Daniel Kane
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780231162975
- eISBN:
- 9780231544603
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231162975.003.0003
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Cultural Studies
This chapter analyzes the ways in which Lou Reed’s vision of himself as a writer informed his music and lyrics for the Velvet Underground and his solo career. I track how Reed’s engagement with Andy ...
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This chapter analyzes the ways in which Lou Reed’s vision of himself as a writer informed his music and lyrics for the Velvet Underground and his solo career. I track how Reed’s engagement with Andy Warhol and the New York School of poets complicated and troubled his otherwise relatively traditional views of the Poet as oracular figure. The chapter pays special attention to Reed’s stories and poems published in his collegiate-era mimeographed journal Lonely Woman Quarterly, analyzing how these works ultimately fed into Reed’s music and lyrics in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. Mixing a world-weary, vernacular tone with bursts of inspired disjunction, or interrupting a straightforward narrative with Joycean free-association, Reed used the journal to sketch the personae that were to prove obstinate presences throughout his career. Reed’s porn-freaks, alcoholics, suburbanite wannabees, drag queens, hustlers, and junkies all got their start at Syracuse University, accompanying Reed on his journey from Lewis to Louis to Luis and, ultimately, Lou.Less
This chapter analyzes the ways in which Lou Reed’s vision of himself as a writer informed his music and lyrics for the Velvet Underground and his solo career. I track how Reed’s engagement with Andy Warhol and the New York School of poets complicated and troubled his otherwise relatively traditional views of the Poet as oracular figure. The chapter pays special attention to Reed’s stories and poems published in his collegiate-era mimeographed journal Lonely Woman Quarterly, analyzing how these works ultimately fed into Reed’s music and lyrics in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. Mixing a world-weary, vernacular tone with bursts of inspired disjunction, or interrupting a straightforward narrative with Joycean free-association, Reed used the journal to sketch the personae that were to prove obstinate presences throughout his career. Reed’s porn-freaks, alcoholics, suburbanite wannabees, drag queens, hustlers, and junkies all got their start at Syracuse University, accompanying Reed on his journey from Lewis to Louis to Luis and, ultimately, Lou.
Nona Willis Aronowitz
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816681204
- eISBN:
- 9781452949048
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816681204.003.0017
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter discusses sin and salvation as reflected in the songs on Velvet Underground, an anthology culled from that rock band’s first three LPs. In New York City in the mid-1960s, the Velvet ...
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This chapter discusses sin and salvation as reflected in the songs on Velvet Underground, an anthology culled from that rock band’s first three LPs. In New York City in the mid-1960s, the Velvet Underground’s lead singer, guitarist, and auteur, Lou Reed, made a fateful connection between two seemingly disparate ideas—the rock-and-roller as self-conscious aesthete and the rock-and-roller as self-conscious punk. The group broke up in 1970, but the aesthete-punk connection was carried on, mainly in New York and England, by Velvets-influenced performers like Mott the Hoople, David Bowie, Roxy Music and its offshoots, and the New York Dolls. By 1977, the same duality had surfaced in new ways, with new force, under new conditions, to become the basis of rock-and-roll’s new wave. The Velvets suggested continuity between art and violence, order and chaos, but they also posed a radical split between body and spirit.Less
This chapter discusses sin and salvation as reflected in the songs on Velvet Underground, an anthology culled from that rock band’s first three LPs. In New York City in the mid-1960s, the Velvet Underground’s lead singer, guitarist, and auteur, Lou Reed, made a fateful connection between two seemingly disparate ideas—the rock-and-roller as self-conscious aesthete and the rock-and-roller as self-conscious punk. The group broke up in 1970, but the aesthete-punk connection was carried on, mainly in New York and England, by Velvets-influenced performers like Mott the Hoople, David Bowie, Roxy Music and its offshoots, and the New York Dolls. By 1977, the same duality had surfaced in new ways, with new force, under new conditions, to become the basis of rock-and-roll’s new wave. The Velvets suggested continuity between art and violence, order and chaos, but they also posed a radical split between body and spirit.
Daniel Kane
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780231162975
- eISBN:
- 9780231544603
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231162975.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Cultural Studies
During the late 1960s, throughout the 1970s, and into the 1980s, New York City poets and musicians played together, published each other, and inspired one another to create groundbreaking art. In "Do ...
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During the late 1960s, throughout the 1970s, and into the 1980s, New York City poets and musicians played together, published each other, and inspired one another to create groundbreaking art. In "Do You Have a Band?", Daniel Kane reads deeply across poetry and punk music to capture this compelling exchange and its challenge to the status of the visionary artist, the cultural capital of poetry, and the lines dividing sung lyric from page-bound poem. Kane reveals how the new sounds of proto-punk and punk music found their way into the poetry of the 1960s and 1970s downtown scene, enabling writers to develop fresh ideas for their own poetics and performance styles. Likewise, groups like The Fugs and the Velvet Underground drew on writers as varied as William Blake and Delmore Schwartz for their lyrics. Drawing on a range of archival materials and oral interviews, Kane also shows how and why punk musicians drew on and resisted French Symbolist writing, the vatic resonance of the Beat chant, and, most surprisingly and complexly, the New York Schools of poetry. In bringing together the music and writing of Richard Hell, Patti Smith, and Jim Carroll with readings of poetry by Anne Waldman, Eileen Myles, Ted Berrigan, John Giorno, and Dennis Cooper, Kane provides a fascinating history of this crucial period in postwar American culture and the cultural life of New York City.Less
During the late 1960s, throughout the 1970s, and into the 1980s, New York City poets and musicians played together, published each other, and inspired one another to create groundbreaking art. In "Do You Have a Band?", Daniel Kane reads deeply across poetry and punk music to capture this compelling exchange and its challenge to the status of the visionary artist, the cultural capital of poetry, and the lines dividing sung lyric from page-bound poem. Kane reveals how the new sounds of proto-punk and punk music found their way into the poetry of the 1960s and 1970s downtown scene, enabling writers to develop fresh ideas for their own poetics and performance styles. Likewise, groups like The Fugs and the Velvet Underground drew on writers as varied as William Blake and Delmore Schwartz for their lyrics. Drawing on a range of archival materials and oral interviews, Kane also shows how and why punk musicians drew on and resisted French Symbolist writing, the vatic resonance of the Beat chant, and, most surprisingly and complexly, the New York Schools of poetry. In bringing together the music and writing of Richard Hell, Patti Smith, and Jim Carroll with readings of poetry by Anne Waldman, Eileen Myles, Ted Berrigan, John Giorno, and Dennis Cooper, Kane provides a fascinating history of this crucial period in postwar American culture and the cultural life of New York City.
George Cotkin
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- December 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780190218478
- eISBN:
- 9780190218508
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190218478.003.0026
- Subject:
- History, American History: 20th Century, Cultural History
The New Sensibility did not end in the 1970s, with the downturn in the American economy. It had by then been incorporated fully into our culture. First, focusing on the continuing challenge of John ...
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The New Sensibility did not end in the 1970s, with the downturn in the American economy. It had by then been incorporated fully into our culture. First, focusing on the continuing challenge of John Cage, Lou Reed’s work in a Cage mode, and the rise of punk, this chapter shows the vitality of the New Sensibility in the 1970s, and continues the examination through the 1980s to the present. Today, a culture of excess, with attention riveted on madness, violence, sexuality, confession, confusion of realms between high and low culture, and liberation, has become pervasive. The argument here is that the New Sensibility, when it is allowed freedom to breathe, and when it is cognizant of the essential tension between “liberation and limits,” to use a phrase offered by historian Roger Shattuck, can continue to resonate in the most valuable fashion. This type of success is demonstrated by Kara Walker’s monumental work of art A Subtlety.Less
The New Sensibility did not end in the 1970s, with the downturn in the American economy. It had by then been incorporated fully into our culture. First, focusing on the continuing challenge of John Cage, Lou Reed’s work in a Cage mode, and the rise of punk, this chapter shows the vitality of the New Sensibility in the 1970s, and continues the examination through the 1980s to the present. Today, a culture of excess, with attention riveted on madness, violence, sexuality, confession, confusion of realms between high and low culture, and liberation, has become pervasive. The argument here is that the New Sensibility, when it is allowed freedom to breathe, and when it is cognizant of the essential tension between “liberation and limits,” to use a phrase offered by historian Roger Shattuck, can continue to resonate in the most valuable fashion. This type of success is demonstrated by Kara Walker’s monumental work of art A Subtlety.
