The Tell-Tale Rocker

[Dave Monroe]

>From Jon Pareles, "Lou Reed, the Tell-Tale Rocker,"
New York Times, Sunday, November 25th, 2001 ...

"In 1845, four years before his death, Edgar Allan Poe
first published 'The Imp of the Perverse,' a short
story about a murder. It identified a human compulsion
toward transgression and self-destruction. 'The
assurance of the wrong or error of any action is often
the one unconquerable force which impels us, and alone
impels us to its prosecution,' Poe wrote. 'Nor will
this overwhelming tendency to do wrong for the wrong's
sake, admit of analysis, or resolution into ulterior
elements. It is radical, a primitive impulse —
elementary.'

"Some 124 years later, Lou Reed offered a more
monosyallabic version of the same idea. In the Velvet
Underground's 'Some Kinda Love,' he sang, 'Let us do
what you fear most/ That from which you recoil/ But
which still makes your eyes moist.' It was not the
first, and hardly the last, song in which Mr. Reed
would contemplate, as a matter-of-fact observer or
playing a highly volatile character, what goes on in
the minds of people committing acts of desperation,
mania and depravity. Where Poe delivered his
narratives in elaborately sonorous prose, Mr. Reed has
used a different vehicle: the rhythm and clangor of
rock.

"Yet perhaps it was destined that as the 20th century
ended, Mr. Reed would find himself delving into and
overhauling the works of Poe for 'POEtry,' a
music-theater collaboration with the director and
designer Robert Wilson that will be at the Brooklyn
Academy of Music from Tuesday to Dec. 8.

"'I just love Poe's language,' Mr. Reed, 59, said
earlier this month.  'To me, it would slip right into
my idea of what rock could be: the fun of the rhythm
of rock and the sex of rock and the physical push of
it, with the real power of the language.'

"Mr. Reed had to invent his own path toward
intelligent rock. He studied poetry with Delmore
Schwartz at Syracuse University ..."

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/25/arts/music/25PARE.html?todaysheadlines

And so forth ...

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