When the dust finally settles on rock and roll, Lou Reed will be placed in its frontline of geniuses. A truly astonishing chunk of the sound, style, and ambition of rock's avant-garde has been directly or indirectly copied from the four proper albums Reed made with The Velvet Underground over three decades ago. Ever since he walked away from the sex 'n' drugs circuit, though, Reed has frequently sounded unsure of himself, unable to find a new home. He came awfully close to true renaissance with his New York trilogy, but towards the end of the 90s, Reed lost the plot once again. Suddenly, he was approached by theater god Robert Wilson to apply his music to a stage adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's work called POEtry. Wilson's collaboration with Tom Waits led to The Black Rider, one of the weirdest albums ever to be so simultaneously good; it's only natural Reed was excited about the possibilities.
The music from POEtry has been released as The Raven, and it does nothing if not confirm that Reed is currently as clueless as his most spiteful detractors could suspect. Packaged as either a 75-minute single disc or an even more exhaustive double-disc set that tacks on more poetry and stories, this album is as much of a baffling nadir as Metal Machine Music, with nowhere near the stoned bravado. Perhaps it works when it accompanies whatever Wilson put on his stage, but as a listening experience, it implodes with the combination of grand ambition and an equally massive void of ideas. An impressive cast of guest stars including David Bowie, Laurie Anderson, The Blind Boys of Alabama, Ornette Coleman-- even Willem Dafoe and Steve Buscemi-- do their best to help cover up Lou's wanting prose, but a list this long should provoke more trepidation than interest. Whenever that much decaying gunpowder is scraped together, the result is usually less a bang than a whimper, and in this case, it's an exceptionally drawn-out, irritating whimper.
Reed's songwriting shows no daring, producing flaccid, indecisive experiments that never get off the ground, and when he settles for the tried and true rock mode, he really settles. For example, the simply ridiculous "Edgar Allan Poe" strikes like a PG-13 Schoolhouse Rock lesson with shabbier vocals. It's not bad enough that Reed actually sings the lines, "These are the stories of Edgar Allan Poe/ Not exactly the boy next do'"; incredibly, he repeats them several times.
Musical crimes like this abound, but what's more noisome about The Raven is the inept way the Poe tie-in hangs over the proceedings. The poetry readings are adequate, and Willem Dafoe's Green Goblin take on "The Raven" is rather fun, but even good poetry readings are no way to resuscitate a moribund album like this, and as a result, they wind up as just another aspect to unmercifully elongate the record. Worse still is the way Reed profoundly misunderstands what he's doing: Rather than delve into the cobwebs and shadows of Poe's psyche-- as one might expect-- he presents a glossy, good-natured encomium to a Great Artist, and from his tone, it's impossible to tell whether he's saluting Poe or Norman Rockwell. When he touches upon Poe's themes, he does so superficially, or obscurely. On "Change", he sings, "Your ass starts to sag, your balls shrivel up, your cock swallowed up in its sack/ The only thing constantly changing is change, and it's always for the worse." That might have some relation to Poe, but it has none to poetry, and Reed should know better.
He should also be wiser than to try to slip his own work next to Poe's, but he makes that mistake as well. Two reworked songs, Berlin's "The Bed" and Transformer's "Perfect Day" make unjustified appearances, and while guest vocalist Antony salvages the latter, the former illustrates much of what's wrong with The Raven. The original remains one of the more haunting songs in rock history, featuring Reed singing about suicide with a narcotic detachment, somehow screaming just beneath the surface. Here, he sings with the self-consciousness of someone who knows he's written something great. A mumbled aside about "poetry and stuff" becomes "Poetry and Stuff", and the song simply dies.
Reed's biggest problem has always been not realizing what he does best and, consequently, what he does worst. He can't write a decent love song to save his life, but he's tried so many times since sobering up, you'd think he was Diane Warren. With The Raven, he tries to write a gigantic love song to Edgar Allan Poe that's no more sophisticated than a MASH note to a grade-school crush. Reed is in a perfect position to draw out the rugged humanity that kept both Poe and his Velvet self tethered as they stared into the abyss, but he instead makes a much cheaper analogy between the two: He says you could dress up for Halloween as either Poe or the Rock 'n' Roll Animal because both are scary, and both are great artists. The Raven, for all its talk of tribute, is a sneakily narcissistic pose-- one that deserves a full-throated response of "Nevermore."
