Lou Reed: The Life

Lou Reed: The Life, by Mick Wall, is a book I found by turns frustrating and interesting.

About the first quarter of the book is a furious hagiography; furious because the author appears to feel Reed is in some way under-recognised and under-appreciated (an idea which seems absurd), and because Wall appears to have taken every slight Reed ever suffered as personally as though it were levelled at him. While this part of the book has some interesting insights and biographical information about Reed, it’s hard to get over the fact that Wall’s writing is the equivalent of a slightly drunk, very impassioned, and perhaps dangerously angry fan cornering you at a party to yell at you about their hero. It’s not just tiring, it’s tiresome.

If you can make it past the opening stanza, the book settles into a more balanced tone, perhaps unsurprisingly at the point where Reed begins to tread his own upward path. Here it is genuinely interesting; Reed’s work with the Velvet Underground, the reactions to their work, his life in New York, and his interactions with Andy Warhol and the Factory, and so on are documented and explored. Wall is more willing to offer a balanced perspective on Reed here, too, with perhaps a more accurate recounting of his subjects faults and foibles as well as his undoubted strengths.

Alas it doesn’t continue that strong work through to the end; in the final stretch it swings back to the earlier anger: even as it describes how Reed’s contribution to popular music is widely recognised the tone is one of anger that it ever wasn’t, as though Wall wants to settle scores that Reed himself had given up fighting about.

Another thing that grated for me is Wall’s use of anti-gay and anti-trans slurs, particularly in the latter part of the book. The intent is, perhaps, to evoke the attitudes that were contemporary to the periods Wall is describing, but they were ugly and out of place; nowhere else in the biography does Wall suddenly drop into the language of decades past to seem cool or evocative. Most unpleasant.

Overall, then, I found parts of the bio interesting and it taught me something about Reed and music, so it qualifies as an interesting read; I cannot, however, highly recommend it given it’s flaws.

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