Blindspotting: "The Velvet Underground and Nico"

The Legacy: If this series goes on for another 20 years, I may not cover another album that needs less explanation than this one, but here goes anyway: The Velvet Underground's 1967 debut album, nominally produced by Andy Warhol and released following the band's performances during Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable tour, was greeted by rock critics with a combination of bewilderment, disdain, and — in certain quarters — guarded appreciation. Buyers were largely unaware of the album, due to a variety of factors that included widespread refusal to stock or advertise it, a lawsuit that led to its retraction from distribution for months, and, well, the fact that it really wasn't terribly radio-friendly. As a result, it lingered very briefly in the bottom reaches of the charts before dropping off completely — only to enjoy a steadily rising wave of reappraisal during subsequent decades, to the point that Brian Eno once famously quipped that although The Velvet Underground and Nico only sold 30,000 copies, everyone who bought it went out and started a band.

Why did so many retailers, magazines, and radio stations react so negatively to the record? Well, aside from a musical approach that made the VU a decidedly acquired taste from the get-go, there was also the small matter of lyrical content dealing frankly with scoring drugs, doing drugs, sadomasochism, and sex work, which was decidedly a no-no in polite society during the late '60s. Somewhat amusingly, the album's commercial failure led to some pronounced dissent in the band's ranks, which leads one to wonder what exactly they thought would happen when they released an occasionally grating proto-punk collection of songs into the world — but all's well that ends well, and today, The Velvet Underground and Nico is widely considered a classic.

First Impressions: It's hard to weigh in on an album like this, because all the things that make it spiky and weird and hard to fall in love with right away have long since been subsumed into the culture at large, to the point that it can end up sounding like an inferior prequel to all sorts of other stuff. It's also a record that doesn't really seem to care whether you like listening to it, all of which means that for this first-time listener, The Velvet Underground and Nico is a lot easier to appreciate in the academic sense than to truly enjoy.

Approached through that somewhat clinical remove, this is a record whose blunt, punky energy is impossible to ignore, even if it's also extremely easy to reject the sum total as meandering, enervated noise generated by pretentious heroin addicts. Lou Reed's lead guitar — substantially recorded in his self-styled "ostrich tuning," a fun-sounding name for the decidedly un-fun practice of tuning every string on his instrument to the same goddamn note — taught Fred Durst and Corey Feldman everything they ever needed to know about playing a solo, and John Cale's viola hangs suspended in the queasy middle ground between elementary school band practice and Indian classical droning. Nico's vocals, meanwhile, are... what they are. Again, this is not an album that has any interest in meeting you halfway — you're either buying what it's selling or you aren't, and the Velvet Underground doesn't seem to care either way.

Where do I land on that spectrum? The Velvet Underground and Nico is decidedly outside my wheelhouse, and on my first listen, it struck me as a shambolic mess; after my tenth or eleventh, I'm still not inclined to seek any of these songs out for pleasure. That said, when you take into account the context of the time in which it was recorded, it's impossible not to hear this record landing like a lightning bolt for listeners who were eager to hear something less mannered and a lot rawer than the majority of the music they were getting from mainstream outlets. It might be pretentious, but there isn't a lot of artifice here; from the barely-there production to the blunt force of Lou Reed's lyrics, it's a set of songs that isn't interested in presenting itself as anything other than what it is. Again, for me, this is an album that's easier to appreciate than it is to truly enjoy. I'm glad I can now say I spent a day listening to it, but I doubt I'll return.

Hidden Gems: No such thing within this track listing. If I have to pick, I'm riding with the barbed coil of "I'm Waiting for the Man" over the awkwardly Dylan-indebted "All Tomorrow's Parties" or whatever the hell is going on with "The Black Angel's Death Song" or "European Son," but as with certain other entries in this series, if you've intentionally listened to this album, then you probably know every song by heart.