Exactly what I was thinking…
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Hitchcock applies his dry wit to the topic:
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In case y’all hadn’t seen it:
EDIT: Please hang on past 1 min 30 sec
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Like most self-styled provocateurs, it turns out Lou Reed meant the bad things that he said.
I’m not refuting anything anyone’s saying about Lou Reed, but the “self-styled provocateurs” who actually succeed in provoking anyone rarely have the luxury of sticking to the relatively limited palette of things they actually believe.
It’s a hell of a lot easier to start with the question, “what will stir shit up?” than it is to go back to the well of your own personal supply of outrageousness over and over again. As I suspect website content producers might be faintly aware of. 
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Our culture, much to my disappointment, seems to put certain things like “being an asshole” and “bi-polar” into the category “artsy”. Then makes the mistake of conflating them when unpacking the term. Never mind the great artists who aren’t assholes. I really wish we would stop enabling bad people in the name of art. It just results in a surplus army of aspiring assholes.
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Well this is another case of needing to separate the art from the artist. I find this a necessity as many creators have unpleasant things you don’t like about them at best, and are total assholes or abusers are worst.
Though in this case I was never a huge fan of his music.
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Yea, I don’t have time for that shit.
It’s like the old saying - “the right to swing your arm ends at my chin”. Same for people who are a pain in the ass. I’m going to do my best not to enable it, and I don’t feel the need to have my life impacted because someone is a dick/bum/drunk/violent asshole, etc…
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Me neither. I always found it interesting that they didn’t actually live together.
For some reason, I used to think Laurie Anderson was gay. Not sure why. Maybe the association with William Burroughs. Maybe the hair.
A lot of that was quitting drinking and drugs, but even that was too late for his liver.
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‘‘Lou Reed…’’ Rings a bell. That a guy who used to be in The Velvet Underground? Yeah.
And here we were wondering what he had been up after THAT.
Will do. Thanks!
Unfortunately it’s necessary for a lot of stuff that’s actually useful.
Never turned out to be much of a singer, but sometimes he could still put a great song together.
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Bom bom bom Satellite of Love. Bom bom bom…
Whatever he was personally, he could tug a heartstring.
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I watched that documentary about Candy Darling recently, and of course, Candy Says was all over it:
Always one of my favorite VU songs…
Slapping Bowie during his Thin White Duke phase seems pretty understandable.
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I understand that Thom Yorke has publicly confessed to being a creep and a weirdo. I’m sure the postmortem psychoanalysis on him (someday in the far distant future, I hope) is going to be interesting too.
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Hey thanks (not) for the link to a piece by that famous black-loathing white supremacist.
I did enjoy Patrice O’Neal’s hilarious (and joking) take on “Creep,” though, so I guess I actually am grateful for that.
And btw (not that you’re likely to listen), for a white man to face up to the dark sides of whiteness and masculinity is not properly described by the term “self-loathing.” In fact, I’d say it can be more like the opposite, a way of trying to free oneself to the extent that one can from the grips of abusive ideologies. Sounds more to me like “self-loving.”
And here’s the O’Neal video embedded over there, for anyone who’d rather not visit a white supremacist’s site. Discussion about just what was and is “white” about Lou Reed, his music, and his white fans could be useful, and at least interesting.
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Really, there seems to be a wide conceptual gap between “racist and misogynist” and “married to Laurie Anderson.” Like those two statements can’t both be true at the same time. But, I suppose, weirder things have happened.
Actually many of em are dead. That is unless the Zombify Andy Warhol movement has made any progress.
