#The velvet underground rym professional

By that token, the simultaneous-poetry experiment 'The Murder Mystery' feels less like an anomalous WTF throwback to the Velvets’ avant-garde roots than the sound of the album’s slow-stewing inner turmoil coming to a boil. Even the seemingly easy-going choogle of 'What Goes On' is routinely upset by Reed’s admissions of anxiety ('One minute born/ One minute doomed'). If The Velvet Undergrounddialled down the aggression and abrasion of its predecessors, it undercuts the mellow approach with some of the rawest songwriting of Reed’s career, and a plainspoken candor as startling as his past meditations on smack and S&M. His blunt language drives a spike into the album’s gentle jangle to unleash a maelstrom of emotions, where ecstatic moments of spiritual reawakening ('Beginning to See the Light') are answered by cruel reality checks ('I’m set free/ To find a new illusion'), where the love of his life becomes someone else's ('Pale Blue Eyes'), where a Jewish guy feels so fucked up, he starts praying to Jesus.

(The album cover reinforces the reflective mood: though shot at the Factory, the Velvets look more like they’re hosting a small gathering friends in their living room, their '67-era striped tees and fuck-you wraparound shades replaced by comfortable sweaters and sensible collared shirts.) And even though the song Yule was crooning, 'Candy Says', marked Reed’s first explicit character reference to the Warhol Factory scene that birthed his band, it ultimately underscored the Velvets’ increasing remove from its hazy decadence: A devastatingly intimate portrait of then-transitioning Factory regular Candy Darling, 'Candy Says' is the sobering soundtrack for that inevitable moment when all tomorrow’s parties turn to morning-after, makeup-smeared, self-loathing introspection. It’s like returning from a holiday only to find your rat-infested apartment building had burned down and been replaced with a white-picket-fenced bungalow. Reed and Sterling Morrison’s amp settings were dialed down from 11 to 1 Maureen 'Moe' Tucker’s thundering thump was softened into a breezy brushed-snare sway and Reed’s ding-dong-sucking snarl was replaced by the melancholic whisper of Cale’s successor Doug Yule. And in light of disappointing sales for their first two albums on niche jazz imprint Verve, they traded up to parent company MGM in 1969 with the intention of being a proper rock band that makes records for big labels in Hollywood and stays at the Chateau Marmont.įrom the very first second of The Velvet Underground, everything about the group had changed from where they left off with the epochal squall of White Light/White Heat’s 'Sister Ray'. The romantic myth about the Velvets-the commercially ignored, ahead-of-their-time proto-punk innovators proudly out of step with the peace'n'lovey-dovey pop of the day-often overlooks a crucial quality about the band: they actually wanted to be popular. But for Reed, the only logical response to White Light/White Heat’s anti-pop extremism was to ricochet back in the other direction, a move that would force Cale out of the Velvets and present Reed with the opportunity to lead a different kind of band. After all, Cale delivered one of White Light/White Heat’s few moments of serenity ('Lady Godiva’s Operation'), while Reed unleashed the album’s most brutalizing shock 53 seconds into 'I Heard Her Call My Name'.

#The velvet underground rym professional

The tension at the heart of these two records has often been attributed to the oppositional approaches of its principal songwriters- professional popsmith Lou Reed and viola-scraping iconoclast John Cale-though this reading has always been reductive. Technically, their first album was 1967’s The Velvet Underground & Nico, a bracing collision of Brill Building pop classicism and avant-garde noise terrorism that, by the time White Light/White Heat was released in 1968, had progressed to all-out warfare.