Lou Reed: NYC Icon, NYC King

I've blogged A LOT about my love for the music of Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground. (You can go back and read my various posts about him and his legendary band if you so wish.)

But in addition to being a brilliant musician and band leader, Lou Reed was an NYC icon, an artist whose work helped to define the city -- or, at least, a certain kind of NYC, that of the counterculture, the artistic and sexual underground, the downtown scene.

As we come upon the 10th anniversary of Lou Reed's death, there's a new book about him coming out that's subtitled "King of New York." He certainly was a kind of NYC "king", a musical and cultural one, a bard of the city, a voice of its dirty streets. (One of his songs is literally called "Dirty Boulevard").

Encapsulating Lou Reed's status as one of the city's "kings" in words isn't easy but it's probably best done in this New Republic review of this new book. The reviewer writes: 

"[Lou] Reed was ... a divining rod for New York, tracking and manifesting the city’s raw energies. One subtext ... is the evaporation of New York’s counterculture in the wake of tangled -tions and -isms: gentrification, corporatization, conglomeration, rank careerism, and the ne plus ultra, the internet. Reed’s career arguably parallels the city’s ruthless professionalization—a cultural mode that shifted its calculus from DIY to ROI, from collectivity to the singular ... One other thing Reed has come to embody: a New York that exists only in memory, a city of unbridled id and romantic sleaze, 'something like a circus or a sewer,' as he sang. He connects us to a place where degradation was currency but redemption always in the offing—by some measures, the recipe for a perfect rock song. New York ain’t what it used to be. But as long as we pretend otherwise, Lou Reed will be its mirror."

Couldn't say it better myself.