What Is Post-Postmodernism, Anyway?

Time for Something New

William Sundwick

Introduction: Postmodernism

Those of us introduced to art and aesthetics through a mid-century lens thought all things modern were products of the twentieth century – especially, the early twentieth century. They included dadaism, surrealism, and theatre of the absurd. These were protesting a tyrannical art establishment controlled by an elite art school aristocracy. The Avant-Garde emerged, spelling the end of modernism. Thanks to new technologies of art reproduction (cinema, wax recordings, radio), art was becoming more accessible to a wider audience. The old elites were losing their power. Cultural relativism replaced scientific determinism, absolutism, in art. Soon, the conceits of late modernism, including cubism and abstract expressionism, also became old-fashioned and conventional.

The twentieth century was awful in many ways. Despite tremendous technological progress and greater egalitarianism, there were those horrible wars, and growing insecurity afterwards. The brittleness of capitalism became apparent with the Great Depression, and nuclear annihilation haunted us throughout the post-WWII Cold War. What’s more, prosperous societies of the global north (North America and Western Europe) were struck by the folly of imperialism – the global south (all other cultures) were recognized as the struggling majority in the world, kept down largely by our heavy boot.

Multi-cultural diversity was now a goal. Variety of cultural experiences, sometimes expressed as moral relativism, became a dominant theme in western art. “Postmodernism” was the name given to this new sensibility.

The Unraveling

Like modernism before it, postmodernism, too, eventually got old. A new art establishment now set the standards, after changing a few rules. Postmodern art may have been more “woke,” but was no more open, thanks to a patronage system that still controlled exhibiting and distribution.

In political culture as well, postmodernism began to show strain. Tribalism made a depressing comeback. Critics saw cultural relativism as ultimately leading to “post-truth” politics in our public discourse.

For young artists, the pressure to conform to standards clearly created by elites who benefit from them is unacceptable. Yet, being anchorless with respect to cultural norms exacerbates the growing depression, anomie, felt by many young people. The retreat into tribalism offers some solace.

In the 21^st century, we are now confronted by the specter of climate change destroying civilization – much as we feared the bomb in the Cold War years. What have we done? Is there a way out? What is the role of art, anyway, regardless of how much time we have left?

Moral relativism does not make us feel better. Our political culture must be more than sheer will to power. We want universal truths. We want to experience them through art. We want unity, not division. I turn to art when I want to discover those universal truths inside me. I know that the world is bigger than my tribe. When I create – when I write for this blog – I want to think I’m giving something to others. And, art is pervasive throughout life. Artistic expression depends only upon the medium chosen by the artist, and the depth of feelings expressed.

Metamodernism

Over the last decade, there has emerged a debate among some cultural theorists and philosophers of aesthetics about the contours of whatever new aesthetic will replace postmodernism. Timotheus Vermuelen, Robin Van den Akker and Luke Turner have each used the term “metamodernism” to describe a pendulum-like movement swinging between modernism, through the space of postmodernism, and into something beyond. This sticky pendulum picks up concepts, styles, and subject matter as it swings. It has been doing this for a hundred years, encompassing the whole epoch of modernism and postmodernism together, depositing what it scoops up at the doorstep (or studio) of today’s young artist. It gives them the material they will work with. It is sincere, more than ironic, experiential more than abstract, and ultimately humane and idealistic as well. Ethics becomes a primary concern. It’s okay to believe in things. In its oscillation, the pendulum becomes acutely sensitive to the demands of the moment. It’s okay to search for meaning. Intellectual exploration remains a noble pursuit.

Students pursuing metamodern truths will study the past, pay attention to their surroundings in the present, and talk with others about the future.

They will recognize nihilism as the most negative product of both modernism and postmodernism. Creativity is not destruction. It is certainly not true that there are no values. The artist’s role is to crystalize and depict those values.

Common experiences should be the primary source material for metamodern art. Cross-cultural (even cross-species?) and very basic – perhaps neurological.

As in the past, when social constraints interfere with art, there will be an avant-garde ready to deal with the situation. Smashing those constraints, and overthrowing the establishment which enforced them, was thoroughly rehearsed when it was time for modernism to be overthrown by postmodernism. And the pendulum of metamodernism will not ignore that avant-garde as it swings past into the post-postmodern future. Revolution is in the air once again in the 2020s. 

Examples

While still speculative, some of the characteristics of the new post-postmodern sensibility might be found in recent works of visual arts, urban planning, theater and film, music, and politics.

In the visual arts, a new school of painters have called themselves “Stuckists,” after a poem written by one of them about being “stuck” on their art. The group celebrates figurative painting and photography, as opposed to abstract, or “conceptual.” They also have coined the term “remodernism” to denote their dedication to rediscovery of some of the fundamental principles of modernism, lost to the postmodernists of the last half-century. Their main aim seems to be dethroning what they call “ego-art,” which springs only from the mind of the artist, without context in real life experience.

Tom Turner, landscape designer and urban planner, has embraced the term post-postmodernism to describe his approach to design of public spaces. He relies on fundamental geometric patterns and Jungian archetypes to create spaces which convey comfort and familiarity to the occupants.

Although cinema is often suborned to the profit incentive, some recent activity in the same direction has been observed by critics. Simple human stories are ascendant over deeply ironic, nihilistic fantasies and dystopias. Despite the need to appeal to a mass audience, indie films and TV are beginning to show signs of change. The new economy of streaming services has enabled much more creative work in television.

One recent big-screen offering, Knives Out, illustrates a complex metamodern relationship to popular detective fiction. It’s a story familiar to fans of the modernist Agatha Christie, or the board game Clue. A famous mystery writer dies unexpectedly following a family gathering at his gothic home. The family is immediately suspected of foul play by an improbable private detective brought in by local police as a consultant. The police favor ruling the death a suicide. Although its script contains much postmodern irony, the basic layout of the story is strictly Agatha Christie modern. Each intuitive hunch of detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) is fully explained in concrete real-world context. The overall effect is: “well, of course, that’s what happened.” It’s a fundamentally post-postmodern plot development with characters being slightly exaggerated versions of real-world people we all know.

Metamodernism is also heard in today’s popular music. The current vogue of country, or “roots,” music is indicative of what some critics call the New Sincerity. Folk has replaced rock as a favorite style of the young. The British band Mumford and Sons began life early in the decade with an uplifting folk-rock style, highlighting banjo and vaguely Christian-inspired lyrics. Their hit song “I Will Wait” demonstrated they were onto something. However, by the time they released their fourth studio album, the banjo disappeared, and the Jungian archetypes became deeper than the admittedly fuzzy religious references in their earlier work. If Delta Blues-inspired rock-and-roll was the harbinger of postmodernism (with punk and metal its pinnacle), then Mumford and Sons Delta album should be a prime example of post-postmodern popular music.

In politics, as in other artistic representations of culture, we now have politicians basing their election campaigns on “genuineness” – they are judged by the media, and voters, on how convincing they are about their ideals and beliefs. Both Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden are experts at this. So was Donald Trump in 2016. Simple human stories, and how well we can relate to them, are presumed decisive. Regardless of the election’s outcome, the continuing drama of the campaign illustrates that metamodernist pendulum swing.

Can We Please Think of a Better Name?

New Sincerity? Remodernism? Metamodernism? Is there any utility in naming schools of art anyway? Labeling the new sensibility in aesthetics may have to wait for another generation, but names give some indication of the direction art is moving. “Post-postmodernism” is clumsy, but here’s what we know: real experience, concrete observable reality, and commonality of all humanity – or even all sentient beings, if you’re a vegan – is a new emphasis in art.

Beliefs can be real and justified. But continuous exploration and study help inform them. Nobody need be left out.

Who Says Avant-Garde Is Dead?

Postmodernism Hasn’t Killed It Yet

William Sundwick

When art critic Clement Greenberg wrote in 1939 that the opposite of avant-garde was kitsch, he was referring to the struggle then between artists who had a burning desire to be creative and the exigencies of the commercial art world focused mostly on advertising and consumer products. Kitsch was defined as mass-produced commercial design (as well as academic art burdened by excessive rules).  Avant-Garde was the modernist response seeking to protect true aesthetic value from such crass commercialism. “True aesthetic value” itself was a modernist, absolutist, concept -- coinciding nicely with radical social philosophy.  Like Marxism, this aesthetic was characterized by a scientific determinism.

But Greenberg was far from the first to use the term “avant-garde.” It’s origins in the art world date from 1825 in France. It was used in an essay by a follower of Saint-Simonianism (the philosophical underpinning of a new aesthetic for the industrial revolution). The arts were to be the “advance guard” (French military usage) for the people, leading the way toward massive structural reform of society. Notable followers of Saint-Simonianism in Europe included the composers Hector Berlioz and Franz Liszt.

The next generation of the avant-garde reached its climax with artist Gustave Courbet, who extolled the destruction of the Vendome column during the Paris Commune of 1871. Courbet saw this as a revolutionary act, toppling a symbol of an imperial aesthetic (it was a monument to Napoleon at Austerlitz), to be replaced by a proletarian art with “true aesthetic value.” By this time, modernism was clearly established in art – rules and school credentials dominated who could exhibit their art and who couldn’t. However, the same scientific determinism which underlay the modernist aesthetic also led to impressionism, then cubism, still far too rules-based for the younger creative souls of the age.

It seemed there must be a “deeper truth” in art, much like the deep insights then emerging in psychoanalysis. Surrealism became the new avant-garde. But the tension with kitsch continued. Ordinary people were still barred from participation in “high art” – because of barriers to entry, academic, linguistic or cultural.

By the mid-20^th century, a new art philosophy began to emerge. It became known as “postmodernism” – characterized by acceptance of cultural relativity in standards for art. Even kitsch could be appreciated, if only for its humor! Mass availability of electronically reproduced art (and kitsch) on recordings, radio and television changed the aesthetic experience for the bulk of the population in advanced societies -- especially the United States. But artists still yearned for that creative satisfaction in their art. Many sought it not through their works, but through symbols. Bohemianism became fashionable. Even affluent young people in the 1960s and 1970s became what David Brooks would call “Bobos” (bourgeois Bohemians). Other conservative commentators on aesthetics have lamented the apparent “irrelevance” of the avant-garde in postmodern art. Avant-Garde has now become the “establishment” among the art cogniscenti.

This ferment in style and aesthetics has been playing out in popular music as well as high art. It’s now a question of separating avant-garde kitsch from real avant-garde – or, conversely, ordinary unredeemable kitsch from avant-kitsch. Punk Rock illustrates this postmodern dilemma of aesthetics.

As the popularity of rock-and-roll on radio and records increased through the 1950s and early 1960s, two countercultures in music seemed to emerge. Both were purists. One sought to return to “roots” (early Delta blues and country ballads), the other mainly sought to smash the stranglehold of pabulum-purveying record companies, expressing their creativity through an edgier, more experimental (yes, avant-garde) style. It is the latter group that started to call themselves “Punk.” They were urban, working class in sympathy, and shared a contempt for the commercially successful pop music of the time.

Some of these artists, like Lou Reed and his band Velvet Underground, managed by that modernist/postmodernist crossover icon, Andy Warhol, set out to create an idiom – the idiom of avant-kitsch. Reed expressed Warhol’s aura, but had an inner competitive drive to be successful in the music world himself.

Others, like David Thomas, a long-time Cleveland Punk personality with his two bands, Rocket from the Tombs, then Pere Ubu, seemed to be happy existing for four decades on the margins of the critical universe, never really entering the world of commercial pop music, except satirically.

Then, there was Iggy Pop from Ann Arbor, with his early proto-punk band The Stooges, and later as a solo performer, with backup musicians from previous Punk groups. He did reach “rock star” status himself – but has always explored the boundaries between art and kitsch in a serious way. He continues to ask questions about the Avant-Garde, even as he seems finally to have quit performing (usually shirtless).

But their music is their legacy. It survives. Art always survives. While popular tastes change, the impulse to transcend the rules, the drive for the Avant-Garde, continues generation after generation. Rules and credentials are meant to topple, like that Vendome column nearly 150 years ago. It is not the conventional we remember – it is the breakthrough art.

There will always be a vanguard. The Saint-Simonians were correct – artists will lead the people’s vanguard. Even in our now-maturing “postmodern” world, we ask ourselves: “What comes next?”

Pere Ubu

 “Avant-garage” Rock with a Rust Belt Sheen

William Sundwick

Cleveland has produced more than the Rock-and-Roll Hall of Fame. Emerging in the 1970s, beneath the radar of its pop music mainstream, was an avant-garde, experimental music scene, epitomized by David Thomas and Pere Ubu.

Starting as a music critic, Thomas decided to try his hand at producing the music he wrote about when he formed the band Rocket from the Tombs in 1974. It didn’t last long, but its members liked the project. Both Thomas and guitarist Peter Laughner decided to join up with four other Cleveland area friends to start a new project in 1975. It’s not clear why they chose the name “Pere Ubu” for the new band – after the main character in the avant garde play by Alfred Jarry, Ubu Roi. Jarry’s 1896 play is pre-dada, and was received by a skeptical audience who considered it to be childish, like a nursery rhyme trying to pass itself off as meaningful. Indeed, some reviewers have made similar comments about the music of Pere Ubu!

I disagree. The band has coined the term “avant-garage” to describe its style. Thomas says it is a joke, intended to fool journalists who are looking for a sound bite, a “genre” in which to place Pere Ubu. They began with a style clearly in the garage rock mold – but, over time, evolved into a much more openly experimental, or avant-garde, sound. They are still performing, with many personnel changes, 44 years later. They’re still in Cleveland, an archetypal midwestern Rust Belt city. It shows in their music. David Thomas is there, as always (except for a hiatus in the ‘80s, when he went solo, and the band disappeared for a while).

Thomas’ distinctive vocal style, a screechy, anxious, dreamily disconnected-from-reality muttering, is nothing, if not avant-garde. In addition, the varied instrumental back-ups have included EML synthesizer and theremin through the years, especially since the ‘90s. This is experimental rock, not mainstream – critics have called it both “art punk” and “post punk.” Pere Ubu’s style was influenced by French musique concrete of the ‘40s and ‘50s, where pre-recorded non-musical sounds are incorporated into a larger musical tapestry. Pere Ubu uses this technique with synthesizer and theremin to create backdrops like science fiction B-film soundtracks from the 1950s.

The evolution of Pere Ubu’s style can be illustrated with seven examples. Their first singles sound much like “Final Solution” – strictly garage rock. Its lyrics relate adolescent anxiety about social mal-adroitness and raging hormones. “D-d-don’t need a cure” … “need a final solution!” But the EML synthesizer, played in those early days by Allen Ravenstine, is clearly there.

The band’s first studio album was released in 1978, The Modern Dance. It greatly expands the themes of the first singles. David Thomas practices his distinctive vocals. “Nonalignment Pact” is lighter than some tracks on the album, and still sounds like garage rock of the post-punk years. “At night I can see the stars on fire/I can see the world in flames/And it’s all because of you/Or your thousand other names” followed by a long list of women’s names, then the chorus, “It’s all because of you/It’s all because of you girl!” “Sign my nonalignment pact/Nonalignment pact/It’s my Nonalignment pact.” All played to bouncy dance music. “Street Waves” develops Thomas’ screechy voice, with lyrics that evoke a kind of “dance anxiety” – the obvious thrill from the electronic music (synthesizer in full gear), tempered by insecurity about the nature of any liaisons made in a supercharged urban environment.

Still on that first album, “Humor Me” strikes a different tone. It may be a precursor of things to come. It’s a vocal protest of the garage rock origins of the band, while carrying over many of the backup band signatures – synthesizer, drums, guitar chords. But the lyrics tell a story of social alienation and sexual frustration in a very different way. The chorus is a plaintive reggae chant, “It’s a joke, mon!” – as if the real anxiety felt by the singer is merely a joke to the rest of the world. Perhaps a truer insight into Pere Ubu’s soul than their earlier work?

By the mid-90s, Pere Ubu had been through a dissolution, deaths of several early band members, David Thomas launching a solo career, then re-uniting the band with different personnel. In 1995, they released Ray Gun Suitcase, which explores new musical themes with a noticeable swing to experimental sound –  tracks with theremin, played by Robert Wheeler, recalling those old B-films. “Folly of Youth” captures the spirit well, especially with its YouTube video. It wants to be a “suitcase” and “hang around inside your Greyhound terminal.” Alienation comes up again in “My Friend Is a Stooge,” with a shout out to T.S. Eliot and “Hollow Men.” It also touches the role of mass media in society, “My friend is a stooge for the media priests. He does the weather map for Channel 3.” He may even be a dog, since he “Stares at the rug if I leave him alone. Lays around the house in misery. He toes the line for the company.”

The album closes with a track which is downright depressing. “Down by the River II” uses some new devices, like electric cello, to create a melancholy sound – is everything hopeless? “The house on fire. The treaty broken. I call for the law. The law’s a token.” Then, “Trip is the worst. I don’t mean maybe. I call for the captain. She cries like a baby. As bad as it gets, it’s gotten worse. I want to run. I had to learn to crawl first.”

But it’s not the end. Pere Ubu goes on. The final verse in “Down by the River II” leaves us suspended in time, “Bye-bye. Bye-bye, baby, my friend. It’s time to leave and I don’t know when.”

Who Killed the Anger?

Creative Tension in Rock Music

William Sundwick

First there was “blues.” It was raw. Sung and played by illiterate, marginalized sharecroppers in the Deep South. Somebody in New York decided that, if it could be made more pleasant, less painful to hear, especially if played by an ensemble of musicians (a “band”), it might gain a wider audience. That was called “jazz.”

Sometime before, during, and after World War II society began making lightning fast changes, via technology. The pace only intensified for the rest of the century, and into the 21^st. By mid-century, there was already noticeable tension between fans of “roots” music (folk and “traditional” delta blues forms), seen as simpler and “purer” forms of artistic expression, and more modern, sophisticated, urban fans who consumed a broader array of electronically reproduced music (radio, TV, stereo records).

That media-saturated urban group started showing the anger first. Rock-and-roll, especially the genre emerging from blues, was the first commercial expression of that anger. It was social alienation, clearly stated. Like big-band jazz, it was originally conceived as dance music. And, like jazz, as it became more “mainstream,” it would stifle creative impulses of young performers. They became frustrated by their inability to break through barriers enforced by taste-making record labels and radio stations.

It may have been marketing that saved them, but it was marketing of creativity itself. Artistic anger, alienation, became the marketable commodity. It turned out there was an audience for it. But, with success, sustaining anger becomes difficult. It seems only the uncomfortable, the struggling, can channel their creative impulses into the deep frustration and resentment that we associate with artistic anger. Creative tension between hungry and well-fed becomes an endless cycle.

This is where John Cage came from when he invented his experimental music. He was, essentially, raising his middle finger to the academic music “establishment.” It is also where Sun Ra and John Coltrane came from with their “avant-garde” jazz in the early sixties. It is where punk rock came from in the seventies. And, as we saw in the two previous entries of “Who Killed the Anger?”, it is where noise and experimental rock came from over the last thirty years. The eternal quest for “something new” is the motivation.

The first act in any revolution is to tear down the old system – or at least demonstrate against it! Revolution, not evolution, is the model. Evolution may be fine and, clearly, it’s the way of nature. But sometimes evolution is just too damn slow. The impatient among us will usually opt for revolution instead.

Indeed, the only thing that keeps us from violence in the streets is fear and doubt of our own moral rectitude. But, in music, revolutionary change seldom carries a moral component. It’s primarily aesthetic. Politics can be moral, music is almost always aesthetic.

Popular music, being consumed largely by young people, is especially fertile ground for the impatient and the frustrated. And, the upcoming Generation-Z shows no sign of being any less impatient, or alienated, than earlier youthful generations. The “silent generation” found early rock-and-roll, the later boomers had punk, “Gen-X” had heavy metal, and angry millennials have noise and experimental rock. Of course, not all members of each generation are equally afflicted by alienation and impatient anger. Many, perhaps through fear of their own emotions, have chosen instead to listen to milder “easy listening” music. Such music intends to erase anxiety with melody.  The anger is pushed down, repressed.

But the music I like confronts anxiety. It tells me to “deal with it!” For me, it’s about emotional catharsis as a solution to problems. If music is “in your face,” so much the better. Full disclosure: the only time I listen to music now is when I’m working out at the gym!

I do appreciate creative sounds, however. If a certain band has a trademark riff, mix or vocal that makes their songs easily identifiable, I am more likely to purchase them on iTunes. Uniqueness has equal weight to a biologically-driven beat that’s a good match for my cardio workout. I like music that encourages me to punish the equipment. “Pedal harder!”

Where do I find new music? Inadvertent listening on SiriusXM (often at the gym) and music-related discussion groups on Facebook are the tools I use to discover bands. They were my sources for Sonic Youth, AWOLNATION, and Deaf Wish.  Since I have no IRL friends who share my musical tastes, I rely on the virtual world for exposure. Sometimes my millennial younger son will contribute ideas, but his older brother has already moved on. Pandora in my car only occasionally, Spotify never.

And, yes, the secret personal drive behind all this: it does make me feel young, again!

The Velvet Underground – Or, Perils of Selling Avant Garde as Pop

William Sundwick

Lou Reed was a middle-class Jewish kid growing up on 1950s Long Island. He was always interested in pop music – especially doo wop -- and taught himself to play guitar from the radio. In high school he apparently experimented with illegal drugs; and, he became sullen, depressed, and anti-social, perhaps due to the notorious gangs of his school. Nevertheless, according to his sister, he was a “genius,” and was sent off to Syracuse University in 1960, where he was mentored by poet Delmore Schwartz, who taught creative writing there.

At Syracuse, he also became acquainted with a classically-trained Welsh experimental musician, John Cale, and another guitar player, Sterling Morrison. They jammed together, forming a band which they informally named “The Primitives.” By graduation in 1964, they were playing gigs in New York City (East Village), and had changed their name to “The Velvet Underground” (after a popular college novel about a secret sexual society). 

Another acquaintance had a younger sister who really loved drums! Maureen Tucker, known as “Mo,” was invited to join the band --over Cale’s objections to having a female drummer.

This was the origin of the “Velvets.” They lasted until 1973, but in their relatively brief lifespan they became one of the most influential rock bands in the history of the art form, says Rolling Stone and other critics. Yet, they were never commercially successful, measured by the sales numbers or charts of the day.

Why? Because you can’t sell experimental, avant garde art to the masses. And, from the outset, this was clearly the preferred path for Reed and Cale.

Yet, their raw and experimental repertoire of social realism was what gave them their first break – Andy Warhol heard them perform in the East Village, and recruited them as the house band for his studio, called the “Factory,” and his upcoming planned tour, “The Exploding Plastic Inevitable.” (For an immersive experience, visit the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. It dedicates an entire soundproof room on the third floor to EPI!)

Warhol also brought a German chanteuse, Nico, into the mix. She added her name to their debut album -- “The Velvet Underground and Nico” – since she contributed lead vocals on three tracks (and backup vocals on a fourth). Nico severed her connections with the band after the release of that one album, to pursue her own career.

The artistic thrust of that first album was dominated by Cale’s fascination with avant garde music. He played an electrically amplified viola on many tracks, and is credited with its creative direction, generally called “producing” in the record business, despite Warhol’s official title as “producer.” The songs, however, were written by Reed, showing his fascination with morbid sexuality and the underworld of drugs and transsexual behavior (“drag queens” in those days). Sterling Morrison was the main force keeping the tracks sounding like rock ‘n roll, aided by Mo Tucker and her simple, yet exotic, drum riffs.

Highlights from that first album are:

•        The opening track, “Sunday Morning,” about paranoia (common in illicit drug users) –Reed was vocal front man, with Nico doing backup.  
•        “Venus in Furs,” based on the novel of the same name by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, about what we now know as BDSM (he lent his name to the sexual deviation “masochism”), lots of John Cale and Mo Tucker exotica in this one.
•        “All Tomorrow’s Parties,” a Nico masterpiece and Andy Warhol’s favorite track on the entire album.
•        And the final track, “European Son,” dedicated to Reed’s mentor Delmore Schwartz, who died before the album was released. 

Also on this album was the very Lou Reedian “Heroin” – anticipating one of Reed’s recurring themes, even in his later solo career, nihilism! I’ve always felt that Heroin is the best track on the album to show the synergy between Reed’s nihilistic lyrics, Cale’s screeching viola, and Tucker’s primitive, pulsating drum kit. It also features a Lou Reed invention – “ostrich” guitar tuning, where all strings are tuned to the same note. This early Lou Reed song, with the ostrich tuning, had impressed Cale as unique enough to spur their collaboration. Reed had written the song before the idea of the band emerged.

If you listen to more than one or two of the songs linked above, you’ll understand why the album was never commercially successful. It was much too dark, much too avant garde, too naughty for the teenagers and young adults who were buying records in the sixties. But, as experimental musician Brian Eno famously remarked, “everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band.” It was later lauded as one of the most influential rock albums ever. It was bought by artists … not by kids who wanted dance music!

For their second album, White Light/White Heat, it was time to try something different. Cale continued to exert creative direction. Reed had fired Warhol, despite his having an extremely laissez-faire attitude, which Reed appreciated. His style left the musicians to experiment as they wished, but Reed may have felt Warhol hampered the band’s potential commercial success. 

The sound changed in White Light. Instead of Cale’s electric viola, more tracks featured Mo Tucker and her primal beat, and much more guitar droning. Tracks tended to be very long, and very loud. Blowing out the amps substituted for Cale’s more exotic forays. The recording quality was intentionally distorted, unpolished and raw, compared to the first album. It was “anti-beauty,” according to one reviewer – paving the way for later proto-punk, and punk, bands.

Cale continued with the band, but became more cynical. When the recording sessions, and a round of live performances, were finished, he left – to produce Iggy Pop’s band, The Stooges. He and Reed were often at loggerheads, creatively. But, while the sound may have been more conventional, Reed’s songs were still way out there – like the homosexual orgy in “Sister Ray,” which relates a story of mass drug use, and a sailor being shot and killed, left to bleed on the carpet. Or, the frenetic world of meth addicts described in the title track. 

The amazing spoken word recording, “The Gift”, features Cale’s Welsh brogue sounding rather charming as he reads a short story, to heavy rock background.

Also included in the deluxe boxed set is a vintage recording jam which is ALL Reed, “Temptation Inside Your Heart” – a sign of things to come in his solo career.

White Light/White Heat, alas, was no more successful than The Velvet Underground & Nico. Verve Records dropped the band, along with many others thought to “glorify” use of illegal drugs. Reed believed that the real reason was: they just didn’t sell. Even nearly fifty years later, when HBO produced its series “Vinyl” in 2015, with music producer Mick Jagger, a “White Light/White Heat” cover was played, by a band portraying a fictitious Velvet Underground gig, shown in flashback. It was the high point of episode 5 … but, HBO would not renew for a second season!

New record labels were found, and The Velvet Underground soldiered on for two more studio albums and a live album, then the posthumously released VU Another View. Now Lou Reed was in total control, with his backup stalwarts Morrison and Tucker. Doug Yule was added. Reed was convinced he needed to move more into the pop mainstream, his song lyrics would now be only slightly unbalanced, and the sound mostly inoffensive. An example from 1970’s Loaded album is “Rock and Roll”. The difference from the first two albums is stark. Reed managed to return to his rock ‘n roll roots, and the lyrics are generally happy, upbeat. The darker side would return later, in his solo career.

That solo career lasted nearly 40 years, until his death. And, it finally propelled him to the commercial success he had always sought, but never achieved, with the Velvets. It began in 1972, with his album Transformer, produced by disciple David Bowie. “Walk on the Wild Side” did the trick, and without toning down the content of his lyrics an iota! Perhaps the times had finally caught up with Lou Reed.

He died in 2013, after a liver transplant, but managed to outlive Andy Warhol, Nico, and Sterling Morrison. Cale and Mo Tucker are still alive (but retired from music?). Rolling Stone’s obit for Lou Reed ranks The Velvet Underground & Nico on an artistic par with two other contemporary classics: the Beatles’ Sgt. Peppers … and Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde. And, summarizing the oevre of the Velvets, calls them “the most influential American rock band of all time.” 

It’s been fifty years since the release of The Velvet Underground & Nico LP. I purchased my copy in Paris, during my college study abroad. It was my favorite on my little portable turntable in the dorm room at L’Universite de Strasbourg. Although, the Rolling Stones’ Their Satanic Majesty’s Request was a close second. Fifty years … that’s a long time, even in a 70-year-old’s life. I’ve always been drawn to the avant garde. Despite my rather conventional life, it symbolizes an excitement never quite attainable, for fear of reaching too far outside my comfort zone. Artists CAN get there, however!

That twenty-year-old’s spirit of adventure is still approachable, if only by listening to Velvet Underground songs on my iPod … while working out at the gym!