Fifty years in the past this month, Lou Reed close toly destroyed his personal profession with one double album. Metal Machine Music offered 100,000 copies during the three weeks of summer 1975 between its launch and its removing from the market. Quite a lot of of the numerous purchaseers who immediately returned it could have been count oning somefactor like Sally Can’t Dance, Reed’s solo album from the previous yr, whose slickly professionalduced songs went down easier than anyfactor he’d documented with the Velvet Belowfloor. What they heard after they put the brand new album on their turntables (or inserted the Quadrophonic 8‑monitor tape into their decks) was “nothing, absolutely nothing however screaming feedagain noise documented at various frequencies, performed again in opposition to various other noise layers, break up down the middle into two wholely sepaprice channels of utterly inhuman shrieks and hisses.”
That description comes from voluble Creem rock critic and avowed enthusiast of decadence Lester Bangs, who additionally happened to be one among Metal Machine Music’s most fervent defenders. At one level he declared it “the goodest document ever made within the history of the human eardrum.” (“Number Two: Kiss Alive!”)
A lot of what we all know concerning the intentions behind this baffling album come from Bangs’ writings, including those who purport to transcribe conversations with Reed himself, who’d been one of many critic’s learniest verbal sparring halfners. The inspiration, as Reed defined to Bangs, got here from listening to composers Iannis Xenakis and La Monte Younger, who dared to transcend the surearies of what most listeners would consider music in any respect. Reed additionally insisted that he’d deliberately inserted bits and items of Mozart, Beethoven, and other classical masters into his sonic maelstrom, although Bangs clearly didn’t purchase it.
“Metal Machine Music doesn’t appear so bizarre now, does it?” requested an interviewer on Night time Flight only a decade or so after the album’s launch. “No, it doesn’t, does it?” Reed says. “In mild of Eno and all these things that got here out now, it’s not close toly as insane and loopy as they stated it was then.” Certainly, it sounds nearly of a bit with an influential work of ambient music like Brian Eno’s Music for Airports, although that album was meant to calm its listeners reasonably than drive them from the room. Over the half-century since its launch, Metal Machine Music has accrued sufficient appreciation to be paid tributes just like the stay performances by German ensemble Zeitkratzer which have continued lengthy after Reed’s demise. The legacy of his “electronic instrumalestal composition,” as he stated after one such concert in 2007, additionally features a titlesake clause in documenting contracts stipulating that “the artist should flip in a document that sound just like the artist that the document company signed — not are available in with Metal Machine Music.”
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Primarily based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His tasks embody the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the ebook The Statemuch less Metropolis: a Stroll by way of Twenty first-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social webwork formerly generally known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
