Ian Penman on the Velvet Underground and Will Hermes’s new biography, “Lou Reed: The King of New York,” which offers an inconclusive portrait of the singer.
That mingling of high and low society, penthouse and pavement, was a distinguishing mark of the surrounding scene, where there was a self-conscious glorying in things sleazy. “Scum” and “punk” were terms of approbation. Values upended, à la Genet: what straight society considers irredeemably low, raised on high. People disporting themselves like minor French nobility in the Versailles of Louis XVI, against a backdrop of shooting galleries and cruising strips.
And it is all the more devastating for being delivered in something like a crooner’s lilt from another era. Reed wrote it with Bettye Kronstad, whom he’d met in 1968, when she was a nineteen-year-old undergraduate at Columbia. At first, the song was called “Just a Summer’s Day,” but Reed’s haunting coda, “You’re going to reap / Just what you sow,” turns it into something far more unnerving. Reed had a saving economy with words; he often wrote like he was sending telegrams to a new lover.
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