Lou Reed

Helped by his old VU drummer Mo Tucker, and an all-star working band that included Rob Wasserman, Mike Rathke and Fred Maher, Reed returned to the stripped-down guitar rock of The Blue Mask and earned critical raves and big league sales ("Dirty Blvd," its best track, hit No. 1 in the Modern Rock charts) in the process. The sound and feel of this one is just right.

New York' is Lou Reed's rock & roll version of The Bonfire of the Vanities. But whereas Tom
Wolfe maintains an ultimately cynical distance from the urban disintegration he depicts in
his novel, Reed is raging. In Reed's apocalyptic vision of the world's capital as a Boschean
inferno, the city's inhabitants have been shocked into incomprehension by homelessness,
poverty, AIDS, child abuse, official corruption, racial violence and drugs. At a ti... More >

Protesting, elegizing, carping, waxing sarcastic, forcing jokes, stating facts, garbling what he just read in the Times, free-associating to doomsday, Lou carries on a New York conversation--all that's missing is a disquisition on real estate. I don't always find his politics especially smart--though I have no problem with his grousing about Jesse's Jewish problem, I wish he'd called the man on Hymietown rather than Arafat. But that's not really the point, is it? As usual, the pleasure of the lyrics is mostly tone and delivery--plus the impulse they validate, their affirmation that you can write songs about this stuff. Plus, right, the music. Which is, right, the most Velvets of his entire solo career. And which doesn't, wrong, sound like the Velvets. Not even as much as Galaxie 500. Just bass, drums, and two (simple) guitars. (Grade - A-)