Douglas Laman Gets A Tune-Up (Entry #2): The Velvet Underground & Nico

DOUGLAS LAMAN GETS A TUNE-UP

ENTRY #2: The Velvet Underground & Nico by The Velvet Underground and Nico

Douglas Laman Gets A Tune-Up is a new weekly series wherein Douglas Laman listens to an album of music he's never fully listened to before (though he may have heard one or two songs from it) and writes up his brief thoughts on it.

I had never heard of The Velvet Underground prior to it being selected as the next title in this series (friends of mine who are way bigger music geeks than me choose the albums I cover for this series), but boy am I not gonna forget 'em now. If you're as out of the blue in regards to this group as I once was, The Velvet Underground is a mid-20th-century band that existed for only eight years but left an incredible impression on the world of music in that timespan. A key reason for them carrying such influence in their work comes from their very first album (released in 1967), The Velvet Underground & Nico.


Adorned with an Andy Warhol cover image of a banana, the album is armed with eleven songs that tap into the youth culture of the decade and all the sex, drugs and rebellion that informed the era. But The Velvet Underground & Nico is not just an album looking to grab surface level details of the unique traits of this generation in order to get a quick buck. Nope, these various tunes tap into the fractured psyche of individuals growing up in the 1960's and the reasons behind their rampant drug use and more boundary-pushing sexual exploits. The instrumental rock n' roll accompaniment of some songs may make you bang your head but there's an undercurrent of sadness that ties the whole piece together, no question about it.

The album begins with the melodic soft-spoken Sunday Morning. Apparently, this song is all about the topic of paranoia (Wikipedia says this idea came from Andy Warhol himself), with the singer, Lou Reed, talking about how the world is always watching him while the more upbeat instrumental accompaniment plays on. A more pop-friendly sound accompanying darker lyrics and even darker vocal turns (there's an eerie echo on some of Reed's lyrics later on in the song) turns out to be a trend for the entire album and the fantastic Sunday Morning is the perfect way to whet one's appetite for what's to come.

From there, the second song, I'm Waiting For The Man, introduces a recurring motif of the entire album; heroin. These guys live for it as a way to escape the world around them. Now, by the time 1967 rolled around, the Vietnam war was a long-standing entity that had consumed countless young lives in America with television sets across the nation projecting horrific images of the carnage occurring abroad. To escape a world seemingly gone to hell, many young adults turned to recreational use of hardcore drugs in an effort to escape reality, even just for a little bit. Heroin was such one drug and the reason why Lou Reed was singing about Waiting For The Man, the man in this case being a fellow who will give him the drugs he desires.

What's interesting about The Velvet Underground & Nico's treatment of heroin is it doesn't seem to glamorize the use of such a drug. I'm Waiting For The Man is more casual about it, certainly, but a tune directly about heroin, appropriately titled Heroin, takes a darker look at using heroin for escapism from your trouble. It's a beautifully tragic song, one of the best on the album, with the song starting out in a quiet manner before the instrumental accompaniment ramps up into this more overwhelming and intense instrumental portrayal of the fractured psyche of an addict. You really get into the head of a man looking for escape and feelings of power in all the wrong places in a way few songs could hope to. The unsettling screeches of the violins (I believe that's the instrument that kicks in about 5.5 minutes into the song) really helps create this unsettling atmosphere that lyrics talking about "dead bodies piling up in mounds" reinforce. Towards the end of the song, you begin to feel trapped by the appropriately creepy instrumental music and lyrics, just as the man in the song feels trapped in a world where the only escape he can comprehend is heroin.

Striking a delicate balance between not glamorizing a harmful drug like heroin while also empathizing the plight and situations that led many to dabble heavily in the substance in the 1960's is something The Velvet Underground & Nico does incredibly well. It tackles the issues of the era in a way that feels authentic like they're a part of the hippie rebellion culture of the 1960's itself instead of a bunch of people watching all this drug-riddled mayhem from the sidelines. It isn't all about drugs though as sexuality also gets the spotlight in songs like Femme Fatale (another one of my favorites from the album), which has this slightly ominous sound to it, reinforced by the echoing chorus repeating the title of the song. Nico gets to do the lead vocals here and she's fantastic with her more tender delivery as she breaks the news to another person of how their lover isn't as devoted to them as they thought.

You also get to explore sexuality again in Venus In Furs which has a....Scottish sound to it? That's what it came across to me anyway. It's apparently about BDSM culture, a topic modern pop culture is only just now beginning to tackle forty years later (in an apparently inaccurate and offensive way according to many in the unfairly stigmatized BDSM culture) in the Fifty Shades Of Grey media. The entire social culture of this era gets explored in All Tomorrow's Parties while the album closes out with a middle finger to authority in European Son, which has one verse of lyrics condemning those who "spit on those under twenty-one" before dovetailing into an extended instrumental riff that expresses plenty of frustration at disapproving adults in this decade who refuse to understand the specific youth culture of this era. The Velvet Underground & Nico very much understands the anger many young adults had at authority in this time period and that's not the only aspect of 1960's youth culture they manage to fully understand and lend humanity to. This phenomenal album explores plenty of then-taboo topics with a deft hand that offers plenty of chances for the masterful vocals of Lou Reed and Nico and tremendous accompanying instrumental sections to shine. An incredible album I'll be thinking about and revisiting countless times in the future.