the Greil Marcus edited version 'Careburetor Dung' has several reviews of MMM and trying to come to grips with "that Lou".
i like VU more than Lou, but he's got some stuff. but like Neil Young, people forget he's put out some real stinkers.
i recently did get a very very good small club Lou bootleg (half the set are VU tunes) from 72. it's quite good.
i like Lou--but he lost me with his late 80's claims to be the "original rapper." and the "rock and roll novelist" thing is iffy too. A lot of people write songs within a narrative structure.
i thought New York was a decent record in the 90's. it had some rockers. i guess he's had some others.
""On a lonely planet spinning its way toward damnation amid the fear and despair of a broken human race, who is left to fight for all that is good and pure and gets you smashed for under a fiver? Yes, it's the surprising adventures of me, Sir Digby Chicken-Caesar!"
"
I like Lou a lot but yes, he has put out some pretty lamentable stuff. Most everything between Coney Island Baby and New York, two of my favorite Lou Reed albums, was dog shit with a few exceptions. The David Bowie/Mick Ronson produced Transformer was probably his best. The Original Rapper was actually The Original Wrapper. A decent tune, catchy as hell, was about items being in their original wrapper or some such nonsense. Haven't heard that song in ages. It was on the same album as Video Violence which is a great song.
MMM has always totally confounded me. I've heard all the theories about it either being a shot at RCA or an experiment for the painfully pretentious hipsters who comprised his fanbase. Just to see if they really would buy anything he pushed their way. Lou has always been vague and evasive when asked about it as far as I know. Personally, I think it was either drugs or Lou being so pretentious himself that he could release this and have it hailed as a landmark artistic achievement. Astonishingly enough, it was recieved as just that by some critics.
I guess I'm just curious to see if any of you like this album and why.