“Vicious” - Lou Reed
(Words/music: Lou Reed, available on Transformer, RCA 1972)

When we talk about Lou Reed as an innovator, whether as a solo performer or as a part of the Velvet Underground, it’s in the context of rock music.  Rightfully so, as the Velvet Underground (and Reed’s subsequent solo material) helped to make rock music more than a louder version of the blues.  By integrating different artistic strains (free jazz, performance art, etc.), the Velvet Underground helped establish rock music as its own artistic medium.  I only mention this because of word choice – it’s usually “rock” music and not “pop” music (somewhat surprising since “pop” was a word associated with Andy Warhol) associated with the band, when these genre-blending experiments influenced many different genres in addition to rock.  Moreover, the Velvet Underground crafted pop songs – granted, they stretched, chopped, and scrambled them often beyond recognition.  Still, most of the great VU songs rely heavily on elements of pop music.  Perhaps the label escaped the band because they were not popular, but the band relied on the same conventions as pop music as their starting point.

Much of Reed’s solo material went away from the pop song, but many of his early solo compositions (“Walk on the Wild Side,” “Satellite of Love,” etc) masterfully combined pop song structure with experimental twists.  “Vicious” takes the standard verse-chorus structure of the pop song and adds in two distinctively non-pop elements.  First, Reed turns the lyrical content upside down – most pop songs   have heartbreakers as villains, but Reed’s narrator has a sinister and violent relationship with the other person in the song.  It might not sound as sensational in a post-Eminem music world, but I can’t think of any murder fantasies before “Vicious.”  Reed, ever the cool presence, delivers these lines about swallowing razor blades in his deadpan vocal style, suggesting either detachment from the narrator or another level of dementia in his narrator’s violent tendencies.  Reed’s narrator goes through his screed while harmonies, cowbell, and a familiar guitar riff (I can’t place it, it might just be from listening to “Vicious” six times today) build a compellingly catchy arrangement.  Then, just like the narrator’s id shining through, that wonderful distorted guitar comes in and plays that scrambled riff (and later, a wonderfully unhinged solo).  It’s the only musical hint at his narrator’s troubled personality, yet it strangely fits in with the rest of the arrangement; it calls attention to itself, but no more than a perfectly played lead part might do under other circumstances. Both the guitar song and the lyrical content seem to play off each other, turning this otherwise normal sounding pop song into something far more interesting.

More on Lou Reed: Allmusic | Amazon MP3 | Emusic | Last.fm