Review Summary: Beyond lies, beyond rock'n'roll
Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music is an infamous album, if by infamous we mean that a substantial number of people are aware of its existence and that its reputation is overwhelmingly negative. When it was released in 1975, it was panned by critics, hated by fans and it came dangerously close to completely tanking the career of a man who had up to that point seemed like he could do no wrong. But instead of being forgotten by all but the most diehard of disappointed Reed fans, its legacy somehow continued to grow over the decades. Rumours swirled and coalesced around it, at least partially aided by the mythos of Reed's persona as the archetypal rockstar who gives no fucks about the business, its journalists, or what anyone else thinks of his work. Indeed for generations growing up in the 80s and 90s it's likely that the first time they even heard of the album was either in an article about the worst albums ever made, or perhaps on an Internet forum topic where users gathered to argue about the worst albums ever made. And so even folks otherwise uninvested in Reed's body of work came to know and perhaps even agree with glee that Metal Machine Music is "unlistenable", "headache-inducing", "not even music" and so on.
You may already be aware that this album is not rock music, it is noise music and we'll discuss that in more detail later. This is of course the crux of why it's such a tough sell to most people, tenfold so in the 1970s, and contributes greatly to the reason people choose to buy into the rumours that surround it. If Metal Machine Music were an ocean, it would have had so much plastic thrown into it as to cover the entire surface, obscuring everything beneath; if it were a planet, it would have accrued so much misinformation around it to strike envy into both Jupiter's moons and Saturn's rings at the same time.
To be perfectly clear, by misinformation I don't mean people's opinions that it is bad or the fact that it gives them headaches. What I'm referring to are the legends that it was created as a joke at listeners' expense, as a big "fuck you" to the industry, as a means of getting out of a contract with a record label, as the completely haphazard result of a drug trip, or anything else along those lines. It's relatively reasonable to want to buy into one of these on some level considering the sonic differences between Metal Machine Music and everything Reed had done up to that point, considering his public image, considering the strange prose in the album's liner notes and considering his seemingly flip-flopping opinion on the matter until almost three decades after the fact.
In the early 2000s Reed was approached by German musician and composer Ulrich Krieger - coming from a contemporary classical background and strongly interested in experimental music - who expressed interest in transcribing Metal Machine Music so that it could be performed by an ensemble of acoustic intruments. Though skeptical at first, Reed was thoroughly impressed by Krieger's preliminary work and not only gave his blessing but chose to perform live with the ensemble in 2002. A recording of it would finally see a commercial release in 2007 and around that very same time Reed would decide to take off his mask at least partially and give us some fairly revelatory interviews about the music and the original album in particular.
For anyone unfamiliar with the above, it's worth taking a few seconds to ask yourself: if a rockstar as legendary as Reed truly had never cared about Metal Machine Music, would he have taken the time to tour and perform it with people who genuinely appreciated it for what it is? To what end? There certainly wasn't much money, fame or acclaim in the endeavour. Not to mention that Reed would go on to join Krieger a couple more times until his passing in 2013.
In the man's own words:
"The myth-- depends on how you look at it, but the myth is sort of better than the truth. The myth is that I made it to get out of a recording contract. OK, but the truth is that I wouldn't do that, because I wouldn't want you to buy a record that I didn't really like, that I was just trying to do a legal thing with. I wouldn't do something like that. The truth is that I really, really, really loved it. I was in a position where I could have it come out. I just didn't want it to come out and have the audience think it was more rock songs." [1]
Indeed, he goes on to say he tried to have RCA release it as a classical album, as an electronic composition, but for whatever reason that ended up not happening. For those wary of taking him at face value, I would strongly encourage you to seek out these interviews for yourself, as his words really exude a surprising level of passion and respect for both the music and his collaborators on tour at the time.
But what about the music? The music is noise, multiple unique tracks of stereo panned guitar harmonics rushing and surging furiously with no slowing down. "Energy music", as Reed calls it, put together in his loft in New York by carefully positioning guitars against their amplifiers such that their respective feedback would bounce off each other and create new sound. After thorough exploration of the possibilities of this approach, he would then record and process the recording through various effects until he was satisfied.
To Reed, rock'n'roll was epitomised by the electric guitar, and guitar feedback was its own entire and complete style of playing. Thus he conceived Metal Machine Music as the ultimate guitar solo, completely unbound and untamed by things like song structure, key, or any other instruments getting in the way. Essentially he wanted a bigger, better, more primal version of his feedback-driven guitar solos from his Velvet Underground days, a fitting ambition for a rock star.
We have now established the man's passion, but it's still interesting to look at how Metal Machine Music did not come about randomly, nor in a vacuum. On this note Reed leaves us a very important clue in the album's very liner notes: "Drone cognizance and harmonic possibilities vis a vis Lamont Young's Dream Music" [sic].
La Monte Young of course being the minimalist composer and drone pioneer of the New York avant-garde, under whom classically-trained violinist
John Cale had studied and performed. And Cale was of course an important part of The Velvet Underground together with Reed, but this connection becomes even more plausible if we look at the band's first single "Loop", a feedback piece written by Cale that bears more than a passing resemblance to parts of Metal Machine Music, even the way it ends on a locked groove, though Reed attributes this innovation to friend of the band and visual artist Andy Warhol.
In interviews since the album's release, Reed has also mentioned "
Ornette Coleman and his free jazz" and "electronic composers like Stockhausen and Xenakis", saying "I was listening to not a lot … a bit … I was just aware of these things". To the cynical and less informed it may seem like a cheap attempt at intellectualising his work post-facto, but when you're brimming with passion and creativity (let alone throwing drugs into the mix), a vague awareness of how others are pushing the envelope can be more than enough to inform your own breakthrough. The link to New York minimalism was also corroborated by
Brian Eno in a 2017 interview [2], with the ambient godfather even going one step further and lumping Metal Machine Music in with his own Discreet Music also released in 1975, as opposite ends of the same spectrum of "immersion music".
Eno is also far from the only artist to have refused to discredit this album.
Thurston Moore certainly was a fan, with
Sonic Youth being known to play bits of it off cassette to their audience during their live shows in the early 80s, and a snippet of the part four of Metal Machine Music can even be heard on the track Society is a Hole from their 1985 classic Bad Moon Rising. Then there's noise rock champion and "producer of all your favourite bands" extraordinaire Steve Albini [3], also on record as enjoying it. This next one may be conjecture on my part but I find it difficult not to hear a similarity between the final minutes of this album - possibly stretched to infinity on locked groove - and the industrial/power electronics cult release Pagan Muzak by transgressive artist / nazi sympathiser
Boyd Rice under his alias
NON - that one of course goes even further by allowing each of its tracks to be looped infinitely.
Today we have countless
Merzbows,
Masonnas,
Ramlehs - many artists all over the world who ever since the 80s have carved niches for themselves in managing to express or evoke emotion through noise, of course varying in their degrees of abrasiveness, chaos, use of samples, willingness to think outside the box and so on. And thanks to the internet there is more of an audience than ever for such art, as some people - especially of those younger and less prejudiced - find that they can derive some sense of comfort or catharsis from it, that there can sometimes be some kind of beauty in the midst of the chaos that compels them. Of course, as Albini also notes, and as many noise fans today could tell you, Metal Machine Music is far from being purely chaotic noise. It's a deliberately conceived sound sculpture of guitar feedback, one that I would urge the open-minded to give an honest try. Especially those of you out there who find that the joy you used to derive from your favourite genres has slowly and steadily been eroded by the unshakable sense that you've already heard the same formulas and tropes a billion times already, becoming jaded that the same is the case in most if not all genres, squeezing and squeezing the old toy for dear life only to receive - at most, if you're lucky - one modest droplet of emotional response or resonance... Something this different could be a breath of fresh air.
