Lou Reed - Metal Machine Music

Lester Bangs, who is in my mind as much the creator of this music as Reed himself, so extensive and potent were his descriptions and defense of the record, used to call this the greatest rock and roll album ever made. Maybe. Then again maybe -- and I think it probably is -- this is the greatest ambient music, therefore easy listening, therefore New Age album ever made. I don't really mean to make the three descriptors synonymous, but to point out that each seduces the listener with a version of the oceanic experience: ecological ("become the wallpaper"), sensual, and spiritual. And, like much New Age music, Reed's obviously "ugly", "messy" and repetitious Metal Machine Music is a projection of a cosmic perspective. Heard in slow motion as it should be, its energies simultaneously spreading out into "good" and "evil" ends, it reminds me most of gamelan music, that massing of ambiguously tempered percussion in parables on the creation and destruction of entire worlds.

Forget for a second Lou's liners, mostly full of technobunk and engineering tidbits, which, by 2003, seem the province of sonic archaeologists and not the dedicated listener. Forget the symbolism of the amine ring and the methamphetamine glare of the conceptual gestures here. Forget, too, the dirt-devil of controversy this record kicked up (a pair of size 5 Keds jigging a tantrum in the sandbox), the talk of contract-breaking and intellectual property sabotage (pre-globalization era). Discard the notion that this music aims methodically, in the most austere terms, to interrogate all our assumptions about tonality and the basic coherence of sounds-as-music (really, Metal Machine Music inflates these assumptions to the point of bursting) or to lay the foundation for a new genre. The record is no manifesto, not even a work of great intellectual consequence. No rebellion, no incarnation of rock n' roll spirit, no punk middle finger, no grime-streaked window looking in on the tenement flat that is Lou's soul. Even forget the idea that this is essentially electronic music.

Remember instead the quintessentially human indulgence of this record. There's an innocence or strangely secretive, grinning trust in this noise that wants so badly to bug you and tries so hard to win your attention. If you have access to the original vinyl issue, this is even more apparent as you hit side four of the 2-LP set and find that a glitch has been pressed into the final grooves, making the last, most recognizable riff repeat until you intervene and rip the stylus off the playing surface or unplug the damn turntable. The "machine" of the title isn't just one "machine" -- the record player -- either. The primary instrument by which this music is expressed isn't the guitar, with all its richness of modern cultural associations from Picasso and Wallace Stevens to Elvis and Hendrix. We also have all these images stored in our mind about the outer workings of a guitar, strumming, picking, hammering, bar-whanging, all the air guitar moves... perhaps it more proper to say we have on file in some not collective but common consciousness images of how the hands and arms and shoulders interface with the guitar. And Reed had already redefined rhythm guitar playing in the Velvet Underground. Yet none of these "techniques" relate that much to the sound of Metal Machine Music, because Reed's real instrument here is the amplifier, the machine that can act with seeming independency, and, by the same token, can be controlled by a vaster array of performance variables. You have to know that many of these sounds were unleashed and shaped by Reed's distance from the amp. The chemical, musculoskeletal and magnetic human figure acts as one mere working is a larger aesthetic system, or a machine enlarged but still imitating in its gadgetry and precisions our own imaginative inaccuracies.

Without having to label Metal Machine Music innovative or unprecedented, it is still fair to say that it is a rare achievement in experimentation. If Metal Machine Music is beautiful, and I feel that it is, that beauty exists by virtue of the music's fundamental simplicity. Here is a lone, huge central vibration -- a primary pulse ties all the sounds, left channel, right channel, together -- seen from the vantage point of every one of its outward-spreading ripples. But how to square this circle whose other curve is the sense that the work is much too much? I ask: what could be more extravagant than such dogged adherence to a single method? Is there anything more indulgent than basing a discrete series of variations on an immersion in your own accidents, and not so much the causes and consequences of those accidents, but the very transient identity of those accidents? Ultimately, for all its sonic and homological tricks, some of them impossible to duplicate with compact digital media, and despite the incredible laminations of tape manipulations and mixing glazes Reed applied in post-production, Metal Machine Music is somatic music. You know how when you know a body is altering the flow of possibilities because an imperfection is present in the visible pattern, like a bulge raised by a submerged boulder in the middle of a coursing river. Or a blotch like a hole not in but superimposed upon the space between your shaded eye and the rays of the sun. If Metal Machine Music is not quite a monument to indeterminacy, its a dance of passivity, a temporary surrender of consciousness to the medium, a surrender that increases exponentially the implications for future action.

~Joe Milazzo