Only 35 people will read this thread, but they'll all make VU posts

March 11, 2017 12:41 PM

NPR: 800 Copies: Meet The World's Most Obsessive Fan Of The Velvet Underground and Nico

AV Club: The Velvet Underground & Nico at 50: Monumental album or just “fine”?
posted by porn in the woods (49 comments total)

Monumental. Now off to RTFA.
posted by chavenet at 12:45 PM on March 11, 2017 [11 favorites]

I think it's monumental but my husband thinks only white Americans think that and he probably has a point. He feels the same way about Bob Dylan.
posted by potrzebie at 1:06 PM on March 11, 2017 [6 favorites]

My favorite all-time think piece about this or any other album is from Iggy Pop: "The first time I heard it ... I just hated the sound. You know, 'HOW COULD ANYBODY MAKE A RECORD THAT SOUNDS LIKE SUCH A PIECE OF SHIT? THIS IS DISGUSTING! ALL THESE PEOPLE MAKE ME FUCKING SICK. FUCKING DISGUSTING HIPPIE VERMIN! FUCKING BEATNIKS, I WANNA KILL THEM ALL! THIS JUST SOUNDS LIKE TRASH!' Then about six months later it hit me, 'Oh my God! WOW! This is just a fucking great record!' "
posted by blucevalo at 1:20 PM on March 11, 2017 [22 favorites]

The Velvet Underground & Nico Is 50 Years Old But Still Sounds New

The Velvet Underground synthesized high and low culture to create something that bands still aspire to, even 50 years later. These are studied musicians who wrote songs with simple choruses and made amateurish music on purpose, who aimed to be both intellectual and unpretentious at the same time. In the beginning, they were more of an art project than a band, an experiment that would serve to remind other artists that there is no one way to be a band, that there is limitless potential for sound.
posted by saul wright at 1:24 PM on March 11, 2017

Monumental. One of my top 10 albums of all time.
posted by Grumpy old geek at 1:24 PM on March 11, 2017 [3 favorites]

Monumental. Like maybe 20 or so other albums, it irreparably changed popular music.
posted by jonmc at 1:28 PM on March 11, 2017 [8 favorites]

I read the article last week. I'm Team Monumental, yeah. But I like The Velvet Underground and White Light/White Heat better.
posted by droplet at 1:34 PM on March 11, 2017 [4 favorites]

potrzebie: "He feels the same way about Bob Dylan."

How does he explain those idolatrous Swedes?
posted by chavenet at 1:35 PM on March 11, 2017 [2 favorites]

TIL that "The Velvet Underground & Nico" is older than I am. For once, talking about music, I feel YOUNG.
posted by chavenet at 1:36 PM on March 11, 2017 [1 favorite]

VU&Nico is the proto- for a lot of stuff. Hard to make a case it's not monumental.

The little rock music I’ve listened to recently feels overly produced, like most modern music
Oh man. This is something that I've found deeply irritating with some follow-up records by indie bands recently. It's not just that the debut album is often composed by songs they've been rehearsing and playing long before pushing the album and so are "tighter", but often that debut is incredibly raw but everything that goes with it has the appropriate energy to go with it. Then they get "big", get access to better conditions and suddenly everything starts sounding more polished but the energy simply dies.
I find a lot of the "we only use analogue tape and vintage mixing desks to produce our blues-rock album" tecno-wankering of gold-plated cable audiophile levels, but just because in a digital daw there's always the option to add a third, slightly pitched harmonized guitar and whip out a faint string section in seconds doesn't mean that is a good idea.
posted by lmfsilva at 1:43 PM on March 11, 2017 [7 favorites]

Meh. White Light / White Heat was better.
posted by Jessica Savitch's Coke Spoon at 1:47 PM on March 11, 2017 [4 favorites]

Monumental. Without this record we wouldn't have the music of Jonathan Richman or The Strokes.
posted by Flashman at 1:49 PM on March 11, 2017 [1 favorite]

"It’s just not something I’d ever choose to put on—it’s music that I think is totally fine. It casts a mighty long shadow, so it’d be downright insane to say it’s not a major record, or that it isn’t important to a whole lot of people. I just don’t happen to be one of them." Yup.
posted by crush-onastick at 1:56 PM on March 11, 2017 [1 favorite]

Blunt truth from David Anthony (from the AVC article): "There’s the old saw that The Velvet Underground & Nico only sold 30,000 copies, but everyone who bought one started a band. And while that’s clearly a hyperbolic statement, I’ll make a similar one: Hearing those 30,000 groups before I heard the Velvets didn’t do them any favors." I mean, it's not unlistenable, but it hasn't held up the way that, say, Transformer has.
posted by Halloween Jack at 1:58 PM on March 11, 2017 [2 favorites]

How about all of the above? In terms of music history, you'd have to be kind of ignorant to say it's not monumental. But in terms of "hey, I feel like listening to an album, which one should it be?", the answer is not often VU and Nico. They're two different questions.
posted by kevinbelt at 1:59 PM on March 11, 2017 [5 favorites]

The way I remember it, David Bowie was doing some kind of mid-afternoon show on BBC Radio 1 presenting a selection of his favourite music—I think this would’ve been ca. ’83 or ’84, at any rate a little before the mid-’80s VU re-releases, compilations & what-not had properly introduced me to their music. One of Bowie’s picks was Venus in Furs. After a few seconds of the screechy viola sounds I thought what is this noise? and reflexively turned the radio off. About thirty seconds after that, the recollection of those same screechy viola sounds having tumbled around in my mind a few times, I reached back to switch the radio on again, thinking: what is this noise? That was one moment I can pinpoint where I could distinctly feel the sensation of my tastes broadening. I’ve not listened to TVU&N for quite a while, but it was a big deal for me for a long time: and I still think it’s a lot better than just “fine”.
posted by misteraitch at 2:02 PM on March 11, 2017 [9 favorites]

Err...
Ummm...
Honestly, I din't realize there was much of a difference between VU albums. I've never really paid them much attention. I've always thought of them as art school wanks in much the same way as the Talking Heads. I have friends that go crazy over this stuff, and just about anything that Lou Reed did, but aside from Metal Machine Music...

Well, meh. I mean, it's better than Journey and a whole lot of that schlock bullshit pushed on me as a kid, but not really something I've ever been drawn to, in the same way as say "Vincebus Eruptum" or or "Machine Gun Ettiquette".
Yeah I know, makes me less cool, but shit, I've never been cool, and I don't really care.
posted by evilDoug at 2:06 PM on March 11, 2017

The album pictured in the NPR article, the one with Lou Reed's autograph, has a hole punched in one corner. That's the way they used to do remaindered vinyl, kids. You could find bins of them in department stores and spend hours flipping through them and trying to rescue the one goody from the piles of crap. (I still treasure the Nick Lowe albums I discovered that way.)
posted by CCBC at 2:12 PM on March 11, 2017 [9 favorites]

I love it, but I think that has more to do with the time I first heard it and my age. I was a britpop fan and next to Be Here Now, The Velvet Underground & Nico sounded so cold and pure. If I were hearing it now for the first time, I don't think it would be anything special. I think it's pretty rare to be blown away by music once you're older and your tastes have become more set. Even if you keep up with new music, the teenage passion has faded.

I think it's monumental but my husband thinks only white Americans think that and he probably has a point. He feels the same way about Bob Dylan.

As someone who is not white, I can't even express how angry this makes me. I have been getting shit my whole life about liking the wrong things, not liking things in the right way, being the wrong race to like something, and I am tired. I've seen Dylan four times, and I was never the only poc in the audience.
posted by betweenthebars at 2:14 PM on March 11, 2017 [32 favorites]

Everybody thinks this album means "Heroin" and "Venus in Furs". But to me, it's the lovely pop numbers, "There She Goes Again", "Sunday Morning", "I'll be Your Mirror", and "Femme Fatale" that made this one of my favorite albums the year it came out. Also, the great, and tightly wound "European Son" -- makes its point without a lot of noise.
I love the album, but there's no reason any young person of today should need to listen to it.
posted by Modest House at 2:16 PM on March 11, 2017 [10 favorites]

I don't understand why it's referred to as the Torso Cover when what's shown is Eric Emerson's head and arms, not his torso, right? Turn the picture upside down, it becomes easier to see.
posted by crazy_yeti at 2:16 PM on March 11, 2017

I love this album and all of their albums each in an individual way. I adore The Velvet Underground (the third album with all the softer songs) the best. But I also love The Velvet Underground's whole odyssey, from this album to Loaded.
posted by Catblack at 2:19 PM on March 11, 2017 [1 favorite]

Perhaps this is a fundamental character issue, but I really don't understand "young people today would of course find [X] totally irrelevant".

First off, it doesn't map to my own experience as a young person at all - I spent a great deal of time listening to older music, reading older books, etc. "Relevant" doesn't mean "is a perfect reflection of your lived experience".

Second, I am given to understand that the kids today, thanks to the wonders of the internet, actually listen to old music even more than I did.

Third, when I was young I was actually quite interested in pastness - how did the past create the present? In what ways was the past bizarre and estranging? I'm not saying I was some super-scholarly person - mostly this just consisted of getting every album I could find from the discography in the back of England's Dreaming and trying to find a bunch of 1960s science fiction - and I think I wasn't particularly atypical for a Young Person.

Fourth, "oh the kids today would never be interested in that old thing" is something I think we say when we're kind of afraid of youth. "Kids today" are of course incredibly sophisticated and modern and with-it, and naturally they'd never be interested in the past, because the past is just kind of garbage, really.

I mean, I know some of the youth because I'm immature for my age and still socialize with them (tonight I am going to hear a musical performance with several people who are just barely old enough to drink) and they're great and everything, but they're not actually better than anyone else.

Team "I like the Velvet Underground, especially 'After Hours' and 'There She Goes Again'"
posted by Frowner at 3:02 PM on March 11, 2017 [15 favorites]

I love the album, but there's no reason any young person of today should need to listen to it.
I think it's important in terms of gaining perspective. There's a time when a genre becomes so bloated and saturated to make anything new you need to go back to the basics, and VU provide a working template for that.

If anything, it's one of the most important albums ever. If I was blown away listening to the first time 15 or 16 years ago, it can still be for a slightly younger generation. That doesn't they should listen to it every day - I sure as hell spend months without going near it, and usually WL/WH is my go-to choice for a VU fix.
posted by lmfsilva at 3:05 PM on March 11, 2017 [1 favorite]

I don't think there's a cover of Femme Fatale I haven't liked. Even if they always pronounce clown wrong.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 3:11 PM on March 11, 2017 [2 favorites]

I own two copies of this on vinyl -- one in stereo and one mono, because that's the way we roll (or, I guess, in this case, spin) in this house. I love this album. I heard it pretty late (I wasn't alive when it came out, to begin with, and probably only heard the whole thing about 5 years ago, maybe). Is it "monumental"? It's certainly incredibly important and influential. Do I think it's the best album of all time? No, but I still really enjoy listening to it.

I also like a lot of VU's other output, but this is the one I tend to go back to the most often, honestly.
posted by darksong at 3:15 PM on March 11, 2017

Fantastic album, and I agree with Modest House, the poppier songs don't get enough attention. For me it's definitely in the "really listenable, not just historically important" category. The article mentions Sgt. Pepper's, now that's one that I never find myself actually wanting to listen to, despite the obvious importance--given a choice I'd always put on VU & Nico instead.

White Light / White Heat has better high points ("I Heard Her Call My Name" is just amazing) but it also has "The Gift" which is terrible, and if you skip that then the album's only like 25 minutes long...
posted by equalpants at 3:18 PM on March 11, 2017 [2 favorites]

Not available in the early 80's.....No.The success of Bowie's Let's Dance was the catalyst for the rerelease of the Ziggy Stardust concert movie and soundtrack, which included part of VU's White Light, White Heat.

I was able to find cassettes of all VU albums in 1983.
posted by brujita at 3:32 PM on March 11, 2017

Monumental in a way very, very few other musical documents or events ever have been.

Larry Levan's first set at the Continental Baths, the legendary Lesser Free Trade Hall Sex Pistols show, arguably the Ramones gig in London a month later: these events set entire genres in motion, transformed the affective and physical structure of millions of individual psyches, injected powerful mutations into the aesthetic DNA of a generation, almost incidentally generated enormous amounts of revenue for everyone but the actual innovators responsible, and caused the entire culture to pivot around them for a few moments in time, if obscurely to all but a few. The Velvet Underground & Nico is an artifact of this rare order.
posted by adamgreenfield at 3:35 PM on March 11, 2017 [3 favorites]

And it remains essential, too. I listen to it in full and in depth at least once a month, and virtually all of the tracks but for "Run Run Run" and (big surprise) "European Son" are in heavy rotation always. I want "Sunday Morning" played at my funeral, where I expect it will still be giving up new depths of loveliness.
posted by adamgreenfield at 3:39 PM on March 11, 2017

As a younger-ish millennial I'm super grateful that some older family and friends introduced me to The Velvet Underground, among other important/essential listening. Honestly, The Velvet Underground managed to produce music both cutting edge and complete, that even now it's still very relevant. Every listen feels fresh. The Velvet Underground and Nico in particular is one of those albums that didn't just age well, it feels like it hardly aged at all. There's some landmark albums that while wonderful, they feel more like kitsch. But the VU still feels cool and new and weird on every listen.

Also, I like "The Gift".... but I also like spoken word poetry and performance art so my tastes are just in the artistic gutter I guess.
posted by InkDrinker at 4:06 PM on March 11, 2017 [1 favorite]

You can draw a straight line from "I'll Be Your Mirror" to "Here Comes Your Man." I've always thought of it as a Pixies song waiting for Pixies. So, yes, monumental and Secret Success.
posted by infinitewindow at 4:17 PM on March 11, 2017 [4 favorites]

The secret of "The Gift" is that it's two separate pieces of roughly the same length. Cale's short story is in the left channel, the boogie jam is in the right channel. Pick the one you'd rather listen to, or use the balance control to make it a noise number with secret messages or a spoken word performance with atmospheric sounds.
posted by ardgedee at 4:21 PM on March 11, 2017 [5 favorites]

Perfect post title.
posted by 41swans at 4:34 PM on March 11, 2017 [1 favorite]

It's impossible for me to say if it's a "good" album or not as I've been listening to it for 20 years, but I can say that it made a lot of weird teenagers feel better about themselves, 30 and 40 and 50 years later, and that in itself is indicative of... something.
posted by Automocar at 4:43 PM on March 11, 2017 [5 favorites]

man, david anthony sums it up for me (This is a bit more than Halloween Jack had upthread): There’s the old saw that The Velvet Underground & Nico only sold 30,000 copies, but everyone who bought one started a band. And while that’s clearly a hyperbolic statement, I’ll make a similar one: Hearing those 30,000 groups before I heard the Velvets didn’t do them any favors. I don’t think VU & Nico is a bad record, but for it me it wasn’t some soul-shaking revelation when I’d already heard so many other bands build on the Velvets’ foundation before ever seeing the blueprints. It’s a record that, when I hear it, I can understand how powerful it was in 1967, kickstarting several dozen different musical revolutions. But it’s never been that record for me.

I played (badly) in a couple of bands as a teenager and i think we were maybe trying to sound like people trying to sound like this album to an extent, but whenever I make a go at getting into it, I can't. I realize there's a throughline from this album to a bunch of stuff I DO like but I just can't get too worked up about it. So, I guess put me in the "it's fine" camp.

(if we get to nominate later albums that seem fresh and like a revelation still today, I am going to nominate Doolittle and Tim but feel free to tell me my favorite album sucks in that grand ol' metafilter style)
posted by dismas at 4:50 PM on March 11, 2017

So much of the 80s onward NZ underground scene is directly indebted to VU and especially that first album. Even the instances of downright aping are usually charming as all hell.



(With a band name taken from Leonard Cohen no less!)
posted by dreamlanding at 5:07 PM on March 11, 2017 [1 favorite]

In 1979 (when I was 17 and getting into music) through to 1984 (when it became available again) in New Zealand you could not get a copy. Not new. Not second-hand. I once got WH/WL out from the library for a couple weeks, but didn't really appreciate it. But there was no way to even LISTEN to the songs. I only knew about VU and these albums from reading about them. You might hear some of them via Lou Reed's later solo stuff, but that was all.

My friend rang me and said there were copies of VU & Nico IN THE RECORD STORE, and did I want a copy, and YES I DID, and he basically went straight back into town and the store and bought up both copies. We were scared it would disappear again.

And I never formed a band or became a rock critic, but yeah, listening was transformational. I probably listen to the third album more nowadays, but this was the first I owned and I adore it.
posted by maupuia at 5:16 PM on March 11, 2017 [4 favorites]

Indeed, it is a great post title. I guess I'll stick my neck out as one of the more "meh" minded people when it comes to the album. I'm a fan of John Cale, and think some of the songs, are solid or better, like Femme Fatale, but always found Lou Reed to be pretty unbearable and the "legend" of this album to far outreach its merits.

I obviously can't deny it has significant influence as I couldn't measure such a thing even if I wanted, and enough bands have claimed the album as important to them for me to more or less accept the statement as true enough. How important influence is, however, is more of an open question that can't be easily be answered. So as a measure it isn't an important one for me beyond noting it's there.

Just looking at the other albums of 1967, I don't see this as a significantly more important debut than, say, Hendrix's Are You Experienced, Sly Stone's A Whole New Thing, The Doors, Pink Floyd's The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, Songs of Leonard Cohen, Parton's Hello I'm Dolly, John Mayall's The Blues Alone or Captain Beefhart's Safe as Milk in terms of either influence or quality. And even if you look for albums as unusual or experimental, Van Dyke Parks debut, Song Cycle, and Red Krayola's The Parable of Arable Land, are right there in quality and boldness, Beefhart too.

Expand the selection to other albums from the year that are also excellent without concern for influence and the distinction VU hold is even harder for me to justify. I far prefer The Incredible String Band for their raw experimental feel, though it isn't at all "gritty". There were a number of excellent so-called psychadelic albums released that year, which points to the the rise of drug culture, a different sort perhaps than Reed's, but one where making references to drugs was hardly an event of immense importance as it was everywhere in the culture at the time. Reed is just more blunt, something I personally don't hold as a mark in his favor exactly. Great guitar players were also all over the place that year, so musicianship was not lacking in either traditional nor experimental measure.

The importance of the album then seems to rest in a fairly narrow niche defined as much by the music it influenced as it own merits and how the appreciation for some of the adjectival notings of that merit have often found their way to the forefront of music writing due to some uniformity of influence on who got to write music criticism for many years. "Raw" and "gritty" aren't inevitably tied to quality, often the opposite, and writing about drug use and sex, no matter how outre, is also no intrinsic merit, nor flaw necessarily of course.

The album is noteworthy. It's musically interesting, unusual, and has some real moments of beauty to it. It's famous for being not famous despite it being connected to plenty of fame and thus notice with Warhol and that scene. Other albums that might have been influential didn't get that break and didn't get heard or those that did weren't necessarily in "cool" genres critics dug. That's how it goes, and we all have our own tastes, but for me this album wouldn't be one of my top twenty of the year, even though I think it does have real merits of its own and is historicially important to later developments.
posted by gusottertrout at 5:21 PM on March 11, 2017 [2 favorites]

TVTropes has Seinfeld is Unfunny. Pop music has Velvet Underground is Boring. Coming at the Velvets' discography from a modern perspective, I can see why the AV Club's reviewers were unimpressed, but they are responsible for the revolution that rock music underwent in the late 60s and 70s, and are direct precursors of my favorite artists of that era (Bowie, Eno, Heads, Clash, Costello) much more than, for instance, the Beatles, their more polished, populist and British cousins. Throw me in the monumental camp, even if I prefer the self-titled album and, though it makes me a rock heretic, Loaded.
posted by enjoymoreradio at 5:36 PM on March 11, 2017

While this was an incredible debut, I prefer the other 3 official VU LPs (Squeeze doesn't count.) Nico always kinda grated on me and I'm glad she left before White Light/White Heat.
posted by porn in the woods at 5:43 PM on March 11, 2017

I think the first album suffers from all of the mythologizing around it and it's connections to Warhol's late 60s NY art world. VU's influence on the American and international underground/independent music scenes is well documented and extends beyond their first LP. Hell, there are bands that have based their entire sound around Sterling Morrison's guitar style. Obviously, the VU's influence is specific and I'd say it's been marginal on the "mainstream," however that can be defined. But take their 4 albums together and it's a pretty astounding to consider their reach/impact. Granted, it's perfectly fair to have little or no interest in their work/sound or the music they've influenced but that's different than having a coherent opinion. If you don't even really like the band how can you even begin to understand its influence. Of course they'd feel minor!

With that said, I barely ever listen to the first album as a whole anymore. It feels too weighed down by the history that's been imposed on it. The Velvet Underground are so good though. I HIGHLY recommend the Quine Tapes set for those interested in listening to them seriously jam.
posted by AtoBtoA at 5:53 PM on March 11, 2017 [2 favorites]

Never felt this way about Journey or Foreigner. I hear VU out in public somewhere and I'm hearing something transcendent, even aside from the fact that I've been listening to it since the early 80's.

When I go back and listen to other albums I listened to obsessively from the time of my life some still stand up (Bowie way more than I thought it would, LED Zeppelin less) but VU is still crazy and vital and beautiful in ways that are still surprising.

"Is it art? Or can we throw it away?"
"It's art."
"Alright then..."
posted by From Bklyn at 5:53 PM on March 11, 2017 [3 favorites]

I had a few Lou Reed albums and already had the later "VU" album... I was familiar through books and art school chat with the legend of the first album but it wasn't until around 1984 that I finally found a very scratchy looking copy....so I fully expected to like it before hearing it ....but still, Sunday Morning was a "needle dropping into the groove, then crackling, then utterly NEW and weirdly evocative sound hitting my brain" moment.
posted by bonobothegreat at 6:25 PM on March 11, 2017 [1 favorite]

Put me down for "monumental". But my favorite VU track will always be "Oh! Sweet Nuthin'".
posted by Hairy Lobster at 6:39 PM on March 11, 2017 [2 favorites]

It's monumental. I first heard this album driving back from a Phish concert. I hadn't known anything about Phish, and I had never heard "Run Run Run" before, but one was monumental and the other was mucus.
posted by kerf at 8:32 PM on March 11, 2017 [1 favorite]

Team Monumental. All of VU's work is great, but Velvet & Nico was a one-off, a rare catalyst of wildly divergent chemicals. It's more sedate, like trying to walk when you're extremely drunk. The other VU albums are more aggressive and frenetic.
And that influence went on to generate Jesus and Mary Chain, Black Angels, and much of other modern psychedelica.
The violas, the production, the more pop sensibilities- it all builds to create this bohemian romanticism, more glamorous and opaque than later works. I'd rather have heard the other albums performed in a live setting. But Velvet & Nico is like some hallucination dream of the parties you dreamed that city life would be about. It's one of the most seductive albums I know of.
posted by LeRoienJaune at 12:27 AM on March 12, 2017 [8 favorites]

Monumental, definitely. And I love Nico's voice on it, much as I enjoy the Nico-less VU albums.

I can understand hating it, and I can certainly understand loving it. I just don't get being "meh" about it any more than I can understand being "meh" about de Chirico's "Mystery and Melancholy of a Street" or Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red or Autechre's Chiastic Slide or Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios. It stands in front of you, and either stroking your face or slapping it, it demands reaction and engagement. Plus, it boasts one of the killer sides 1 in music history.

To an earlier point, I think it's easily in a class with Are You Experienced, The Doors and Songs of Leonard Cohen, which are also among my favorite albums. But TV&N, by contrast, is a real New York album, one of very few from that annus mirabilis that can claim that distinctionb, and special and excellent because of it.

(now up to "Run Run Run"...)
posted by the sobsister at 11:04 AM on March 12, 2017

It is epochal, important, life-changing and for me it is just a fantastic fucking album. I first heard it at maybe 14 or 15, so mid-80s, and I was just spiraling into a lot of things. It's a soundtrack to dizziness and worry, and to the wonder and danger that exist if you know where to look. To those spinny nights giving way to bleary mornings. Every time I hear it I am back there, but I am also here and now, and can appreciate it in both ways. All the first three albums are unassailable for me. I hold them holy.
posted by Kafkaesque at 12:40 PM on March 13, 2017