Graded on a Curve:
Lou Reed,
Mistrial

Mistrial? I say we try the album again and convict it this time because it’s guilty! Why, come to think of it, why don’t we do it now and get it over with! I’ll gladly serve as prosecutor! And I’ll settle for nothing less than the death penalty!

And rest assured I’ll be issuing peremptory challenges to the likes of knee-jerk Rock ’n’ Roll Animal apologists like Robert Christgau. He’d have acquitted an album of Lou sharting to the accompaniment of a calliope, while singing It’s a Beautiful Day’s “White Bird” in Farsi. Or worse, Lou rapping, as he does on Mistrial’s “The Original Wrapper.” In the original trial (I’ve studied the transcript carefully) the song was excluded from evidence on some legal technicality or other. Not this time.

Two Months Later

Well, it’s over. The trial was held at Manhattan Criminal Courthouse on January, 15, 2025, despite the defense’s attempt to have it held in American Samoa. A victory for yours truly, a bona fide attorney (I received my law degree from one of those children’s claw machines where you can win prizes like highly flammable teddy bears and bottles of highly combustible cheap tequila) because let’s face it—everybody in the Big Apple knows Lou Reed was an insufferable jerk. You could fill a book with people calling Lou Reed an insufferable jerk. Most of them were his friends, who tended to dive into open sewer grates at his approach because he possessed a gift for fucking over his friends that bordered on the supernatural, and which he actually acknowledges on Mistrial’s (1986) “Don’t Hurt a Woman”:

“I was angry, I said things I shouldn’t say
I must have lost control
Sometimes something clicks in my head
And I’m not myself anymore.”

A written confession if ever I’ve ever heard one.

But Lou Reed wasn’t on trial for being a truly lousy human being. Lou Reed wasn’t on trial at all. Mistrial was on trial for being a truly lousy album, and I intended to eviscerate the LP in my opening statement to the jury. The album itself was seated at the defense table dressed in a black Tom Ford suit with a gray Canali dress shirt and a Tom Ford men’s silk houndstooth tie, a strategic mistake seeing as how I’d managed to assemble a jury largely composed of bodega owners, janitors, and hard-up music critics, all of whom knew wealth when they saw it and wanted nothing more than to see it in prison orange. Yours truly was wearing a Pablo Cruise t-shirt and shorts. In part because I wanted to demonstrate that I’m a true man of the people, and in part because they were the only clothes I owned that weren’t covered in cat hair.

My opening statement was brief. I said, “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I thank you for your service. I know I’d sooner be listening to KC and the Sunshine Band, and so would you. But we’re here to perform an important societal purpose, and that is to see that the defendant, the Lou Reed album Mistrial, is no longer allowed to prey on the public at large.

What I intend to prove is simple: that Mistrial is boring, musically bland, and lyrically vapid. And that those tracks that aren’t boring, musically bland and lyrically vapid are frankly atrocious and even dangerous—we simply can’t have songs like ‘The Original Wrapper’ roaming the streets of New York City. Or Peoria or Bangor or Portland for that matter.

Your children, your grandmother, your dog walk those streets. Do you love your dog? Would you stand by while your beloved dog was run over by a bus? Or even worse, a song being driven by a Caucasian male who thinks he can rap? I am not talking about the Beastie Boys here. I am talking about an over-the-hill professional decadent who gave us the great ‘Sister Ray’–some ten thousand years ago.

“Did Mistrial bear a warning label saying ‘This Album Blows’? No. This is unconscionable. Would a manufacturer be allowed to sell a flamethrower without a warning label reading, “User could burn himself or his entire neighborhood to a crisp’? The law is clear. You cannot sell shoddy or dangerous goods to trusting people. It’s a form of violence to their bodies, their minds, and their musical tastes. And the state will prove that Mistrial is in violation of New York penal law § 120.10 subsection 43, Musical Assault and Battery in the First Degree.”

The defense made the predictable arguments. Mistrial was a commercial move, sure, but certainly there was nothing illegal about that. Its predecessor, 1984’s New Sensations, had cravenly rolled around on record store floors in pursuit of public approval as well, and it had received good reviews. The songs may not be Lou’s best, but nobody hits a homer every time out. There are people out there who like “Video Violence,” and have literally thrown their dog in front of it.

As for “The Original Wrapper,” okay, yeah, it was misguided, and hardly Lou’s most shining hour, but remember Madonna’s “American Pie”? Nobody put “American Pie” on trial. And nobody attempted to throw David Bowie’s 1987 stenchfest Never Let Me Down in the hoosegaw either. (Not true. I attempted to prosecute, but an obscure 1897 New York State statute forbidding the “unfair molestation of mimes or former mimes” made it impossible.) Besides, many contemporaneous reviews had been positive, or at the very least not scathing.

Fortunately, I had a great advantage over the defense—the album itself. The defendant may have been wearing a Tom Ford suit, but beneath that suit there squirmed a king rat of unlistenable duds. As for the contemporaneous reviews, they’d been written by a legion of hacks in thrall, as so many have been over the years, to Lou’s prehistoric days as the front man of an influential but highly unpopular group that sold exactly seventeen records during their active existence.

Case law was clear—past brilliance did not give an artist carte blanche to spend the rest of his or her career producing radioactive sludge that posed a risk to the public health. There are those who think White Light/White Heat posed a risk to our children. I would argue that Mistrial was a misfire that had been ricocheting against the walls of Western Civilization for decades, causing mass casualties. It could take an eye out. I’m sure it has taken eyes out. The CDC doesn’t keep figures on such things.

It’s a simple musical truth; put out a couple of great albums and you can dine out on them forever. After that it’s a simple matter of keeping the public off-balance with albums they can neither make heads nor tails off—see Berlin and Metal Machine Music. Done adeptly, they’ll forgive you for all manner of errant nonsense, a collaboration with Metallica included.

Even Bobby Christgau, who knew about that of which he spoke, once wrote, “Lou sure is adept at figuring out new ways to shit on people.” Not that it kept Bob from kissing the ass from whence said shit came in perpetuity. Even a critic willing to call him a lazy fraud and “death dwarf” (see Lester Bangs) to his face kept returning to his every new album like a dog chained to his vomit. Bangs made Lou Reed his favorite whipping boy, but did he ever give up on him? No. Like so many others, he believed the next Loaded was just around the corner.

So I turned to the jury and I said, “The defense would have you believe that Mistrial is an album like any other. The defense would have you believe that Mistrial’s only crime is that it was tailored to meet the mid-eighties demand for generic dreck. The defense would even have you believe that Mistrial has artistic merit. There is only one way to prove that the defense is trying to pass off a turd as a Thunderbird. At this time I would ask Mistrial to place itself upon the turntable.”

There was a hush in the courtroom as I put the needle down on the opening title track, an anonymous slice of hard rock complete with Everyman Guitar (could this be the same guy who played perhaps the most mind-bending guitar solo ever on “I Heard Her Call My Name”?) and a gigantic drum thump gratis the unknown J.T. Lewis. The song could have been by anyone, with the exception of anyone interested in writing an interesting song. The vocals were those of “strident Lou,” and the lyrics proved very little aside from the fact that he could spell “mistrial.” “I want to bring my case in front of the people of New York City,” he sings.

I let this sink in. “So let’s allow him to do that,” I said. “The song has zero musical merit. That guy in Three Dog Night could have written a better song mid-penis explosion. And what does everybody’s most revered NYC bard have to say? I would direct you to the lines, ‘You can call me mister, you can call me sir/But don’t you point your finger at me.’ These are the most interesting lines in the song. As for details, we get ‘When I was 30, my attitude was bad.’ Is this the work of a great ‘rock poet’? I’ve run across better from Patti Smith!”

I then turned to single “No Money Down.” Lame pop synthesizer, formulaic drum machine, perfunctory characterless saxophone. “It burbles along,” I told the jury, “like a stream of horse piss towards an aghast storm drain.” It was at this moment that a juror at the first trial had cried, “I can’t listen to it! It’s odious!” Result: mistrial. There was no such outburst this time, because I’d taped the jurors’ mouths shut. “Outside” had the same canned straight from a musical mass production line in a factory in a third-world country feel. “But the lyrics,” I said, “make it something special, because they’re as mindless as, well let me just quote a verse:

“Outside the politics of hate and greed, outside
Outside the world’s a mindless child, outside
But when I hold you in my arms
It’s a mindless child that you want
Inside, no matter ’bout the world outside
Inside, a baby is what you want inside.”

“So,” I said, “the world’s an idiot baby and Lou’s lover either wants to give birth to an idiot baby or wants Lou himself to be said idiot baby. The lines are ambiguous, but one thing is clear—Lou Reed has birthed an idiot baby of a song.”

At the defense table, Mistrial’s team of high-priced attorneys looked nervous.

“Then we have ‘Video Violence.’” I played it for the jury. “It has kick, doesn’t it? But listen to the lyrics. What we have here is the King of NYC depravity spending your valuable time going tsk-tsk over violence in America’s cinema like some cranky old coot deploring the advent of the talkies. And old fogey Lou doesn’t stop there. Evidently strip clubs, which upstanding citizens such as myself frequent on a daily basis, offend him the way they would a Baptist preacher from Peoria:

“Down at a bar, some woman is topless
She’s acned and scarred, her hair is a mess
While he shoves five dollars down her exotic panties
The video jukebox is, ah, playing Madonna.”

“Tits and Madonna! Lou would have you believe they have our country on the brink of collapse! As do zombie movies! Who doesn’t love a good zombie movie? Bill Murray, who should be President of our great country, has appeared in a zombie movie! I would submit that this is moralistic tripe and that Lou should marry Marjorie Taylor Greene and get it over with!”

“Objection!” cried the defense. “Even Marjorie Taylor Greene might balk at marrying a dead man! Although anything’s possible with that publicity-seeking fucktard.”

“Sustained,” said the judge.

“Moving on,” I said, “We have ‘Spit It Out.’ No choruses, no melody, just a drum machine and an angry Lou offering us timeless lines like ‘You gotta talk to him or her or it/And take aim with your mouth and spit/Spit it out, spit it out.’ It? Who or what is this ‘it’? And is he talking about speaking truth to power or just advocating gobbing? I would remind you that this is the same Lou Reed who gave us ‘Heroin’! Now he’s advocating expectoration as mental health therapy! But worst of all he plays guitar like a guy in a New Orleans bar band. There was a time when Lou could play guitar, and then there was a time when Lou could no longer play guitar but was smart enough to let Robert Quine play guitar, but by 1986 Lou had forever alienated Robert Quine and couldn’t find anybody else to play guitar which left Lou who could no longer play guitar to play guitar!”

It wasn’t one of my finest pieces of oratory as an attorney, and the jury had to ask the court to repeat what I’d said six times.

“I would like to have it entered into the record that I’m extremely inebriated,” I said.

“Duly noted,” said the judge.

I then returned to the attack. “I warn the jury that the song you’re about to hear, ‘The Original Wrapper,’ could render you sterile. Because 1.) Lou has all the rapping skills of Vanilla Ice’s retarded left testicle, and 2.) there are so many things wrongs with Lou’s rap that I don’t know where to begin. I will say in passing that he seems to have a real distrust for breakfast sausage. And then there’s this humdinger:

“Don’t mean to come on sanctimonious
But life’s got me nervous and little pugnacious
Lugubrious, so I give a salutation
And rock on out to beat real loud
Oh, poop, ah, doo and how do you do?
Hip hop gonna bop ’til I drop.”

The jury gasped behind the tape on their mouths. Mistrial averted.

“‘Oh poop, ah, doo and how do you do?’ Has the man been mainlining Screaming Yellow Zonkers? And who uses the word ‘lugubrious’ in a rap song, with the possible exception of W.H. Auden? He also makes it clear that MTV offends him, but who does that make him except everybody? This could well be the worst song ever and it sinks this album like a titanium turd. Lou talks about Reagan, Falwell, herpes, the most important issues of the time in short, and is there anyone who doesn’t long for the old cynical Lou who once said, ‘Give me an issue, I’ll give you a tissue, wipe my ass with it’?

“How do you follow a song like that, ladies and gentlemen of the jury? By retiring. Instead he follows it with the generic rocker “Mama’s Got a Lover.” I think we can all agree that the guitar is, uh, loud. And for the only time on the album Lou gives us an all-too-brief peek at his cutting wit, with the stanza that goes:

“Mama’s got a lover
I met him yesterday
she’s starting a new chapter
I wish she was on the last page
The last page.”

“Yes, hoping his mom dies in song is as close as Lou, who was if nothing else a wickedly funny guy, comes to a yuk on Mistrial.

On ‘” Remember You,” Lou sings the word “remember” 39 times and throws in a few other words just to prove remember isn’t the only word he knows. Lou remembers Lou, Lou remembers you, and that’s pretty much it. It’s a song about looking back brokenhearted guaranteed not to break your heart. Which brings us, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, to “Tell It to Your Heart,” which is as close as Mistrial comes to a song that doesn’t give me angina. It’s not a great song, I’m not even sure it’s a good song, and if I’m reading it correctly it’s about a lovely light in the sky that reminds Lou of his lover, only the light turns out to be a light being used to film a TV commercial. Or maybe I’m missing something.

One thing I’m not missing is the line, “We’re no teenage movie that ends in tragedy.” Immortal poesy, that. As is the line about his leather jacket “squeaking.” Lou, I hate to tell you, but your jacket is made of mice. I would also submit that if this is the best song on Mistria , what we have in Mistrial is an album whose rightful place is not in your record collection but in a cell on Rikers Island. It does not move me, this song. It does not make me want to listen to it again. To be honest, although we just heard it, I couldn’t hum it for you, which is a pity because I am a great hummer and you would love to hear my humming.

Mistrial is before you. You have heard its testimony. Reed himself described it as a ‘very positive’ album. Perhaps he was speaking in jest. I find it a very depressing album, and I’m not speaking just about the bummerific subject matter of songs like ‘Video Violence’ and ‘The Original Wrapper.’ I’m referring to its adamantine mediocrity, its stubborn refusal to rise above its station, its ruthless banality. It is composed entirely of songs that are either not memorable or you don’t want to remember. Could Robert Quine have saved this record? No. Could John Cale have saved this record? No. Could our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ have saved this record? No. It’s the mindless idiot of a baby that Lou sings about in ‘Outside.’ Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I rest my case.”

With this the defense attorney stood and said, “I would ask the defendant to put on the leather jacket he’s wearing on the cover photo.”

“I object, your honor!” I cried.

“Overruled,” said the judge. “I see no reason why the defendant should not put on the leather jacket.”

The defendant struggled to get into the too-small jacket.

The defense attorney smirked, approached the jury and said, “If the leather jacket doesn’t fit, you must acquit!”

“Well fuck me,” I said.

Mistrial walked out the door a free album you have to pay money for.

GRADED ON A CURVE:
D-

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