Lou Reed: Genuine Fake
Several media scandals over the past few years have managed to put the question of authenticating the true experiences of memoir writers by the publishers. In almost every case – I’m thinking here of James Frey, Margaret Seltzer, and Laura Albert (J.T. Leroy) – the authors deceived their readers by representing a false, but believable, gritty reality of the street that few would be able to authenticate on their own. What times we live in, where drugs and life on the street are such marketable experiences that the desperate would re-invent themselves as lowlifes just to get a piece of the action. I would posit that much of the blame for this falls on artists like Lou Reed, the well-educated pop-songsmith who re-invented himself as a hustler dandy and somehow also managed to mythologize New York realism (though perhaps not by intent).
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In his long and distinguished career, Reed toys with the fake vs. the genuine. The theme emerges as central to his art, and in a broader sense the turns of his life and career in music. The Velvet Underground saw the value in creating pop songs about very unpopular things – drug use, transvestites, and S&M being chief among them – seemingly just to experiment with the success of doing so. |
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| It was by evoking these unpopular themes, that VU managed to inject a kind of authenticity into pop music that was incongruent with the escapism of 50s and 60s era pop music. But the authenticity, seemingly so crucial a factor in judging the coolness and credibility of today’s punk mainstream, may have been an unwitting by-product of the band’s desire to shock its audience. |
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What they were really interested in, I’m convinced, was examining personalities that couldn’t face reality and therefore were forced to create new realities for themselves. One might call that ‘fake’, but in the pop-art ethos, these stories are redemptive. What you get in the best Velvet Underground song-stories is the ambiguity of the genuine vs. fake, and therefore the tragedy and ultimate redemption of one overcoming the limitations of childhood, class, even one’s own body. These songs also perfectly anticipate the glam-rock celebration of fakeness in the 1970s.
Throughout his career, Reed can be read seen as playing with what it means to be genuine as a songwriter and musician. He began as a tin-pan-alley songwriter, paid to write ditties that got pushed on the radio to satirize and/or frame other, more popular dance tunes. At the same time, he was mixing with artists and musicians of the fringe and finding it more interesting if not commercially lucrative.
Tony Conrad Angus MacLise (excuse me!), the closest thing there is to a “fifth Velvet” (Nico and Warhol were never really part of the band), was famously noted by Reed to have been incredulous at the notion that he would be expected to show up on time to rehearsals and play pre-arranged songs.
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But Reed, like Andy Warhol, loved being surrounded by representatives of every artistic temperament. Conrad’s hatred of conventional music was by no means misunderstood by Reed, in fact it was probably admired. At the same time, Reed understood that his art hinged not so much on the immediacy of his sound as a measure of its (and his) genuine-ness, but in the creation of music with as much variety as possible.
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In an age when writers and artists are resorting to passing off fiction for fact just to make a buck, it’s useful to remember that art was never really about representing authentic experiences of the artist, the artist was a mere vehicle. Viewers of a bygone era were not as addicted as we are today to ‘Information’ (a rather general term that has by and by come to imply the narratives of authentic experiences). This addiction makes it necessary for readers of fiction to discover the biography of their authors; makes it important for listeners of pop music to follow the lives and loves of musicians they do not personally know; makes it a common pastime for viewers of film and television to read books and magazines about their favorite actors. While these diversions are always pleasurable, they also lead to the fake biography scandals we see today. These are not necessarily new, but it is far more lucrative to fake a biography nowadays – especially when your publisher offers a huge deal, and nobody really reads the book (wink, wink). Any of these memoirs could have been novels (oh, wait J.T. LeRoy started out as a fiction!), but a readership’s hunger for authentic experience pushed these authors and publishers into a corner, forced them to represent certain narratives as fact. The imaginative process should be as alive in the audience as it is in the artist. ‘Truth’ does not need to be born out of genuine experience to be appreciated. ‘Fiction’ did not need to be thought of as ‘Fake’.
Further Reading:
All yesterdays’ parties : the Velvet Underground in print, 1966-1971. edited by Clinton Heylin.
Cambridge, MA : Da Capo Press, 2005.
The rough guide to The Velvet Underground, by Peter Hogan.
London ; New York : Rough Guides, 2007.
Up-Tight: The Velevet Underground Story, by Victor Bockris
New York, NY : Cooper Square Press, 2003.
To make your own fictitious dialog with a rock star, go to www.bitstrips.com.
