The Tell-Tale Rocker

Paul Mackin paul.mackin at verizon.net
Mon Nov 26 06:46:38 CST 2001


"The human compulsion toward transgression and distruction"
Reminds me of that  human desire for war business. 

        P.
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Dave Monroe" <davidmmonroe at yahoo.com>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Monday, November 26, 2001 7:05 AM
Subject: The Tell-Tale Rocker


> 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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