Reed always portrayed the five-album career of the Velvets as a noble tragedy in the classical sense it is with good reason that Steve Hamelman began his obituary of Reed in these pages with Aristotle (53).
In 1987, Lou Reed told music executive Joe Smith that he felt the purpose of the Velvets was “to elevate the rock & roll song and take it where it hadn’t been taken before” (qtd in Grow n.p.). And few bands, particularly in the late 1960s, have made authenticity such a central component of their public identity as did the Velvet Underground. And of course rock music, even at its most commercial and contrived, has always foregrounded its relationship to authenticity-such a claim perforce underlies any notion of rock music as “a vehicle for aesthetic and social liberation” (Burns 1).
The question of authenticity plays a central role in the history of cultural studies generally and popular music studies specifically. Not surprisingly, it is this question of truth that orients my thinking regarding the Velvet Underground. It felt so modern-I had to look at the back of the record to make sure it wasn’t a newer band” (qtd in Vozick-Levinson). It was like hearing something I’d always wanted to hear. Beck, for example, commented that, when he first heard the song in the 1980s, “I’d never heard anything like it. Many Velvets fans can recount similar experiences of introducing new listeners to their music. She was surprised to learn the album was first released in 1967. Just moments ago, my partner’s younger sister, a 22-year-old hip-hop fan who had never heard of the Velvets before today, remarked to me as “Venus in Furs” came on that she really liked its groove. My 1985 reissue languishes on a shelf in a home-made record cover after the original was destroyed in a flood, but in the intervening years I have managed to collect several different copies of various iterations of the album, including the 1968 reissue and the 2000 yellow vinyl reissue that I am playing in the background as I type. Thirty years later the album still packs some of that punch. Nevertheless, the record sounded utterly new to me-raw, primal, forceful, enchanting, and real-in a way that made me completely rethink my understanding of rock and roll. I had already been exposed to punk, industrial, and new wave, and “college rock” was already a thing indeed, by that point Brian Eno’s well known comment about the record’s influence was three years old, and I had already heard a good number of the bands he was referring to. I had heard of Lou Reed before and was already familiar with Nico’s voice on “Femme Fatale,” but it was not until 1985 that I heard the album from start to finish. Polygram had just re-released The Velvet Underground & Nico, and I, like many of my friends, had this record on heavy rotation. What I did know was that I was discovering the music of the Velvet Underground. In the mid-1980s I was an undergraduate student who knew nothing of Frith or his call for low theory.
#Lyrics rock and roll the velvet underground professional#
In the intervening 30 years, we have seen the emergence of an entire field of popular music studies, with all the associated institutional and professional apparatus that accompanies any academic discipline, including journals, organizations, conferences, archives, and even the occasional tenure-track position.
This third category, “low theory,” reflects, as John Shepherd puts it, the “nascent, common-sense theory through which popular musicians, record industry personnel, rock journalists and consumers make sense of and legitimate their worlds” (306). Much has changed in rock music studies since the mid-1980s, when Simon Frith called for a category of popular music criticism to bridge the gap between “high theory” as was generally practiced by British scholars and the “empirical studies” that were more common across the pond (Shepherd 306). The Velvets’ first album produces meaning precisely through this dialectical tension in a manner made possible only through its mediation in the commodity form. I propose that we instead examine these discourses as themselves signifiers that can be manipulated by artists. I contend that much of the discourse about authenticity in popular music is hampered by the assumption that artifice and authenticity are incompatible.
A close textual analysis of The Velvet Underground & Nico functions as an entry into theoretical arguments about truth and meaning in popular music. This project emerges from the tension between these identities. While much ink has been spilled explaining the original and authentic genius that is the Velvet Underground, an equally compelling case can be made that the band’s first album marked a turn towards insincerity and inauthenticity in popular music. Musicians, journalists and academics often hold up the Velvet Underground as the paragon of authenticity in rock music, and the band indeed portrayed itself this way from the outset.
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