A review by jnzllwgr
Lou Reed: The King of New York by Will Hermes

4.0

Biographies are always specious. Do they depict the lives of the individual more accurately than the individual can lay claim to in a memoir? What grounds the author’s choices, weaving the narrative to make interesting and legitimate connections — across arcs of time— to reveal possible unconscious operations of the subject? How much detail is appropriate to convey the gravity of events? What do you leave out? There’s no point here in discussing Lou Reed, the person, the artist, the rock god. Their iconic status is deservingly cemented. Their music is rock and roll by some of the strictest definitions. It’s also subversive and experimental. It’s high art, it’s low art. It’s raw and tender. Tough and brutally graphic. Their life was incredible. The encounters, the people they intersected with, unbelievable and charmed. Reading this continues to support my believe that 1970s were an absolute pinnacle of creativity before corporatism and capitalism started to suck all the oxygen out of the room. Hermes did a great job with compressing Reed’s life into under 500 pages. My only quibble might be that he spent 50% of them on Reed’s early life through his departure from the Velvet Underground. As we perceive time accelerating with age, the book does the same leaving less and less space to learn about the later work and events. I would argue that Reed was never on autopilot and the makings of his last true solo LP, Ecstasy, was just as important to them as making Transformer (let’s start a fight: I say we can and should ignore his self-titled solo debut). That said, the through line in this work might be Reed, the person. That may have been the author’s greatest challenge, given Reed’s reputation, but was quite satisfied at the end.