Lou Reed was unusually hard to pin down in the 1980s. After the gay-rights-rallying cry of Transformer in 1972, he spent a decade mating queerness with rockn’roll and flirting with his own homosexuality in public statements, an identity that seemed to culminate in 1979, when he came out to Creem Magazine. Hardly a year later, he was celebrating married love on Growing Up in Public and, by 1982, heterosexuality in more general terms on the nonetheless excellent The Blue Mask. Reed’s subject matter changed because his life did—he got married in 1980—yet his newfound pop persona as a successful heterosexual capitalist coincided with the rise of Ronald Reagan, who was murdering gay people with his refusal to acknowledge the AIDS epidemic while helping to make greed and white-collar success culturally ubiquitous. Reed never supported Reagan’s policies, but he gave the impression of a star wearing the garb of his own era, scrawling an ode to his New Jersey country home as easily as he once caked on glam rock make-up. And then he made New York, a record of unmistakable conviction, one so direct and literary, erudite and rageful that it resembles no protest music written before or since.
Released in January of 1989, days before George H.W. Bush’s inauguration, New York treats straightforward hard rock and clean-toned, mesmeric guitar as blank pages on which to lay down a series of news stories, urban setpieces, and liberal-minded principles. Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani appear in its hyperdense lyrics—gleefully, Reed subjects both to horrific calamities. He once stated that he wanted to write “the Great American Novel” using “the rock’n’roll song as a vehicle," and on New York, the directive feels apt rather than pretentious. The city of his birth becomes his Yoknapatawpha County, a location for synecdoches that encompass large swatches of experience. Like much great fiction, Reed’s handling of his themes—a depleted environment, indigenous persecution, pro-lifers, police killings, racial violence—has aged into greater relevance today.
Though Reagan is never named, New York is nonetheless a dispatch from the fear-ridden two terms of our 40th president, an album that touches on aspects of the ‘80s ignored by the era’s major-label music. Prince, Cyndi Lauper, and Reed himself worked HIV/AIDS into earlier songs, yet those few instances shied away from connecting the epidemic to the gay community. “Halloween Parade” uses the eponymous West Village tradition to show the hole that AIDS left in queer life:
There’s a downtown fairy singing out “Proud Mary”As she cruises Christopher StreetAnd some Southern Queen is acting loud and meanWhere the docks and the Badlands meetThis Halloween is something to be sureEspecially to be here without you
Reed’s songwriting always shined when he wrote about subjects other than himself, and New York is structured around characters: the Romeo Rodriguez of the thrilling opener “Romeo Had Juliette,” its turns of phrase packed as tightly as Dylan’s in the mid-’60s; the abused young Pedro on the three-chord single “Dirty Blvd.;” the proverbial whale—which might be a novel, or might be an endangered species—on the VU-esque highlight “Last Great American Whale.” We have references to Michael Stewart, a black graffiti artist murdered by the police, and Bernard Goetz, an NRA-embraced vigilante who shot four black teenagers on a subway train. Over 57 minutes, New York transforms from a collection of diffuse character studies into a concept album about the futility of the individual to be a meaningful agent of political change. On the penultimate track, “Strawman,” Reed provides his album with a thesis in reverse: “Does anyone need another self-righteous rock singer?”
The danger of this kind of music is the ravaging that time does to proper nouns and political stances. Shockingly, Reed’s liberalism still feels progressive. The one exception is on the taut, distorted “Good Evening Mr. Waldheim,” about Jesse Jackson’s 1988 presidential campaign, and an incident in which he referred to Jews using the ethnic slur “hymies.” Reed was understandably offended, but he peppers his song with ripostes that have aged poorly, notably interrogating Jackson’s belief that U.S. leaders should meet with the Palestinian Liberation Organization. Contextualized by the multiperspective New York, though, the song fits: it evokes someone agitated at home, arguing with the evening news while the city rumbles by outside.
The new deluxe edition of New York contains live versions of every track, glizted-up arrangements of the Reed standards “Sweet Jane” and “Walk on the Wild Side,” one non-album instrumental, a long-out-of-print concert film, and a number of demos and rough mixes. These works in progress largely serve to show that Reed got it right with the album’s final version.
When New York was released, Reed was 46 and seemingly done trying lifestyles on for size. He’d made something that echoes James Baldwin’s Another Country in its depiction of a city tensely cohabitated by gay and straight, black and white, Latinx and Jewish—one that nonetheless holds a candle for the possibility of utopia. New York also introduced a loose trilogy of works (including 1990’s Songs for Drella, about Andy Warhol’s death, and 1992’s Magic and Loss) that animated middle-age from a point-of-view that was not explicitly gay but also glaringly non-straight. AIDS is never mentioned outright, but the records are undoubtedly products of the epidemic: They focus on the inadequacy of saying farewell, avoiding “Family values” as well as family relationships to consider the anguish of losing friends to disease.
There’ll be no Halloween Parade in the Village in 2020. In a year of virus, election, publicized police abuses, and natural disasters, it’s a minor yet sorrowful loss. We don’t need a self-righteous rock singer now—probably, we never did—but on New York, we got a worried and determined one. After dressing up in so many different costumes, Lou Reed revealed himself to be like the rest of his city: reasonable and resilient in a crisis, staring grimly at authorities too big to wrap a song around.
Buy: Rough Trade
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