Lou Reed & Metallica
Oct 24, 2011
The king of New York avant-rock, Lou Reed made innovative, iconoclastic music with the profoundly influential The Velvet Underground before "Walk On The Wild Side" gave him 1972's most unlikely pop hit. He reacted to this development with admirable perversity, releasing a stream of diverse and challenging solo albums, from the macabre, monumental Berlin to the subtle, seductive Coney Island Baby, from the wallpaper-peeling Metal Machine Music to the punk pivot Street Hassle. More recent years have seen his always-present literary bent come increasingly to the fore on works like New York, Magic And Loss and The Raven. His aim has often been to set the spirit of Burroughs, Selby and Poe to three or four chords, to marry the gutter and the stars, to fuse trash and majesty.
Metallica, the world's best selling hard rock band (with well over 100 million albums sold), formed in California in 1981, and it would be no exaggeration to say they've since redefined what we call rock. Like Reed's, their lyrics have never been shy to discuss alienation, fear, death. Musically, they've expanded the boundaries of metal, using speed and volume not just to pound the listener but to enhance their song structures, take sound to new places. They've revived the heavy rock genre by grounding and earthing it before sending it through the stratosphere. Epic, enduring albums like Ride The Lightning, Master Of Puppets and 2008's Death Magnetic have established the nine-time Grammy winners' legacy.
These two giants of modern music first came together in October 2009, at the 25th anniversary Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame concerts in New York. Metallica - founder members singer/guitarist Hetfield and drummer Ulrich plus guitarist Kirk Hammett and bassist Rob Trujillo - played with the hometown hero Reed on Velvets classics "Sweet Jane" and "White Light/White Heat".
As fearless musical pioneers of different generations, the combination of Lou Reed and Metallica was always going to deliver something startlingly different and exciting, on visceral and cerebral levels. They've achieved that resonantly on Lulu, a set of extended songs inspired by German expressionist Frank Wedekind's early 20th century plays Earth Spirit and Pandora's Box (much admired by Freud). The plays, originally published in 1904 and set in Germany, Paris and London in the 1890s, whirl between the points of view of Lulu, an inverted-Eve-like cipher-mirror of desire and abuse, and the people who fall desperately in love with her. Then she meets Jack The Ripper...
Lulu is set to be released on November 1st. The lead single is "The View."
