In 1975, Lou Reed was near the height of his fame as a solo artist; 1972’s Transformer had given him a couple of minor hits (“Walk on the Wild Side” and “Satellite of Love”), and 1974’s live album Rock and Roll Animal took some of the old Velvet Underground songs and turned them into arena glam rock spectacles. It was at this peak that Reed decided to put out Metal Machine Music, a double album of experimental noise music, mostly the sound of guitar feedback in a room full of speakers. It was absolutely pillaged by critics upon release; rumor was Reed had put it out just to get out of his record deal, thousands of copies were returned within a week of purchase, and the record was pulled from shelves after three weeks. In the liner notes, Reed wrote, among many other methamphetamine-fueled thoughts: “Most of you won’t like this and I don’t blame you at all. It’s not meant for you. At the very least I made it so I had something to listen to […] off the record, I love and adore it. I'm sorry, but not especially, if it turns you off.”
As Mark Richardson notes in his Pitchfork reappraisal of the album, critics at the time who didn’t openly hate the album lacked the language to even express how they liked it. Lester Bangs admired it slantwise: “as classical music it adds nothing to a genre that may well be depleted. As rock 'n' roll it's interesting garage electronic rock 'n' roll. As a statement it's great, as a giant FUCK YOU it shows integrity—a sick, twisted, dunced-out, malevolent, perverted, psychopathic integrity, but integrity nevertheless.” It was only years later before the album started to be accepted for anything other than a “giant FUCK YOU” to listeners, years before its rigorous and astringent experimentation was feted rather than dismissed. The album is an achievement in pure punishing sound, a progenitor to 80s no-wave and 90s Sonic Youth style noise rock, an album that, as Richardson notes, “not only sounds like something that will damage your hearing, it’s the sound of the damage itself.” It is obliterative music, not precisely pleasurable to listen to but completely successful in its aims. It is a rock album inimical to rock albums, an artist responding to the braying drunks request in the front row to PLAY IT LOUDER by turning the knobs all the way past ten (and even eleven) and just letting them hear it. “My week beats your year” sneers Reed at the end of his liner notes; he’s in charge, and this is what he wants. You may have clicked play on that video above and immediately shut it off, and then maybe checked if your computer was OK given the noises that were coming out of it, and that’s fine; I can’t really sit through the entire album myself, and Reed himself claims that “[n]o one I know has listened to it all the way through including myself. It is not meant to be.” All that said, some part of me enjoys it, enjoys finding unexpected melodies within the squall of sound; maybe I wouldn’t have dug it if I picked it up from the record store in 1975 and expectantly dropped the needle on it, but it is a one-of-a-kind listening experience, a type of music that forces a different mode of attention and scratches a different part of the brain.
Rachel Cusk’s new novel Parade is the closest thing I can think of to a major literary version of Metal Machine Music.1 After she worked out all her issues with the idea of ‘character’ within novels in the Outline trilogy, Cusk seemed to have moved back towards more traditional forms of the novel with 2021’s Second Place, a novel that featured a kind of gothic lurid intensity to it as opposed to Outline et al’s planned shapelessness. It was still a Rachel Cusk novel, but a little more fun - there were even exclamation points! With Parade, Cusk the severe experimentalist is back, and this time she has sheared even more away from the foundations of the novel and asked the reader if what remains is enough for them. Like Metal Machine Music, I dislike this novel intensely, because it is really not interested in being anything like a novel that people read and enjoy. But also like Metal Machine Music, some sick part of me likes this novel, loves picking through the debris of the form and finding Cusk’s persistent thematic obsessions still there. A couple ways of saying this: do you want another non-novel about people looking into and out of windows? Are you interested in the various perils of seeing and being seen? Do you still have time for essential links between art, gender and power? I wrote my masters thesis on Rachel Cusk, so I do; you probably didn’t, so your mileage may vary.
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