Life on the underside5 Out Of 5 Stars
By taking all the romantic aspects out from the musical visions others may have had concerning New York City, the Velvet Underground upended the NY Art scene by recording an album about kinky sex, mad drug use, pimps and dealers and femme fatales. Andy Warhol attached himself to the band's skewed vision and began to shepherd them, bringing singer/model Nico along. In 1967, The Velvet Underground and Nico was released, and during the Summer Of Love, nobody really got it. But as the famous quote (accredited to Brian Eno) goes, the Velvet Underground may not have sold many albums, but everyone who bought a copy formed a band.
Nowadays, the album is heralded as a seminal piece of the rock and roll puzzle, and listening to it years later will surprise you as to just how well the album has held up. The center of attentions were singer/songwriter Lou Reed and multi-instrumentalist and art-music fan John Cale. They teased and tormented conventional pop structures while still delivering hooky songs (like "Sunday Morning" or the haunting "All Tomorrow's Parties") before Cale would whip out a viola and draw his bow across some squealing noise ("Black Angel's Death Song"). There's even the fact that Nico's voice had just a mysterious quality to it that added to her allure. When she emotes on "Femme Fatale" that you're just a clown, it drawls out as "clowan."
But what attracted the bulk of the attention (and still does to this day) was the way the band cavalierly treated the dark underbelly of sex and drugs. Reed's "Venus In Furs" explicitly describes the trappings of an SM ritual with a mistress who wants you to "kiss the boots of shiny leather." The fixation of drugs in "Waiting For My Man" and the actual rush of using in "Heroin." There is the push-pull of addiction in an unromantic light that is positively brutal in its almost journalistic qualities. The Beatles were singing about a day in the life, Reed was saying "heroin be the death of me."
It's that kind of non-romantic bluntness that makes the best material on "The Velvet Underground and Nico" so compelling. While the group (it should be added that Maurene Tucker was the first great female rock drummer) rode the pulse of primitive and proto-punk music, they'd lose Nico by the next album and find their way to even more abrasive topics on "White Light White Heat." All the VU albums that featured the line up of Cale, Reed, Tucker and bassist Doug Yule are essential listening, this is the first step off a very steep cliff. Even today, it can be a difficult listen, but it is one of those kind of albums that bent the musical direction of bands to follow.
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