Welcome back, Jack Pat ! I`ve been wondering what happened to you recently.
Thanks for replying so politely to another of my complaints about Lou Reed.
Yes, when I listened to the Stones` and the Velvet`s songs, I realized that the Velvet Underground gave the song a completely new lease of life; a more interesting topic, better lyrics and a more modern, jaded, streetwise attitude. Lou Reed puts enough new substance into the song to hold your attention, at least for a few play-throughs anyway.
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... The idea behind this was to convey as much meaning and emotion as he possibly could with very few words... not too dissimilar to what Hemingway did as an author. The funny thing is he continued this concept with his singing, which could easily be viewed as a flaw. Although, in the case, it's a strength in that he's attempting to do with his voice what he was doing with his lyrics. Except this time he's conveying as much emotion as he can with a voice dominated by monotone and a deadpan aesthetic.
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When he`s not crooning, I`ve always liked LR`s singing style -it`s such a welcome rebuff to all those shriekers and weepers who try so hard to get our attention. Leonard Cohen does something similar, although I admire LC`s lyrics a lot more than Lou Reed`s :-
Lou Reed and Hemingway :
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The New York Times wrote in 1926 of Hemingway's first novel, "No amount of analysis can convey the quality of The Sun Also Rises. It is a truly gripping story, told in a lean, hard, athletic narrative prose that puts more literary English to shame."
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^ When you read something like this, it`s easy to think that Hemingway`s style is worth emulating, but I wonder if any of these points crossed Lou Reed`s mind :-
Firstly, what was a daring, original approach in 1926 isn`t going to have the same impact 40 years later.
Secondly, Hemingway`s style was very effective for someone who had an exciting story to tell, as with his First World War experiences. The lean writing style doesn`t work so well when your narrator is drifting rather aimlessly around a peaceful, civilized city. Hemingway himself proved this when, in the 50`s he wrote
A Moveable Feast about his days in Paris; his philosophy of writing had reduced him to writing a book that wasn`t much better than a worked-up diary. It is by turns, dull, repetitive and shallow.
Finally, Hemingway was originally reacting against a verbose, pompous style of Edwardian literature. He was like an energetic gardener, hacking away at the dead wood. Lou Reed, though, had nothing to hack away at; sixties pop lyrics had already been reduced to a banal minimum.
So my feeling is that LR straight-jacketed himself to an outmoded, unoriginal, facile style of writing, which set the bar for lyricists dangerously low. If he has been influential, it may be because a lot of wanna-be song-writers hear him and think, in Bowie`s words," Oh God I could do better than that !"