Metal Machine Music is the only album I’ve ever loved without having ever once listened to it. I suppose I could listen to it, but do I look crazy to you? Only a masochist would actually LISTEN to Metal Machine Music, because everybody knows Metal Machine Music is unlistenable. Or (pick your favorite) insanely boring, intensely annoying, or just something blandly maddening in the background of your life, like a running toilet or a malfunctioning air conditioner.
Can a malfunctioning air conditioner be art? Is every annoying and grating and horrible noise under the sun actually art? I used to operate a jackhammer; did that make me an artist? Seriously, I want to know.
No, I will never listen to Metal Machine Music because listening to Metal Machine Music might cause me to fall out of love with Metal Machine Music, or even worse to hate Metal Machine Music, and I don’t want that. I want to go to my grave loving Metal Machine Music, and the only way to be sure that happens is by never, ever listening to Metal Machine Music and finding out that Metal Machine Music is 64 minutes and 11 seconds of sonic tedium and totally blows, which I basically already know.
I guess what I’m saying is that I love Metal Machine Music in the abstract. I love it because of what it says about the meaning of art and more particularly the artistic pretentions of Lou Reed, and the sheer unmitigated gall of Lou Reed, and the lunatic grandiosity and pure self-loathing of Lou Reed—to (1) put two guitars in front of two very large amplifiers, then let the feedback from said amps cause the guitar strings to vibrate, in effect turning them into zombies (and wasn’t Lou Reed a zombie?) forced to play themselves, and then (2) release the resulting sonic palaver as a rock album, for all of Lou Reed’s hardcore fans to blindly run out and buy, without so much as a clue that what they were buying wasn’t a rock album at all but a larval insectile hum.
The question is, why did Lou do it? Was it because Lou Reed so hated Lou Reed—according to one observer, Reed was convinced he’d lost his talent after 1970—that it was plain as day to Lou Reed that anybody dumb enough to love Lou Reed deserved to be shit on the way Lou Reed shit on Lou Reed, by shooting himself up with enough speed to become an insect or conversely drowning himself in enough hard liquor to become a horrid and bloated horror?
And by shit on, I mean being suckered into paying good green for a so-called “rock” album by Lou Reed that one critic called about as exciting as “a night in a bus terminal” without being given so much as a heads up by Lou Reed that the “music” contained within said album was so much tuneless noise? (Although he claimed he wanted a label placed on the album reading, “Warning: No vocals. Best cut: none. Sounds like: static on a car radio.”)
Was Reed’s intention in making Metal Machine Music basically a hostile act of self-hatred turned outward? In this scenario, a self-loathing Lou Reed gives the middle finger to Lou Reed’s most faithful fans for committing the high crime of loving Lou Reed. Reed himself once called Metal Machine Music “a great fuck you” to all those fans who wanted to hear “Vicious” and “Walk on the Wild Side,” which after all are songs he wrote, which lends credence to the idea of Metal Machine Music as a gesture of comtempt by Lou Reed directed at those fans stupid enough to idolize Lou Reed. Critic Lester Bangs concurred with Reed’s assertion that MMM was an act of hostility, saying, “As a statement it’s great, as a giant FUCK YOU it shows integrity—a sick, twisted, dunced-out, malevolent, perverted, psychopathic integrity, but integrity nevertheless.”
Or was it the grandiose Lou Reed who put out Metal Machine Music, totally convinced that it was High Art, like the Mona Lisa or Beethoven’s Ninth? Reed, who once claimed (speedfreak bullshit, says I) that Metal Machine Music took him six years to make, and on another occasion hilariously suggested the album should have cost “$79.99,” often indicated as much.
“I just think it’s one of the most remarkable pieces of music ever done by anybody,” he said on one occasion. He also said, “That album is as close as I ever came to perfection,” which says something about Lou Reed, namely that for him perfection was a tuneless hum containing none of the personality or “poetry” of Lou Reed, which leads us in a big circle back to the concept of the album as an act of self-loathing, because who but a guy who really despised himself would call an album without the slightest trace of himself on it his best ever?
As for his fans, Lou said, “If they don’t like it, they can go eat rat shit.” Except that at other times Reed claimed that the LP was never intended as a fuck you to his fans, but rather the result of a big misunderstanding. In this scenario, Reed claimed that Metal Machine Music was a difficult conceptual album not intended for his core audience at all. It was meant, rather, for experimental classical fans of La Monte Young and the like.
Reed claimed that he, and in turn his fans, were duped; that RCA scammed him (and in turn, them) by assuring him that the conceptually brilliant Metal Machine Music should and would be released on RCA’s Red Star classical label, only to turn around and release it as a regular rock album. Hence if Lou’s fans were unhappy, it wasn’t his fault! And his story does have its basis in truth, with some very funny differences.
In Reed’s telling of the story, the RCA exec who first listened to Metal Machine Music was ecstatic, blown away, stunned. The executive in question recalls things a bit differently. “As soon as he came walking into my office,” said the RCA honcho, “I could see this guy was not well-connected with reality.” Of Metal Machine Music itself the exec said, “Jesus Christ, it was fuckin’ torture music.” In his account he told Reed the album would be released on the Red Seal label simply to buy time, because he knew it was a rock fiasco in the making and wanted to find out what his thought should be done with this potential boondoggle. He then handed Reed a bunch of classical LPs, “in the hope that he’d write better stuff next time.”
And it was definitely the grandiose and delusional Lou Reed who told Lester Bangs that if you just listened to Metal Machine Music closely enough you would hear passages of the works of classical composers, although he never definitively stated whether he somehow put them there or whether said composers put themselves there, from the Great Beyond, because Beethoven and Brahms and Company could conceive of no higher honor than making a cameo on a Lou Reed album, even if the only person who ever heard them on said Lou Reed album was Lou Reed himself.
In one of their hilarious interview sessions, a wasted Lou Reed told a wasted Lester Bangs, “If people don’t realize how much fun it is listening to Metal Machine Music, let ‘em go smoke their fucking marijuana, which is just bad acid anyway, and we’ve already been through that and forgotten it. I don’t make records for fucking flower children.”
And this gets, I think, to the real reason I love Metal Machine Music more than any other Lou Reed album or more than any album ever made by any musician in the history of mankind. Because it inspired Lou Reed, who was at heart a comedian (as his comedy album, 1978’s Live: Take No Prisoners proves) and not a rock artist at all, to the hardy-har-har heights. He was never so funny, or so full of bullshit, or so hilariously arrogant as he was when he was talking about Metal Machine Music. It brought out the Lenny Bruce in him. Metal Machine Music was his best material, his Henny Youngman “Take my wife, please.”
Or perhaps the real “real” reason I love Metal Machine Music is because it has a great cover, one of the best titles ever, and you can’t dance to it. Or maybe you can. I once heard that ants love Metal Machine Music. They love it more than a good picnic even. And they dance to it. Metal Machine Music is their idea of a sock hop. I doubt this is true because I just made it up, but if Lou Reed was an insect, which is what I think Lou Reed thought he was, then who knows? I suspect he considered it his perfect album because it hums like an insect, and if it hums like an insect then maybe ants really do love it. They do line dances to the damn thing. Congas, the Twist, you name it. Forget about Adam Ant; Metal Machine Music is the real Ant Music.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A for Ant!
