so much so that the RCA thought of adding a sticker to warn the buyers that “this disc does not contain vocal parts”. The idea was discarded – as well as to publish it for a sub -ethics of classical music. The result was a wave of return by angry fans, convinced that she had bought another rock album.
Later the artist will describe the album as “shit on a silver plate”, but will always defend him as a work of art. “Reed”, Hermes writes, “would never have stopped attempting to contextualize ‘Metal Machine Music’ as a fusion between high and low art, what in a certain sense had always been his project. He compared him to the can of soup and the Andy Warhol film”

Distorted ambient music

“Metal Machine Music” was a commercial flop, but in some way he ended up anticipating the success and reputation of genres such as Noise and the drone, influencing artists ranging from Sonic Youth to Glenn Branca. Also in ’75 Brian Eno will release “Discreet Music”, an album of electronic bords, giving life to the ambient music, the background music that can also be heard. Without getting tinnitus, as with ‘Metal Machine Music’

Paradoxically, over 30 years later, Reed would also have converted to ambient music, affecting an album of peaceful instrumental music designed for his martial practice of Tai Chi, “Hudson River Meditations”, for a long time unavailable and reprinted last year.

The version of the record store day

In the end, perhaps, that punk gesture and that fuck to industry and fans had their reason for being: fifty years later, “Metal Machine Music” is still here. Back in a “metallic silver” vinyl edition with a cover cover, for € 50. Those who buy it this time will know what to meet and do not return the record.
As Daniele Federici writes, one of the greatest experts in the rocker and founder of the Italian community of Loureed.it, the reprint is the transformation of “an act of artistic sabotage into an object of desire”:

“There is something perfectly circular in all this: an album born (also) as an act of rebellion against the musical market that is now re -proposed as luxury goods, packaged in a precious guise that certifies its status of ‘classic’. The system has finally found a way to tame even the wildest of its critics, transforming its roar into a perfectly marketable hum.”