Why is there a big banana on the cover of this album? Would a psychoanalytic interpretation be too obvious? If so, then that’s too bad, because I will proceed to argue in the following review that The Velvet Underground and Nico is as Oedipal a record as you’ll ever hear. Andy Warhol was responsible for the banana – and, from what I’ve read, this was more or less his only contribution to the album. Nominally, he was ‘the producer’, but it seems he was absent most of the time, too busy entertaining the suggestible grad students of his bohemian coterie at loft parties across New York. Andy resurfaced merely to ensure that the phallic banana ended up on the album cover. Though, let’s face it, we’re still talking about it 250 years later, so I suppose it’s an effective testament to the Warholian edict of performativity. Certainly, the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York was talking about it in 2012, because John Cale and Lou Reed sued the Andy Warhol foundation for letting Apple use the image to promote the iPhone – a most fitting illustration of how the counterculture was effectively co-opted by neoliberalism.
But before this becomes too tiresomely Foucaultian – what percentage of all the songs written during the 1960s were about drugs and getting fucked up? Of all the albums I’ve reviewed from this decade, I think only Pet Sounds is not obviously, essentially about drugs (and god only knows that Brian Wilson didn’t need them to maintain his unique connection to the divine). “I’m Waiting for the Man” is about – presumably – Lou Reed, sat downtown, eagerly anticipating the arrival of his drug dealer. The music has an incessant, chugging quality, almost like a prototype of a punk song, which I suppose reflects its dirty urbanity and the gathering, irresistible inner impulse to score (what exactly was Lou on, by the way? What wasn’t he on?)
A few songs later, the twangy rock’n’roll of “Run, Run, Run” depicts, I guess, the ‘lives’ – if that isn’t too charitable a term – of the fiends that haunted the streets of Lou Reed’s New York. Interestingly, this song seems to equate getting high with a religious experience – the unhappy characters are named, variously, Mary, Marguerita, and Sarah, and there’s lots of talk of ‘getting to heaven’ and selling souls in order to be ‘saved’. These are the wretched that Our Lord Jesus Christ elected to fraternise with during his lifetime – which maybe implies that Lou saw himself as a kind of Christ-like figure among the damned of the earth. Or maybe not.
“Heroin”, meanwhile, is pretty ingenious, in terms of the way it starts slowly and sluggishly, then builds and builds to a delirious climax, before collapsing again into torpor – much like an addict anticipating, and then getting, their fix. Great lyrics, too, with an obvious Freudian impulse. Cue psychoanalyst Irvine Bieber’s observation that heroin addicts suffer from a basic inability to ‘compete’ or fully integrate aggression into their psyche due to the terrifying nature of their father figures. You can hear this reflected in Lou’s rather sweet-natured indictment of “everybody putting everyone else down” – perhaps he chased the dragon as a retreat from (incessant, but inescapable) social conflict (which is ironic, considering how much of it he caused). This raises the question – was the widespread use of, and addiction to, self-abnegating drugs amongst the post-war generation a reaction to their overbearing father figures, who were shaped by the ultimate masculine experience of war? There was no way of competing with that, as a man, so getting smacked up becomes the only escape from the Oedipal dilemma.
No need to put Civilisation and its Discontents back on the shelf just yet because, if drugs represent a turning away from, and inability to fully master and integrate, the inherent rivalry and aggression of the father-son relationship, then other songs here are more obviously rooted in mummy issues. “Femme Fatale” is a deceptively gentle soft-rock song that prefigures Fleetwood Mac or even the Bangles. It’s apparently about one of Andy Warhol’s muses, the supermodel Edie Segdwick. To complicate matters further, it’s sung by a woman, the statuesque and deranged German supermodel Nico, who warns about the titular bitch and her penchant for breaking hearts. Are we dealing here with the Freudian dichotomy of the Madonna and the whore, with Nico cast in the role of the former? Perhaps. Further evidence for this hypothesis can be found on “I’ll Be Your Mirror”, as Nico offers a maternal, nirvana-like unconditional love, whereas the rather forgettable “There She Goes Again” is quite evidently about a prostitute.
Whether the subject of “All Tomorrow’s Parties” is the Madonna or the whore is harder to determine, however. The song concerns a penniless girl who finds herself among New York’s bohemian elite, confronted by Warhol’s esoteric but no doubt extremely affluent coterie, and with nothing to wear to ‘all tomorrow’s parties.’ It’s neither sympathetic nor condemnatory, but merely bleakly frank and observational. Actually it reminds me of a friend of mine, a talented but skint aspiring artist and academic who ended up on a scholarship in New York and spent most of her time fretting about being socially accepted by the Bobos of Manhattan. In the end, she was indeed accepted – as a kind of Balkan curiosity, a walking art installation. I’m not sure she appreciated it.
If drug abuse (representing the relationship with daddy) and the Madonna and the whore (representing the relationship with mummy) are the themes for much of this album, then the two closing songs represent the point where the symbolic order breaks down and the patient returns to the psychotic jouissance of the womb. “The Black Angel’s Death Song” was apparently picked by Morrissey as one of his Desert Island Discs, which merely confirms my suspicion that Morrissey is driven not by melancholy solipsism or even maudlin self-pity, as is often supposed, but by defiant rage and cantankerousness. This song is almost unlistenably discordant. Screeching violins and droning acoustic guitars – like a mid-00s movie soundtrack by Johnny Greenwood – with indecipherable and unintelligible, free associative spoken word poetry over the top. I might put this song on at midnight, during a psychotic breakdown, while driving at 200km an hour down the Autobahn, but otherwise… probably not.
“European Son” is in the same category. It’s seven minutes of incoherent brain mush, as far as I’m concerned. Apparently, it’s a hate screed to a poet that Lou Reed met at university, and who was on the verge of death, hence his rather malicious exhortation to ‘say “so long”’ as it draws to a close. God knows what happened between them – maybe they were romantically involved, which would explain the level of bitterness. Ultimately, though, the song’s sound and background reek of the petty antagonisms characteristic of middle-class grad student bohemia, and are reminiscent of Radiohead at their most eye-rollingly ‘experimental’.
And that’s why I turn the album off after “I’ll Be Your Mirror”. But we’re yet to mention its two highlights. “Sunday Morning”, the first song on the record, arguably marks the invention of dream pop. It starts with a funny little music box, implying a gentle, childlike naivete and simplicity. But the voices get progressively ghostlier, the music increasingly sinister, until we’re left with the image of a grown man experiencing a psychotic break with reality and cowering in his home on a Sunday morning. The quirky music box now points to a full-scale retreat into infantile paranoia and psychological disorganisation. Apparently, this song was tacked on at the end of the recording process to allay Verve Record’s concerns about the lack of a hit single. So there you are – ask Lou Reed and John Cale to write something for the radio, they come back with a song about schizophrenia.
Surely the standout track on this album, though, is “Venus in Furs”. It sounds utterly terrifying when it comes in, like some kind of weird, exotic, oriental den of iniquity, a Magrebi brothel where everyone is sat around either laconically copulating or MIA on opium. I don’t know how they created this orientalist wall of sound, or where the S&M-infused lyrics came from, or why Lou Reed starts elaborating on his desire to ‘sleep for a thousand years’. But the overall sound is memorable, unique, deeply sinister and alluring – a thoroughly postcolonial piece, I suppose, which Eduard Said would probably have impugned as reproducing all the worst Western stereotypes about the effeminate, sensual, Dionysian orient. Anyway, tiresome theorising of this nature can be left to impoverished Cultural Studies postgrads. Suffice to say, “Venus in Furs” is a sixties classic.
I don’t believe that this album can be so easily categorised alongside some of its contemporaries as mere Bacchanalian sixties rock. The Doors and the Stones, for example, brought a certain masculine rambunctiousness to their music, whereas the unrelenting decadence of The Velvet Underground and Nico is somehow fragile and feminine. It’s sultrier and gentler than My Generation or the Door’s debut, though apart from “Venus in Furs”, “Sunday Morning”, and “Heroin”, I can’t say that the music left too much of an impression on me. One thing is for sure, though – the 60s are often characterised as the decade of peace and love but, having listened to some of the classic albums from that era, my overall impression is that everyone was on some kind of mind-altering substance, at least 80% of the time. It was all about short-termism, chasing a high with maximum risk for maximum reward, which perhaps points to the basically psychopathic nature of rock music. But there I go again with my armchair Freudian nonsense.
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Highlights: “Sunday Morning”, “Venus in Furs”, “Heroin”