Day 34 – It was Paradise
The continuing adventures of “Eric’s Trip Around the Sun”. One final trip with the iPod.
Whenever reviewing the solo career of Lou Reed, it’s an admittedly a hit and miss affair. ‘Transformer’ is probably his most popular, ‘Metal Machine Music’ is his most fucked up (this is a good thing btw) and ‘Berlin’ is his most underrated (or I should say underrated until very recently).
I think that there are a lot of reasons why it is underrated. For one, it is not Transformer, the glam rock masterpiece that had helped save his career.
Second, after his stunning output with the Velvet Underground that the critics had lofty expectations. If the expectation is that he is going to write about sex, drugs and depressing shit …
Err…
Oh wait, he did that with Berlin.
I remember around the first time that I heard this song was when I met him at a book signing in Chicago. There is no doubt that the meeting had an impact. I still remember the hexagon rimmed sunglasses with green lenses that he was wearing.
Berlin Wall had fallen almost 2 years to the date of meeting him so just the word Berlin still meant something since I was a child of the Cold War. It was not as if the song suddenly transported me to eating a jelly donut somewhere in the middle of Deutschland and finding a fraulein with a nice set of juggs to drink beer with. Or maybe it did. I think for Americans who grew up on McDonalds and Taco Bell, there is something romantic about a culture that has been established for hundreds of years, and being in that area and falling in love would have some type of merit.
The version of the song ‘Berlin’ on the album is several minutes shorter than the version that appeared on Lou Reed’s self-titled debut album. I have always favored the version the updated version for it’s subtle pauses and breaks that brought a ton more emotion to the performance itself. The song also sets the rest of the album up as Berlin, is a concept album based on a relationship gone really bad.
A VU Song like ‘Candy Says’ is depressing but endearing. A song like ‘The Kids’, especially being a parent, is your worst nightmare. When I was a teen, it was depressing but listenable, but now you cannot do it.
I have to admit to missing Lou Reed a little bit. I want him to come out with another ridiculous album like Lulu, or say something off the wall or at least be a fly on the wall when Lou Reed met Lester Bangs upstairs. Btw, this is what Lester had to say about Berlin:
What [“Berlin”] really reminds me of, though, is the bastard progeny of a drunken flaccid tumble between Tennessee Williams and Hubert (Last Exit from Brooklyn) Selby, Jr. It brings all of Lou’s perennial themes — emasculation, sadistic misogyny, drug erosion, twisted emotionalism of numb detachment from ‘normal’ emotions — to pinnacle.
It is also very funny – there’s at least one laugh in every song — but as in ‘Transformer,’ you have to doubt if the humor’s intentional. ‘Transformer’ was a masterpiece at least partially by the way it proved that even perverts can be total saps — whining about being hit with flowers, etc. — and this album has almost as many risible non sequiturs as that did: the heroine gets up from a beating and says that it’s ‘no fun… a bum trip,’ and the protagonist’s plaints draw a laugh just when they’re most spiteful.” – Lester Bangs, Creem magazine, December 1973
• Mike Watt – Belle Stabbed Man
• R.E.M. – Belong
• Unrest – Ben’s Chili Bowl
• Massive Attack – Better Things