A Nihilistic Delirium
to Catharsis the Fantasy for a Better World: A Historical and Literary Re-contextualization
of the Musical Role of Velvet Underground
(Published in the Sabaragamuwa University Journal 2013, Vol 11: No 1, ISSN 1391-3166)
Abstract
Velvet
Underground (referred as Velvets from here on in
this essay) is one of the most authentic, influential but least talked rock
bands in the history of rock music, whose contribution is greatly forgotten in
presence of the high popularity of the commercial form of rock. Started in 1966,
the Velvets successfully articulated the avant-garde movement in 1950s and the
European eliticism to create an independent, nihilistic and subversive form of
rock which was later known as punk. Their style was the most self-expressive
and pessimistic rock structure to go in between the hippie psychedelia
influenced by existentialism and German expressionism; the two most influential
ideological reactions which dominated the intellectual and literary tradition
for decades in the post-war Europe. Without identifying with both hegemonic
strands, the Velvets pertinently invented their own independent way to express
the most profound and authentic feelings of their generation. They were later
celebrated for their intellectual and artistic use of rock with great amount of
experiments along side avant-gardism. In
their poignantly arranged, de-aesthetic songs, though inspired by the use of
heroin, have shown an imagination for the need of a better world. This paper
will research how their self-expressive, nihilistic and notorious dreams which
actually meant to get rid of the era’s desperation can be literary
re-articulated to vision a futuristic better world. Though this situation of
nihilism and futuristic hope is paradoxical, it is the very dilemma of the era
and of modernity. The visualization of Velvet’s fantasy is, if
psychoanalytically contextualized, in the form of a nihilistic delirium made through
drugs and, resulted as, in Freudian terms, a catharsis to release the
masculine libido; the sexual energy in the Id and sometimes as thanatos;
the death instinct: both the animal within us. Their death instinct is also
illuminated by the fact that they denied the ‘pleasure principle’, or in other
words, the entertainment aspect in rock music.
In this case, they are studied here as the first rock band with taboo
adult fantasies in their songs which were mainly not for kids. This discussion
will also observe their deliberate and positive use of deviant social
attitudes, sexual perversion, underground metropolistic and seductive
urbanistic hyper –realism in their songs in fantasizing the future better world
against the contemporary monotonous, de-humanized socio-political structures. Their
attempt to go beyond the political reactionism of that era towards a political
radicalism, which was not the usual case in the time, will be paid attention to,
while discussing their style and lyrics. Velvets’ contribution to rock music
will historically be restructured in the first part, and the content will be
literarily evaluated through some of their renowned lyrics in the second part
of this dialogue to prove the hypothesis.
Key Words:
Artistic and Psychedelic Rock, Delirium, Fantasy, Catharsis, Political Nihilism,
Hyper-realism, Death Instinct.
Methodology:
This
paper will flow as literary essay by post-structurally and semantically analyzing
the musical caliber of the Velvet
Underground and the historical socio-cultural impact that they created in
1960s rock scene. Velvets’ lyrics and themes will psychoanalytically be re-evaluated
to find whether the content actually carries what they intended to have in them. They will sometimes be compared with other
contemporary popular rock bands to reveal their depth, complexity and radical experimentalism
which did not attract the public, who were blinded by commercial rock. This
essay will elaborate both the historical importance of Velvets, in the first
section, and their intelligent, classical and poetic use of lyrics in the
second. Further, their historical place in rock will be extendedly discussed in
comparison to the function of other rockers at the time to position Velvets at
the right place. In this survey, only the most influential lyrics will be taken
into account but some extremely important, musically and aesthetically significant
and realistic ones will be omitted due to the space factor here. They were
immensely lengthy as a result of Velvets’ experimentations. Since the lyrics
are commonly available online, they are not attached in the appendix but the
important URLs are given sometimes. It must be mentioned here that I happened,
in some occasions, to depend on online sources, as written material on rock
music are extremely rare to find in Sri Lanka. That might have an impact on the
strength of the evidence that I intend to prove my hypothesis with.
Part I -Historical
Re-contextualization
Introduction:
Rock music is a highly
popular global form of art. Beyond its musicality, it is a live, energetic,
vociferous and ferocious way of expressing very profound human experiences. It
has been used, over its comparatively short history, to articulate important
socio-political themes in the century. Rock is not only a genre of music with
its subcategories such as hard rock, art rock, psychedelic, metal, heavy metal
or punk, but is also treated as a movement, life style, culture and an
ideology. It rose to its universal fame in the 1950s in way of rock ‘n’ roll, which
is now understood and categorized as ‘oldies’. The fifties rock ‘n’ roll did
not last long, but the 60s style is even remembered today. Sometimes rock is treated as folklore and a
belief system in which people identify themselves. It can rightly be defined as
the key to the most explosive popular culture in the 60s and 70s until
overtaken by pop and disco in the 80s. However, the global rock fan base is innumerable
and the impact it had on the Western civilization is convincing and bewildering.
Rock in the sixties has
been generally understood as a form of music which represented an experimental,
self-expressive, and rebellious and an improvised form of alternative music
genre against the popular, easy-listening pop ditties of the 1940 and 50s. It
also brought out the political protest and reaction (as in case of Dylan) and
the explosive generational anger (The
Rolling Stones would be an ideal example) of the post-war Europe; the fear
and angst of the Cold war and the Vietnam war and of the ones who wanted an
alternative cultural value system in opposition to that of the Puritans; and
catered those who wanted to change the world and who were tired of three-minute
ditties of pop music which had been crafted for decades. Rock music of that age
is understood as a form with space for psychological narrations,
anti-establishment satire, political denunciation, drugs, sex and death
(Scaruffi 2003: 15). Historically speaking, rock music was as African-American
development which has its roots in African blues music. According Townshed, ‘if
every society, after all, has its indigenous music, which serves as
entertainment, accompaniment to ritual and ceremony, bonding force, story
teller, preserver of history; the rock, certainly, is modern American folk
music’(Townshed 1999: 4). But rock travels beyond the destination of a
ritualistic entertainment and cultural adhesive status, since it captures the
very soul of the American civilization from 1950s to 1970s and even beyond.
Under this phenomenon,
the emergence of Velvet Underground[i]
looks alarmingly controversial, since the innovations and experiments that they
brought about to the rock arena have never been tried before. Velvet Underground was the most
important and influential rock band in 1960s, which made a great impact on the
contemporary rock arena and changed its pathway of rock for another couple of
decades. Many rock critics and artists recognize that Velvets are the most
artistic, innovative and experimental band of all time in the history of rock
(Scaruffi: Op Cit: 23), though they were
not popular as the other contemporary rock giants such as The Beatles or The Rolling Stones,
The Who or perhaps The Kinks. The world knew them simply
because of Andy Warhol’s multimedia show ‘The
Exploding the Plastic Inevitable’. The main reason for their less
popularity was due to their advanced, ahead of time musicality, experimentation
and the realistic social criticism which the popular bands were afraid to touch
in fear of loosing popularity. By being realistic and critical about the
society and individuals Velvets did not become ‘popular teen idols’ such as ‘The Beatles’
but they became true to the spirit of rock music. In doing so, they identified
themselves with the discarded, marginalized and anti-establishmental nature of
the urban youths in that era. Nevertheless, we should not forget the fact that
both Lou Reed and John Cale, the leading members of the band, were classically
educated youths who were aware of the avant-garde movement, who had obviously nothing
to borrow from popular music.
Even though they were
nihilistic due to era’s frustration and their use of heavy drugs, the meanings
they brought out can be articulated deeply within the peripheries of a
revolutionary movement that may rise one day. The desperate urbanism and its evils
have never been captured more vividly than the way Velvets have; and the
symbolic value that they bear as an urban group of youths who sought something
alternative to the dogmatic, hegemonic and bourgeoisie values that were
spreading in every social stratum should academically and politically be
evaluated to understand the dark, urban underworld better. It could also have
been even more valuable, if Velvets were studied and their themes were
articulated by a revolutionary political movement to enlighten the public mass.
Since most of the rock bands were
either silent about the intolerable social unjust at that time or were not
directly representing the agony of the youths, Velvets become ‘an ahead of time
revolutionaries’ in their own way, in relation to their true outspoken nature
and by becoming true to the spirit of rock.
This literary survey will observe how their nihilistic deliriums
resulted from heavy drugs such as heroin; emerge as futuristic hope from the
fog of era’s desperation. It will also investigate how their songs work as an
eye-opener to change the world and as a form of de-aesthetized poetry to
catharsise their own ego and character, in addition. It is a gratitude for them
to presume that they did not abandon the contemporary rebellious generation who
dreamt for a better future. Such contextualization is academically urged to
appreciate their historical and literary role which has been under-determined, within
the commercially over-determined rock phenomenon in the consumer stage of capitalism.
.jpg)
Defining Rock Music and
Its History in Brief:
Rock music started with
slavery. The history books will bear no better witness to offer the truthful
background to rock without tracing back to the uprooting of thousands of
African from their native lands and cultures to transplant them in what is
known as ‘the new world’. The music that the Africans brought from their
homelands was the only vehicle of the expression of the trauma of thrashing a
fellow human group into unending servitude, the core of the modern Western
civilization. This human agony, as sited by Townshed, is;
‘families
were split apart, slaves from different tribes were thrown together on the same
plantations, and, of course, these reluctant visitors were chained, whipped,
imprisoned, and compelled to perform excruciating hard labor for barely
subsistence nourishment. Keep in mind that these conditions continued, on this
continent, for well over a century, until less than 150 years ago’ (Townshed
1991:2).
From this servitude
situation the blacks could never recover. They have resided on to drugs, crimes
and violence until today. They were never paid a psychological compensation for
the recovery from the loss of the traditional past to set themselves in the
secular modernity (Harbamas: 2002). At the same time, they wanted something to
express their unending suffering which took place in the form of a break of a
civilization. They did not choose the ‘soft’ blues or jazz as the right form of
catharsis of the trauma. The Afro- American hybrid of rock ‘n’ roll was the
option. It is wrong to say that rock ‘n’ roll was entirely black but, without
slaves, rock ‘n’ roll was never possible. Whites too realized that this is a
strong form of spiritual expression and entertainment and, started to borrow
this ‘devilish music’ which actually came from the burning souls from the
alienated blacks. For the desperate souls of the white youths who were also
marginalized as the outcasts of capitalism, rock had something to offer. This
is how these two groups met to formulate the most expressive, ever
cross-cultural product in the American soil.
With the radio, rock
continued to produce some galvanizing and most remembered music in this
century. It was during the 50s that rock was taken to the popular culture to
entertain public. With the record industries, the black form of music was
exploited and eventually transmitted to the white teenagers who had money to
buy those records and wanted something exciting. But originally these ethnic groups were
racially divided. The meeting point of these segregated communities was the
commoditized and commercialized rock ‘n’ roll. Blacks were singing something
that the white teenagers could relate to. It was all about the prohibited
subjects such as adolescent love or taboos which had a great appeal on the
youths who still were under the influence of the remnants of Puritan
adults. The contemporary county or blues
and their childish rhymes could not produce something substantial to address
the tormented souls of the white youth who were equally alienated in the
industrial capitalism. This binary
oppositional meeting point is the historical conjuncture of the popular form of
rock ‘n’ roll that we experience today.
Technically, rock music
is generally understood as a genre of popular music employing electric guitar,
bass and drums sometimes with a strong back beat. It is also defined on the
basis of the availability of a strong back beat, since rock music does have
such exclusiveness. However, the difference between British and American is
surprisingly huge and, as a result, the Encyclopedia Britannica Online[ii]
suggests that defining rock is problematic since least because the term has
different resonance in its British and American usages (the latter is broader
in compass). Apart from this continental difference, rock genre
has been divided to many sub-genres over the last fifty years followed by many
stylish, thematic and structural varieties.
The
Collins Cobuild English Dictionary, based on a vast database of British
usage, suggests that ‘rock is a kind of music with simple tunes and a very
strong beat that is played and sung, usually loudly, by a small group of people
with electric guitars and drums,’ and further it suggests that ‘rock and roll
is a type of pop music originating with a blend of rhythm and blues and country
and western’[iii]
but there are so many other contexts that encompass these technical descriptions which might dig out
more historical and political factors to give us a more lively background. According
to the Wikipedia online,
‘Rock
music is a form of popular music with a prominent vocal melody accompanied by
guitar, drums and bass. Many styles of rock music also use keyboard instruments
such as organ, piano, mellotron, and synthesizers. Other instruments sometimes
utilized in rock include harmonica, violin, flute, banjo, melodic, and timpani.
Also less common stringed instruments such as mandolin and sitar are used. Rock
music usually has a strong back beat, and often revolves around the guitar,
either solid electric, hollow electric or acoustic’[iv].
Rock music was the
dominant form of popular music in the 1950s, 60s and 70s but its grandeur
diminished after the introduction of other forms of music such as pop, disco,
hip hops and electronic in the late 70s and 80s and afterwards. In 1950, it was
rock ‘n’ roll which shocked the world with The
Beatles. With them and many other great artists, rock music became the
global form of music towards the end of 1970s and may be a bit afterwards. It
is important to remember that before The
Beatles, there were many popular musicians whose works significantly contributed
to rock music in many different ways. For instance, Bo Diddley’s Mona
(1957) and I am a Man (1955), Chuck Berry’s Sweet Little Sixteen
(1958), Roll over Beethoven (1956) and Johnny be Goode (1958)
made rock history remembered up to date. Both Diddley and Berry not only electrified millions of
youths at that time (Scaruffi 2003 p. 63) but showed what guitar can do in rock
music. After that, there was a pianist called Little Richard who invented
decadence rock, a sub-genre with which historically important hits such as Tutti
Futti (1955), Lucille (1957) and Good Golly Miss Molly (1958)
were made. Richard introduced a hysteric pace to rock music which was inherited
by many later artists. Apart from Richard, the two white musicians Jerry Lee
Lewis and historic Elvis Presley too must be mentioned here. However, it was
Buddy Holly who brought a school uniform plus a child-like appearance to rock,
which was copied by The Beatles and
was extremely popular among teens.
The
Beatles, with their extreme commercial success, changed the
appearance of rock music forever. Many critics point out that because of the over-success
The Beatles did not grasp the true
spirit of rock; the way many other later rock bands and artists did. However,
the giant bands such as The Rolling Stones,
The Who, The Kinks, dominated the rock arena in the 60s and in 70s but The Jefferson Airplane, The Grateful Dead too were extremely
popular with their identification with contemporary political trends. Their
approach to rock was, however, different from that of The Beatles or at least they did not look like them. Many rockers
during that time were either hippies or acquired most of their values from the
political trends such as peace movements, sexual revolutionaries or left wing. Many were heavily addicted to psychedelic
drugs. Their lives were influenced by post-war ideologies such as
existentialism or expressionism. It is noteworthy that the hippie movement was
also based on the existential way of thinking and is considered one of the most
powerful socio-political movement in Europe in
general and in the States in particular. Hippies were followed by the punk
tradition which was also equally influential in West.
The Velvets were
neither hippie nor established musicians, but were elitist musicians who were
aware of the avant-garde movement, even though the hippie was the political and
cultural trend at the time. Velvet
established a style in the rock music, which was overwhelmingly intelligent and
anti-mainstream, and was structurally different from the three minute ditties
of The Beatles who dominated the
scene. It is important to mention here,
as a result of the excessive commercial success and popularity of The Beatles, in 1960s specially, all
other talented bands which were ideologically and musically different from them
were covered by their huge shadow. They could not represent the true historical
spirit of rock because they were manipulated towards a commercial success by
the producers who wanted nothing but money. What is the exclusiveness in rock? The
specialness is in its origin.
“We
must also remember here that rock music is different from other music forms such
as blues, R & B or Jazz, simply because rock is meant to represent the
alienation and the anxiety of the ethnically disintegrated blacks from their
original homes due to slavery during the colonization….
Rock
‘n’ roll can be traced in a direct line to an utterly unnatural phenomenon; the
forced uprooting of tens of thousands of Africans from their native lands and
cultures, and their transplantation. To a new world as different from what they
had known as black is different from white” (Townshed Op cit: 21).
This shows that rock ‘n’
roll is a result of a historical social evolution of suppressed, alleviated and
thrashed African blacks who make a window to history. They belong to the very
socio-cultural fabric of America. In
this regard, the above critic further mentions that,
“To
understand rock ‘n’ roll, therefore, we must understand what slavery was, and
where it left the sons and daughters of Africans who knew nothing of the
European roots of American culture. For
slavery provides the perfect rationale, the perfect explanation why rock ‘n’
roll should stand apart from other musical forms, as a cultural revolution unto
itself. Every society, after all, has
its indigenous music, which serves as entertainment, accompaniment to ritual and
ceremony, bonding force, story teller, and preserver of history. Rock ‘n’ roll,
certainly, is modern American folk music in these respects, successor to
Stephen Foster and Cole Parter. But that
is only a minor facet of rock ‘n’ roll’s place in American, indeed in world
society since 1955, and the larger element of rock’s influence reach for beyond
the traditional cultural adhesive status of other folk music. Solidity this
claim, and to explain it, we can point directly to slavery, which forcibly
mixed the radically different element of two cultures in a boiling cauldron
(rather than melting pot), bringing to white, rural, agrarian American a series
of vocal and rhythmic traditions that originated on the other side of the
planet in Africa, and adding an important spiritual, melancholy, almost
fatalistic sensibility that grew up by itself in the slaves’ imprisoned souls”
(Townshed: Op Cit: 23-24).
So, this gives evidence
to the fact that the origin of rock music is tied with a traumatic history of
an African-American hybrid generation who used music to transcend earthly pain
for a while. The Blues which was also of
the same origin was used to relieve the pain, the sadness, toil and loss cause,
through repetitive rhythms and chards and lyrical phrases. But the gentle nature of Blues which served
as a spiritual function was insufficient to express the true soul of the
oppressed, deprived and purposeless black slaves. It is interesting to note here that after a
century, the whites borrowed rock ‘n’ roll to express the cataclysmic
horrification, generational anger and genocidical destruction of a generation,
which had tremendous psychological trauma after the First and Second World Wars
and the Vietnam War. It was also
re-articulated in a very successful commercial phenomenon in the form of The Beatles (including several other
‘teen-idol’ popular celebrities such as Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly), which were
an artificial formulation in the empty market space. The touchy and rebellious
form of music was pumped out to make soft easy listening stuff for the middle
class kids and this new form was harmless to the established form of political
and cultural bodies. The new ‘sellable rock’ was de-politicized, de-bourgeois,
anesthetized ‘sleeping tables’ for the lazy middle class in the post-industrial
Europe. In other words, rock became to function as an ‘empty signifier’ without
representing or bearing any material truth or a reality with its proliferated signs.
But by surpassing this
huge commercial success and popularity, few contemporary rock bands who were
either less popular or not at all came forward to discover the true spirit of
rock to re-narrate the uncompromisingly restless minds of the youths, who were
alienated by capitalism and who wanted to challenge the values of the adults,
and who were revolutionary against the establishments which restricted
socio-cultural freedom. Such inspirational
bands were namely the Rolling Stones, The
Who, The Kinks and the VelvetUunderground and later Pink Floyd, Grateful Dead and the Jefferson
Airplane. All these bands were
either the representatives of the contemporary socio-cultural and political
trends such as the hippie movement, anti-war movement, students’ protests or
generational struggles, or the spokes persons and the participators of those
trends. With these bands, rock ’n’ roll
far exceeded any political or cultural movement that had preceded it. Music became the terminal stage of an anelastic
process; from social alienation to musical alienation to musical revolution to
social revolution. With the rock music
in 1950s 60s and 70s, music became not only a universal language and more than
entertainment, but also a revolutionary tool for the youth of the USA in particular, and in Europe
in general.
With its anti-establishment
and anti-bourgeois nature, rock remained a ‘clandestine’ and ‘underground’
genre in the beginning, but in 1955 the establishment applied the capitalistic
rules of mass marketing to this new product, and sanctioned its existence. Eventually, the above mentioned bands, with a
great dedication, re-invented rock to sound something different from the older
and traditional tone of popular music.
This new rock ’n’ roll denied the sentimental, the tragic and the comic
tones of popular music and allowed the erotic, violent and sarcastic form,
which was truly the teenager’s view of the world at that time. Scaruffi further mentions about the
atmosphere of the youths when this new form of self-expressive rock came to
effect.
‘Puritan
were right, when they claimed that rockers (by appropriating the convulsions of
stripper, the sensuality of perverts, and the savagery of blacks) were inciting
male teenagers to became prostitutes. It
was their way to next a generation’s feeling of independence’ (Scaruffi: Op
Cit: 40).
With the fast growing
capitalism and the creation of an alienated, underground,’ dark’ segment of the
individuals who were not absorbed by the establishments of the main stream was an essential by product. To understand that
phenomena better, we must turn to what was happening in the industrial
metropolitans.
‘Accumulation
of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery,
agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the
opposite pole’(Marx and Engels 2000: 222).
The above Marxian
statement is a clear guidance to understand the misery of the urban, down
trodden class, who was at the receiving end of the disadvantageous economic
polarization, and who were ‘unaccepted’ by the rich. The financial frustration of the youths was
further set back by the post-war fear and angst, the Vietnam War, and the Cold-war
nuclear holocaust. Those who promised a future better world were no more
reliable whether left or right, and this new frustration generated made a fresh
ideological turmoil to challenge the older generation and their values and
politics. The above angst and the different
ideology yielded a great reason for psychedelic music, a music that reflected
the spirit of the time, that experimented with studio sound and that embodied
the psychological frustration of the youths.
This new trend was further described by Scaruffi as follows;
‘The
synthesis of 1966 was fueled by hallucinogens, as if drugs were the natural
meeting point of the bard, the punk and the sound sculptor. Most likely, it was a mere coincidence: drugs
just happened to represent the unifying call of arms of that generation. It might as well have been something
else. Drugs were conveniently available
and stood for the opposite of what the hated establishments stood for War,
bourgeois life, discipline, greed, organized religion, old fashioned moral
values’ (Scaruffi: Op cit :32).
So, the new music style
in rock in mid 1960s to entire 1970s was the psychedelic; opposite to
mainstream commercial music of three-minute, termed as punk or acid ‘jam’ whose
ingredients were of a much more complex recipe.
The first representatives
of this free, loosely constructed style were Velvets to start with and then
followed by Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead and the Pink
Floyd. Their innovations were no
longer related to rhythm and blues or country music but to jazz. This new way of style actually led to create
a very strong social movement and a counter- culture which was secondary only
to the civil right movement and to the hippies in its participation and
existence.
Of these entire line of
rock psychedelic bands, not forgetting the other two hard rock revolutionaries
such as the ‘Rolling Stones’ and The Who, the Velvets are the first to
consider rock as a creative art, not as commercial product to sell in the
market. Their prime purpose was to
communicate with their environment, to transmit emotions and to express
uneasiness. They are also the first and
foremost example of creative freedom: the band wrote what it felt like,
arranged it as it pleased, and played it how it wanted, while most other bands
and musicians supplied what the producers and the audience demanded in fear of
losing commercial success. On the other hand, since Lou Reed was a
student of English Literature and was a friend of Delmore Schwortz at Syracuse University, who was a poet, Velvets’
lyrics were very much poetic; and since John Cale was a classically educated
avant-garde musician, they were able to produce masterpieces which could stand
with any form of music at any level. It
is this poetic quality of their songs which inspired me to write this literacy
essay. At the same time, it is noteworthy that their innovative style and
artistic adherence to explore a new world and a new music which have not been attempted
by other rock bands was another motivation to research on the Velvets. The other intention was to search how poetry
can be articulated in lyrics to such a creative extent that a community can be
awakened to find out their ignorance, blindness about the truths that are at
arms length. The Velvets showed who and where
people were at a time when individuals were forced to forget their identities.
Placing
the Velvet Underground in the 60s and 70s Rock Arena:
The rock music after The Beatles, adjusted itself according
to the demand of the mass form of art, which was highly commercialized in the
hands of few entertainment companies. The cynicism and the pessimism of the
generation, which was retarded by the Vietnam War, fear of the Cold War, human
avalanche and catastrophe of the post World Wars were not properly understood
by any rock artist other than Velvets.
Nowadays, Velvets are considered as one of the most important rock groups
in the history of rock, because of their enormous impact on it (Harvard:
2007:01). But still the mainstream radio stations remain Velvet free. Enough
attention is not paid for their laborious effort to improve modern rock and to
the profound experimentations that brought a new inspiration to the
contemporary rock, which had never been tried before at any length. It is difficult to define the function of the
Velvets since they did not authentically belong to any of the rock categories
in the contemporary scene. It is a strange and excellent form of combination of
two great musicians namely, John Cale and Lou Reed. As mentioned above, Cale
was an avant-classist and Reed was a great poet and a lyrist. But the Velvets
cannot simply be measured through the magical mix of Cale’s avant-gardism and
Reed’s poetic lyricism; but they must be evaluated through their truthfulness
to the essence of rock music. The easiest way to define them is to look at
their strangeness and deviance. They brought heroin, orgies, methamphetamine, bondage
and discipline, physical and emotional submission, violence, transgender,
transvestites, transsexuals and street-wise deviance (Ibid: 17) to the rock
arena at a time those elements were not pronouncedly talked in popular music. As
Cale once rightly mentioned in 1986, when the Velvets were inducted to the Rock
and Roll Hall of Fame, ‘Sales are not the be-all and end-all. Inspiration
and artistic freedom are the cornerstones of rock and roll’. They remained
the most influential but most commercially unsuccessful band in the history of
rock. If one views pop music as a
disposable commodity whose value is measured through sales units, the case of
Velvet is especially problematic. So, the populist and commercial standards
that may apply to measure the success of the rock bands will not be applicable
to Velvets. Therefore, new artistic and music standards must be reinvented in relation
to the Velvets, because they were far away from the mass art form of the time.
When The Beatles were identified
in their popular over-deterministic Beatlemanic atmosphere and The Rolling Stones, The Who with rebellion outcasts and generational anger, the Jefferson Airplane or Grateful Dead with Hippies, the Velvets
just hanged around the streets with heroin without sticking any such identities.
However, the way that the Velvets have
been defined by various music critics will be useful to contextualize them in
the scope of this dialogue. Those definitions will explore their historical
role as a rock band and how they can retroactively be seen today. However,
as a common characteristic and a salient feature, all agree on one point i.e. Velvets’
love to be experimental, introvert, urbanistic and the nihilistic. According to Patti Smith;
“They (Velvets) were the stark, elusive balloon that burst upon an
inflated scene, injecting that scene with radiance that connected poetry, the
avant-garde and rock and roll. They were a band of opposites, shooting freely
from pole to pole, without apology, with dissonant beauty, tramping the flower
of peacemaker, treading the blond depth, black in the white world, and white in
the black world. They opened wounds worth opening with brutal innocence,
without apology, cutting across the grain, gritty, urbanic. And in the search
for the kingdom, for laughter, for salvation, they explored the darkest area of
psyche” (Zak: 1997: xiii).
Velvets were, however,
the by product of the true spirit of rock and representatives of urban
hooliganism and scavengerism. The bourgeois academia will be reluctant to study
them, because their living standards will have a disturbing and traumatic
impact on them. They are most authentic representatives of the reason’s modern
world and its barbarianism. They were
not only a symbolic mirror to reflect the world we live in but a traumatic
source to majestically saturnine the bourgeois kiddy music and the life style
of the generation.
“The Velvets were less a source than a symbol and mirror. For those whom
the band meant, it represented confirmation of a deeply held, yet perhaps
unarticulated belief in rock itself: that this music so bound up with the
working of industrial capital, pimply teenage fantasies, and absurd celebrity
poseurs could yet be a revolution of truth, a way of knowledge and
understanding, a way of getting through. Their fans believed in rock and roll
with all their hearts; or at least wanted to. They were waiting, perhaps
consciously, for a band that would embody and reflect upon them the light of
their own faith. And whether they had any idea what they would mean, they
recognized when they heard it” (Ibid: xiii).
When the commercialization of everything including music was the motto of
consumer capitalism, the Velvets went on experimenting with different forms of
rock music. The experiments were highly advanced in comparison to the Beatlemania
and other superficial stuff. Therefore, M.C. Kostek mentioned once, “The Velvets
existed to tell not to sell” (Ibid: xv). Selling the realities that the
contemporary youths were undergoing due to the great de-humanization in the
name of various wars, Cold-war fear and pauperization and marginalization was
not something that the Velvets were interested in. They rather choose to live
with it. Since they too actually belonged to the social segment that many other
youths did, they could authentically sing what others could not.
“The Velvets operated in the ragged seam between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art that
opened up in the 1960s and has grown increasingly irritated (to some) and fascinating
(to others) ever since” (Ibid: xv).
As they did not get
caught by the commercial signs generated through the capitalists’ market
orientations and profit motivations, they commercially failed to lift
themselves to the big rock arena at that time but could produce the best form
of artistic rock music to express the deepest psychological traumas and
anxieties. As an obvious result, “their
records were utter failures as commodities but became extremely successful as
artworks” (Ibid: xv). In this case, their music definitely goes beyond the
political expressionism and reaction of the The
Who and The Rolling Stones, the
most expressive of the time. They were able to bring the most profound aspects
of the psyche of the youths due to their open, cathartic and outspoken
experimentalism, which grasp not only the anger of the generation, but also the
deprivation and hopelessness consumed by the use of drugs of which Velvets were
a part. As Charles Oliver observes;
‘Theirs was the dim world of drugs and sexual
perversion, of heroin addiction and the desperate loss of hope that goes with
it. Their concern was with death and violence... Oozing evil and lubricity,
they made every other group look like kid stuff, and they made a lot of people
nervous... There is no word for their sound but sometimes it seems as if a presence
has taken it over, perhaps even His Satanic Majesty himself. You can easily
imagine someone performing black masses with the Velvet Underground’s albums. Not for the kiddies’ (Roxon 1969: 65).
The Velvets did not belong to the
popular world of flowers and peace of the hippies and of the existentialists
but to a rather dark and an underground world, which is the true demonic face
of capitalism. They were essentially nihilistic since they had nothing to hope
for and to achieve, but they had one thing to say i.e. this is not the right
place to dream for. Their world view was made through the narcissistic and sadomasochistic
fantasies of urbanisms. "Their world view was dark and nihilistic at a
time when everyone else was singing about peace and flowers” (Ibid:
65). They
were highly sensitive to the realities of their time but not excessively
vociferous about the sufferings that can easily be commercialized in turn.
Silently, with an excessive caliber in imagination, even though with great
commercial failures and a small fan base, the Velvets produced the most
aesthetic rock of the time. ‘Recording mere four
studio albums and one live album in the late-'60s, the group established an
aesthetic so extreme, alien and ahead of its time that it has taken three
decades for the world to catch up[v]’. The above introduction
was made to be written, since even most careful rock fans were unaware that a
band called the Velvets ever existed in the world.
Before the formation of
the Velvets, both John Cale and Lou Reed played under different names such as
the ‘The Warlock’, The ‘Primitives’
and ‘The Falling Spikes’ in galleries
and at poetry readings around lower Manhattan.
By the time of this meeting they both were academically trained musicians; Cale
as a violist and Reed as pianist. Cale was
engaged in avant-garde experimentations and Reed was writing poems about
down-and-out street life (Scaruffi 2002: 32), and he had been working as a
house song writer.
Their academic
background helped them to become extremely capable song writers of the entire
history of rock music under whatever standards it may be such as classic rock,
blues or punk. As Scaruffi mentions;
“It
was difficult to find a precedent for the Velvet Underground’s music, because
these barbarians were educated to the classical lieder and to LaMonte Young’s
minimalism, while they borrowed very little from rock‘n’roll and pop music” (Ibid:
45).
Actually, when their
music and the themes are concerned, any one who is sensitive towards 60s’ rock
can believe how true the above statement and how advanced their music is, when
compared to what most of the popular rock bands offered to their audience at
that time, including The Beatles (Scaruffi
Op. Cit: 26).
Avant-garde
Modernism and the Velvets:
The only difference that Velvets makes in them
from rest of the contemporary rock bands is their awareness in the Avant-garde
movement. In the modern world, what capitalism was experiencing, apart from the
crisis of over accumulation, from the beginning of the 19th Century
was the time-space compression or, in other words, the annihilation of space by
time. The result was the Imperialistic
expansionism of capitalism and radical restructuring of social relations in
every part of the world where capitalism stepped in. According to Marx, 'Constant
revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social
relations, everlasting uncertainty and agitation, distinguish the bourgeois
epoch from all earlier times. All fixed, fast-frozen relationships, with their
train of venerable ideas and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones
become obsolete before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all
that is holy is profaned, and men at last are forced to face with sober sense
the real conditions of their lives and their relations with their fellow men' (Marx and Engels: 2000:99-100).
So, the aesthetic modernism is actually a cultural reaction
to the modernity itself. It reacted against the tension that was created by
high capitalism by disturbing the old social order and relationships. Modernists’
reactionism was oriented towards the psychological shock and jolt of the
alienated souls who were caught in the industrial capitalism. It was a
nostalgic withdrawal towards the myth of the organic community that was lost.
For the men who were spilt and schizophrenic, the imaginary past was a safe
retreat. In a modernist’s sense, this
self-protective reaction resided in what is called ‘high culture’. In case of
T.S. Eliot who is a paradigm in the time, the high aestheticism and the
thickness in the textures that were employed in his writings were understood by
the bourgeois few. Same applies to Joyce.
The antagonistic reaction by them was to re-organize the scattered
fragments to make a meaningful, organic whole. Their tradition symbolizes
modernism’s problematic relationship to the high-cultural tradition. The
modernists’ entire aesthetic endeavor rests on their production of disruptive
semiotic texts which carried clashing discourses to signify a demand for a
revolutionary world order immediately to be restored. However, the revolutionary avant-garde meant
a radical breakdown of the barrier of social life and art, rejection of
tradition and questioning the commodified social relations. Apart from that, the naked results of
modernism were militarism and Fascism which produced genocide and holocaust;
both were historical traumas in the human civilization. The modernists’
reaction characterized this very paradox of modernity which actually promised
prosperity.
It is those modernist
eliticism and reactionary aspects that were shared by Velvets. They were not
hippies but were aware of this avant-garde reactionary intellectual tradition.
It is through this tradition that they become experimental and independent and
different from rest of the rock artists at the time. Their classical academic education immensely
helped them to mark this difference. According to Scaruffi, ‘their true goal was to provide a documentary of the
decadent, disaffected, cynical mood that was spreading among the intelligentsia’
(Scaruffi: 2002:23). They did this without betraying the militant and barbaric
spirit of rock by reducing it to the isolated high culture phenomena. They
created form of music which truly grasped the dark fresco of modern mankind.
Their
poetry was not to please the academic intelligentsia but portray much darker
and fathomless agony of the generation. Even though they were great poets of the
metropolis, Velvets never used that for a pleasing effect. “Their poetry is a continuous reference to the
degradation of modern life, to the alienation of the city, to the existential
desperation of chronic loneliness, to the moral and physical violence shared by
an entire population of modern "losers"(Ibid: 25).
Heroin and Death Drive:
They were
heavy users of heroin against the typical LSD tradition of the hippy
psychedelic. Heroin is more sinister and delirium. They lived in a dim world of drug and sexual perversion. Here, the
death drive is discussed in relation to their reluctance to engage in producing
pessimistic and pleasure oriented music.
As Slavoj Zizek mentions, the ‘death drive’, according to structuralism,
is understood with symbolic order ‘in so far as it follows its own laws beyond
the Imaginary experience of the subject, that is to say, ‘beyond the pleasure
principle’ (Zizek: 2006: 33). Velvets lived in a time where the symbolic order
has been disturbed or annihilated by the seductive capitalism. Here the death
also refers to the symbolic death resulted from the cognitive break or
disruption of the socio-psychological automation which maintained the subject’s
equilibrium. The commercial capitalism completely annihilated the symbolic
universe or the corporal reality of the societies by making its subjects
perverts or psychologically sick in one way or the other. The Velvets became the true representative of
the death instinct and the psychological perversion of the generation at a time
of loss.
The music
that they produced did not intended to be entertaining but expressive. The
denial of the commoditization is also part of their denial to be identified with
the main stream rock which targeted to be sold for an entertaining crowd who
made fun out of music. So, in short,
Velvets rejected to be identified with the over-determined ‘pleasure principle’
which was at work in commercial popular rock. They instead remained an off
beaten track, experimental art rock band which articulated even lengthy tribal
form of music to express the unending agony of the time for hours for the
little crowd who listened to them. Their superb songs such as Femme Fatale,
All Tomorrow's Parties and Black Angel's Death Song, together
with the percussive boogie Waiting for My Man resulted from the hard boiled souls that were withdrawing from the
dream of prosperity of the modern capitalism to the underground corners of the
street. And the chaos of Heroin is their Dantesque lament for the
desolation of modern life. The use of tribal music in European Son,
and the Indian classic music stained in Venus in Furs are best examples
to show the experimentation to mark a clear cut deviation from rock ‘n’ roll
and pop. Through them, Velvets explored their male libido which was directing
towards a dark death through fetish sexual fantasies. The songs are, in a way,
cathartic release of the dream for a better world.
The death
instinct and the denial of pleasure as mentioned above did not appropriate the
commercial form of music. No one wanted to listen to their tormenting
lamentations in the form of music which generated a trauma. As a consequence,
they were also among the first bands to show total disregard for the charts.
The aim of their music was to transmit emotions, to express uneasiness, to
communicate within their environment. The motto of the post-industrial
entertainment culture which demands ‘pleasure’ with no care for the limitations
imposed by reality (Zizek 2008:54) is not applicable to Velvets because, in
opposition to pleasure, they were seeking death instead. If that aspect is
taken together with their urge to experiment and the limitless independence
which was not restricted by commercial motives, they become the most truthful modernists
of the era with an anti-bourgeois existence. But the nihilism and hyper-realism
are marks of the kind of modernity afterwards.
Velvets’
True Legacy, Identity and Supremacy in Rock:
They neither lived in
nor got blinded by the glazing neon lights of the profit oriented consumer
capital unlike The Beatles. The velvets stuck by their own
standards and did nothing or little to share with the contemporary existentialists,
hippies and the San Francisco
rockers. Their identity is unique as the representatives of the classical
avant-gardism, intelligentsia and more sinister heroin culture. They were not
the LSDs which are utopistic and dreamy. They introduced the most pessimistic
standards to rock music. That pessimistic and subversive nihilism led to
establish what is known as ‘punk rock’; the style which dominated in the 70s. To
accurately mention what their legacy was in the history of rock, it is suitable
to quote what Brian Eno has once famously said as, “that not many people bought the Velvet’s albums when they were
originally released, but everyone who did formed a band’[vi].
After bravely jousting the twin enemies of indifference and open hostility in
its lifetime, the Velvets has gradually been embraced as one of the best and
most important bands in rock history. The legacy of rock bears a very high
place for Velvets, since their practice of music made a foundation to a new
tradition in the Western civilization in mid 1970s as what is called the ‘punk
subculture’[vii].
Velvets are the first punk rock band in the history of rock music.
Secondly, it is
important to study Velvet and rock music which was the sole weapon that the
urban youths had to show their political protest and antagonism towards the
establishments. According to Terry Eagleton, by the end of the Velvet’s time
(mid 1970s); ‘the Western history was at a turn. Although I could not have
known it at that time, an era of political radicalism was just about to slide
into one of political reaction’ (Eagleton 2005 p. vii). It can be believed that Velvets’ music, as in
case of Dylan, goes beyond the boundaries of resistance and reactionism. Their
musical ‘sign’ was to create the reality in which they were living into the
signifying language of music. As Scaruffi mentions, ‘the metropolis was reduced
to an endless pulsing noise, daily life was reduced to an unconscious delirium,
and everything, both public and private, was clouded in pure, Freudian libido’
(Scaruffi: 2002: 9). The chaotic and
de-humanistic urbanism was made a hyper-reality in the grip of drugs and
perversion. The seductive and terrific nature of the urbanism has never been so
vividly and impressively portrayed in rock music any other band in the
contemporary times others than Velvets.
As mentioned earlier, their
identity is further illuminated by the fact that their purpose goes beyond just
entertaining of the public. This is
also why they were not popular in the arena.
The band sought not just to entertain and react, but to challenge, to prove
that rock ‘n’ roll could be a dangerous weapon that can direct against the
bourgeoisie. In that, they used their classical music background to articulate
the protest. In this endeavor, they gravitated not towards French
existentialism but towards Andy Warhol — who brought Austrian actress/model/chanteuse
Nico into the fold — and became
fixtures in Warhol’s multimedia organization, the Factory, and in the Village
bohemian art scene. That is one historical example in which populism and
political radicalism intermixed to produce something that can have an impact on
mass.
If The Doors are considered to be the most creative band in the
history of rock, the Velvets become only second to them, but as long as the
experiments are considered, they were the best without ant doubt. In
reducing rock ‘n’ roll to its harshest essentials, the new wave took Lou Reed’s
aesthete-punk conceit to a place he never intended. For the Velvets the
aesthete-punk stance was a way of surviving in a world that was out to kill
you; the point was not to glorify the punk, or even to curse the world, but to be honest about the
strategies people adopt in a desperate situation. The Velvets were not
nihilists but moralists. In their universe nihilism regularly appears as a
vivid but unholy temptation, love and its attendant vulnerability as scary and
poignant imperatives. Though Lou Reed rejected optimism, he was enough of his
time to crave transcendence. And finally, quoting from Ellen Willis, "Rock
And Roll" makes explicit, the Velvets’ use of a mass art form was a metaphor
for transcendence, for connection, for resistance to solipsism and despair
(Marcus 1979:44).
Theirs were not songs
because they did not sing but rather cheerlessly reported an intolerable
reality through soundtracks. Those ‘songs’ cannot, under any standards, be
placed or compared with the type that were popularized and commonly heard at
the time or even today. However, their
supremacy in rock music is remembered due to their denial to identify with commercial
form of rock, denial of the pleasure orientation and drive towards an
unconscious delirium instead of a the sweet dreams that The Beatles form of
ditties were promoting. But their nihilistic dreams are never deprived of
signifying the necessity to change the world for a better place. Their lyrics are
studied from now on to prove this hypothesis.
Part
ii
Literary
Appreciation of Velvet’s Lyrics
Velvet Underground has released
four albums during their short journey. The first was named The Velvet
Underground and Nico, (Verve, 1967) recorded in the Spring of 1966
performed together with German actress and singer Nico (Christa Paffgen)[viii]. That is perhaps the best masterpiece which
sustained their mark in the history. Next was the White Light White Heat
(Verve, 1967) which was released without Nico
who abandoned the band after several failed concerts in empty theaters. But the physical vacuum that her absence created
was filled by Cale’s experimental new innovations and Reed’s self-expressive
discourses which went on unto ten-twenty minutes which were not very usual at
that time. This new type of music is
described by Scaruffi by following terms;
‘The
cats grew excessively long, over shadowed by a common monotone darkness, a
sense of impotence and claustrophobia, torn by guitar distortion and abused by foul
language. The free-form feedback jams,
hyper-dosinte grating holocaust that collapse into lowest level of
emotionality’ (Scaruffi, 1996 p 37).
These two albums are
the most noteworthy ones, but they also later released two albums called Velvet
Underground (Verve, 1969) and Live (Mercury, 1974). Those latter
albums do not carry the gravity and discourse as the first two did.
This essay comprises of
very few of their long poetic discourses in the form of acid jam. However, many of the shorter and well
structured three minute (or bit longer) lyrics which fall into the jazz-rock
category will be analyzed. The lyrics
which have been selected to evaluate here are ‘Sunday Morning’,
‘Femme Fatale’, ‘Venus in Furs’, ‘All Tomorrows Parties’,
‘Heroin’, ‘I will be your Mirror’ from the first album and ‘After Hours’ and ‘Pale Blue
Eyes’ which were in the later albums .
Though the lengthy and experimental titles are the real masterpieces, I choose
the shorter ones too because of their popularity and widely discussed. However much those are historically important,
in the scope and the physical space of this study; all the lengthy songs cannot
be discussed here. For the convenience of the shape of this study, I first discuss Velvet’s short
lyrics such as ‘Sunday Morning’, ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’ and ‘After Hours’ which are of more balladic
nature and fairly easy-listening, and then go into some of those longer,
chaotic and more deliria category such as ‘All
Tomorrow Parties’, ‘Venus in Furs’,
‘Heroin’ and ‘Femme Fatale’.
Sunday
Morning
The song ‘Sunday Morning’ (VU&N 1967) relates
to the 60s typical compositions structure of the pessimistic psychedelia of the
contemporary human existence which ideologically stood against the optimism of
rock music in general and of the San Francisco psychedelia in particular. The entire lyric explores the contradictory human
existence at present in which the organic realities of the world is either
forgotten or ignored by us to accommodate ourselves comfortably turning our
back to the modern day human adversaries. The psychological tensions that are
generated through physical torments are temporarily forgotten to by means of what
the establishments such as religion promote as consolatory words. The
individuals pretend that they do not to see the very restlessness that the
society has subjected them to live with.
They follow the daily pattern that they have been trained to and do not
question anything as if everyone is in a kind of an agreement not interrogating
anything. The title ‘Sunday Morning’ has
also a religions connotation i.e. to ‘mechanically’ perform the Sunday mass at
the call of the church. The religion makes us forget the fact that too many bad
things are happening around us and we have to be patient without disobeying the
God’s wish. We must be out of harmful things. Revolutions, uprisings against
the unjust are not allowed in the name of God. On the contrary, in reality, in
the name of God and justice, it has generated countless wars, hatredness and
deeper divisions and wounds in humanity. That situation can empirically be
perceived as the destruction of the humanity in the form of subjectification of
individuals, forceful suppression which demands obedience, ethnic cleansing in
the true history. This catastrophe was further facilitated by the intellectual
laziness of the generation and backwardness of the public who does not care. All this is condensed in the line;
‘It’s
just a wasted years so close behind’
This history that we
witness in this century is the history of sadness and suppression. Humanity
could not achieve its goal of prosperity. The world is so divided and all hope
is gone. These were the years of pure
human desperation after two Great Wars. Man was in the threshold of the Cold War
which left the humanity in absolute fear and hopelessness about what tomorrow
will be. The traumas of recent past have
still not been healed and to which destination the societies were lending have,
hitherto, been obsolete. The
contemporary consolation of the past and the present has also been constantly
barred by, ‘someone around you who will call its nothing at all’. Velvets here
ideologizes the ordinariness of the individuals who always ignore the reality
of suffering and the cause for suffering which the present entertainment culture has a
part in diluting the tension by way of petty happiness of its fetish goods. In
the upcoming consumer Capitalism, nothing was serious and everything was
entertainment-oriented including you own destruction (Zizek: 2006b):130.
The awareness of destruction is further
dissolved by the ignorance which claims that ‘it’s nothing at all’ and the
submission of the subject to such myths is shown by the line;
“Sunday Morning
and I’m falling
I’ve got a
feeling I don’t want to know”
We now live in a
society in which myth has replaced the dominance of the ideology. This is a
post-ideological era (Zizek: 2008: 38). So, the individual have given up the
desire to be conscious of the suppression and subjugation by submitting to the
feeling that seriousness is not wanted and things can be taken for granted,
which is what is repeatedly said in the contemporary technological
civilization. The ideological education
of the previous generation is no longer applicable. The direction of the social
consciousness of the individual was altered initially by the religion during
the modernity but today it is done by fetish consumerism. This blurs the material and empirical
consciousness of a subject about the elements of the suppression. But we must
also realize that the technological society has a capacity to enhance the
awareness of individuals by means of advanced technical devices of the digital
technology. These songs can filter to individuals through such means surpassing
the geographical and time restrains of the previous era.
The next line of the
song awakens us from the blindness the very reality of the day-to-day life. The
Velvets illuminate our tendency to ignore it and try to remind us how feeble
can be when we are caught in such ‘empty myths’. They transcend a meaning for
us who have just become neutral participants of what is ignored as the human
suffering that we experienced.
‘Not so long ago’
The things happened not
so long ago but we do not remember them now. The repetition of the line;
‘Watch
out the world behind you’
is a clear eye-opener
to the public who are reluctant to review things. The Velvets warn us that if
the negligence continues, the things will get worst. It is clear demarcation
for the audience who are unconsciously determined not to be aware of the
suffering but to come forward to change the world for better. The Capitalism
will give ‘small happiness’ to everyone through its fetish commodities. However
the inner contradictions disturb the very existence of the man. ‘It is just a
restless feeling by my side’ shows this ex-introvertness of the subject. Though
the reluctance is inside, when you look at the world to see that there is
ugliness everywhere, what is suppressed comes to the surface.
The song never
represents any political ideology but grasps the very reality of human
contradiction of clinging to the comfort of an ideological convenience. The
man’s attempt to ignore the reality and pretend not to be aware of the
suffering is cynically but undisturbedly turned down in the song. However, man
has fallen into the trap of unending mythologies that forsake reality and he is
now not potential to make aware himself and others by finally falling to the
pit of laziness and to the indefinable misconception of not knowing what to do.
Although sometimes it appears that the subject gives into the ignorance but
actually it does not; i.e. to mean that the song surpasses the existential
acceptance of,
“Man
simply is..he is what he wills” (Kaufman 1946: p25)
As Velvets wants us to
look at things by exploring more than what they superficially appear to be, they
seem to command us to ‘watch out’ so that we are to perceive the world abandoned
by us, which we have to care for. The song stands against the conventional
optimism (example Here Comes the Sun or
Good Morning by the Beatles) of beauty and charm in the
morning in the face of more hostile, competitive and antagonistic social
relations. Here the Velvets de-aesthetizes the entire rock and blues tradition
by mentioning nothing of any romantic nature that has been the practice of the
poets and lyrists for centuries. The studio version sounds more classical,
compact and easy-listening and perhaps one among the few Velvets ballads which
has an attractive and simple melody. Scaruffi puts this song in more classical
atmosphere in his remark,
“The cold lunar landscape of Sunday Morning, a
tenuous fairy tale told by a cursed fairy with finite nostalgia, with a refrain
suspended in emptiness that wraps itself around endlessly in a thick jingling of metal.” (Scaruffi, Op cit: 42)
This song detaches from
the reality and, at the same time, combines the reality into a sad melancholy
but not with no hope for a better future, though they do not entice the
audience to do away with the evil of the oppressor, no they provoke the
listener to act against the suppressor, but they simply and empirically show
you who are you and what you are made of. Though the Velvets were not
existential, this attitude fits more to the existential understanding of the
world.
This song also appears
in Velvet’s first album Velvet
Underground and Nico (1966) and reflects the facelessness of the
individuals in the contemporary society where people do hardly find something
to mirror who they truly are. This is an ‘identity-less’ and ‘mirror-less’
consumer society which absorbs everything into it and does not reflect anything
(Baudrillard 1983: 3-4). Here, the
Velvets volunteer to be a mirror from which their audience makes out who they
themselves are and the very elements that we are made of, but of what we all
have forgotten. If people cannot figure
out what they are, Velvets go further to become even the rain and the sunset;
the denotations of the nature; the very elements with which the humanity
conquered in the early history in discovering the ‘otherness’ in making the
culture. It is also reminded that when those individuals are back home not
knowing that they are actually back, Velvets looks into the possibility of
becoming the light at our doorstep to show that they have returned back home;
to the place where we have started the journey. It also appears that we have
returned without fulfilling the needful of a necessary battle of making a
better world. This battle still remains unfinished today, even after nearly
thirty years of their career. However,
in this song, the Velvets disclose the true, selfless and egoistic soul of the
individuals of the era.
We think that we know
ourselves but Velvets display their wider awareness about the humanity by exploring that the real
inside of everyone is either ‘shaken’ or
‘twisted’ or ‘unkind’ that we never see the suffering of ‘the other’. However,
the word ‘twisted’ seems to mean that the individuals are shocked by the
outcomes of the era. Man was completely convulsed by the outcomes of the wars
and by the waves of the post-industrial commercial capital and its
de-humanistic market forces. Is that the ‘twist’ and the ‘unkindness’ that is mentioned
here? Obviously, no human relationships have been left in this market orientation.
As Marx mentions in the Communist Manifesto that,
“The
bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal,
patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley
feudal ties that bound man to his "natural superiors", and has left
no other nexus between people than naked self-interest, than callous "cash
payment". It has drowned out the most heavenly ecstacies of religious
fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water
of egotistical calculation.” (Marx and Engels 2002: 222)
Human differences and
their internal dimensions have not been understood and given due respect in
this world but absorbed into the capitalist’s market as sellable consumer
goods. The true human nature in their relationships has been taken off from the
core by the over-determining external appearance of the objects.
Velvets volunteers to offer
their hands to guide us in the right pathway. They employ an ultimate
combination of aestheticism, political conception and awareness to awaken the
audience from their blind adherence to the current social structure.
‘Let me stand to show that you are blind’.
What is appreciable
here is that Velvets fearlessness to criticize their own listener without
considering that they might loose their popularity in the process. They bring
out a harsh criticism to everyone including their own listeners, whom they
thought, were blind to the dark nature of the humanity. This was what the
Beatles were afraid to do and remained extremely popular for the next decade or
so. The Velvets took the path less
taken.
‘When
you think the night has seen your mind’
Night is generally
metaphoric for the release the sexual libido. The nights in the major
metropolitans are seductive and supportive of that libido, since sexuality is
chief way to maximize profit. The above
line is about the false consciousness of the individual who believes that the
romanticism and the gloominess that the night generates and unleashes the
motives to release the sexual libido is the true catharsis of the inner
galvanized sufferings. The true blend
of intellectual motivation and avant-garde musicality to dig out the
subconscious of the urban kid has never been authentically depicted before the
masterpieces of Velvet.
Velvets extend their
criticism further to envisage that we are not only unaware about, as mentioned
earlier, the external social realities of the day but, unforgivably, and
unaware of ourselves. We, at least, do not know whether we are beautiful or
not. Velvet also commands us to put down our hands which we always raise
affirmatively to show that we know ‘things’. It semantically carries two
meanings i.e. we raise our hands to show our presence and to show that we know
and, on the other hand, to signal for help. All that can be applicable here in
regard to the present conditions of the humanity. We are ‘prudent’ and ready to
show that we are there to help in any adversary of any kind but, in the real
needful, we are even not to be seen but go home and stay comfortably
participating in the superfluous, digitalized media reality. Velvets ask us to
put down our hands since they ‘see’ us. We do not want to say that we know
ourselves since Velvets are in a pre- assumption that they have realized the
pretentious nature of today’s man and, at the same time, there is no need to
raise our hands in showing our suffering since that has too been realized by
them.
As we do not see our
own beauty, they are ready to become the light in our doorstep or even to become
the eye in order to show ourselves and, most of all, the world and its degradation. They come
forward to give us a hand to walk in the darkness of the present human
civilization. This signs optimism in the extreme pessimism that they advocate
in their songs. We are not only blind that we cannot see anything but the world
itself is dark which prevents us seeing anything. The ideological blindness, on
the other hand, refrains us from ‘seeing’ anything accurately. Velvets show an
excessive cleverness in showing both the inner and outer darkness of the time
when no light of intellectuality is found nearby. The leading ideological
frontiers such as existentialism and expressionism were incapable of grasping
the world realities and changing them. This song is a good example to display
Cale’s ability to divulge the degradation and the dualistic nature of the
humanity today. He cleverly and deliberately combines beauty with the salvation
of evil. Further, this lyric produces symbols of ideological laziness to discover
a new pathway of intellectuality to understand and alter the mystery of misery
and extreme degradation of inner human values.
After
Hours
Before beginning the
discussion I would like to give you two brief online commentaries about the meaning
of this lyric. Authors of these writings are unknown but the original URL is
attached for further investigation.
Commentary One
‘The
song is about After Hours bars of which there are plenty in New York City. It's
about the other world that exists there where you don't have to face the
reality of what's outside so long as you keep the door closed (in realty and
metaphorically). It's not about any particular romance or whatever it's just
about the kind of people who hang around bars at 3-4 am when everyone decent is asleep. Everyone looks good
in the dark. For a good perspective on this song listen to the Maxs Kansas City
album where Reed sings it, especially the final verse. If you want to view it
in a wider context its about anyone who doesn't want to race the reality of
something (in Reed's case the band was breaking up when Maxs was recorded) and
hides away from it.’[ix]
Commentary Two
‘This
song makes me think of virginity. the narrator wants to see what it's like
("all the people are dancing and they're having such fun"), hope it
will happen to her ("i wish it could happen to me").
Losing
virginity a toast to never (never be a virgin again). It sounds like she's
about 14 years old or something and very curious. she figures that experiencing
sex now will not lessen the effect of when, someday, she finds someone that she
actually loves (Oh, someday I know someone will look into my eyes; and say
hello -- you're my very special one--").
And
finally, day symbolizes purity, clarity and goodness. The night (that could last
forever) symbolizes vice/sin i.e. sexual "immorality" - once the day
ends, it's night forever.’[x]
It seems to me that both
two commentaries are worth studying since both can be semantically deconstructed
with equal justifications. The first author does not go beyond the contexts of
the making of this song and the background on which the composition was made and
so on but the second author attempts to bring out some external contexts to
re-define what is not said in the song. In a feminine way, she relates the
connotations of the song with virginity that underlies purity. The lost of
virginity means, under Puritan values, that one can never regain it. Further,
she articulates that with the real romance which is worth offering the
virginity for. The Victorian Puritanism and the morality that it advocated has
been questioned to a certain extend by the second comments that can go with the
semiotic interpretations of the sort of meanings that Velvet advocated for.
But the song, I think,
elaborates two major themes i.e. the restriction of a female’s freedom
through masculine institutions (such as
morality, power, and family) to ‘(un)make’ the woman and her struggle to become
herself. The societal restrictions and ignorant unacceptance of diversified
sexualities in humans is another aspect in question. The long-lasted,
over-determined sexual mode in the human history is heterosexuality (Foucault,
1972, p). In the face of the hegemonic heterosexuality, the other ways of
sexualities such as homosexuality, lesbianism, exhibitionism and transvestitism
and so on will be either secondary important or, most of the time, oppressed,
unaccepted and excluded from the mainstream. In such exclusion, a transvestite
such as Lou Reed will find the hostility of the dominant mode as suppressive or
unidentifiable. The phrase ‘close the door’ means the closure and antagonism
towards the other gender developments of individuals against heterosexism.
‘If you close the door,
the night could last forever’, shows us the forever unacceptance will suffocate
such an individual forever. When the acceptance of a different gender
development is deliberately neglected or unconcerned, the ‘ordinary happiness’
that prevails around the speaker intensifies the pain and isolation. Then it
becomes an identity crisis of not being able to move in the line of the ‘ordinary’
social mobility. On the other hand, when this is compared to the restricted
freedom of a woman who longs for freedom outside the domesticated household
setting of the patriarch, she too cannot bloom with her inner potentials and
diversities and, thereby, the sunshine of the day will be barred to her
forever. Night denotes the sexuality of the domestic life in which she has to
perform the ‘duty’ of ‘giving in’ but the day means outside, outgoing, and
non-domesticated patriarchal human world.
The domestic night will then last forever and the human day time will
never arrive to her.
However, the restricted
life and a drive to regain individual freedom, whether heterosexual or
transvestitism or any other category, is connoted as a key theme in this
song. The night that lasts forever
destroys not only the wine glass and the toast. Though appears simple, the song
connotes many meanings that can be interpreted in many ways to serve different purposes.
The next line immediately confronts with the surface mannerism that hides the
hypocrisy of those who would finally say, ‘you are my very special one’. The
speaker thus becomes a special character since she has not been to the outside
world and others have not seen her in the town in the day time. But the
ordinary world moves as usual with its machinery movements; the Cadillac and
bars go on to make things happier and the ‘innocent’ people who know nothing
about the injustices and de-human nature of the immediate reality just gather
in the city and the subways to celebrate in orgy. Can they forget the fact the
there are others who struggle to be a part of the happy world that they share?
The deliberate and spontaneous social movements, unorganized mob, social
arrangements, fights, romances, urbanization and its merits and demerits
including evil, industrialization and pollution (gray in the train), alienation
and tension are all part of the life we share. This is the life outside the
door. Once she does not face the reality, she obviously cannot say ‘hello’ to
anyone since she does not know them properly. Thereby, she will not come to
know anybody, or fall in love with someone and discover the ambiguities and
beauties of the life. The joy in success and the pain in defeat are not part of
her life. The darkness of idiocy will remain inside the walls forever.
Even though this song
did not receive much of a reputation and respect as the early Velvets’
masterpieces, the male domination and Puritan homeliness (Garrett, 1992: 65) is
effectively and bitterly questioned by this song very much similar to the
radicalism of the previous works. This
theme becomes an iconic universal slogan of the contemporary generation who
wanted to decisively break away both physically and ideologically from the
previous generation and from the patriarchal parental home where they were
supposed to live as decent and obedient followers of their parents. The anger against ‘the masters of war’ made a
greater generational and political gap between the two which never pacified
after.
Venus
in Furs
This song too
originally appeared in Velvet Underground
and Nico (1967) which was recorded in their California Tour in 1966 and
released in the following year. It reveals the moral misery of the nocturnal
masses (Scaruffi, 1991: 55) of the underground metropolis. The masterpiece is
reputed as one of the most prolific and fetish songs ever produced by the
Velvets. The song has its mystic ability to excavate the freaky sadomasochistic element of the dark underground metropolis
where a fantasy of a pervert becomes materialistic in the hand of a whore or
any in seductive female body who hovers in the street. The freaky and fetish
appearance of the mistress whose lash has the magic ability to cure the heart
of a pervert with her sadistic hits with the whip is initially portrayed to the
listeners. The shiny boots of the whiplash girl-child with a bell (Lolita
syndrome?) reminds us of the paid sex labor of the fetish, immature genre of
today’s pornographic industry.
The fetish appearance
itself is suggestive of her tactile stimulation to get caught in her seductive attraction.
She would then dominate over man by taking control of man’s innermost and
profound psycho-sexual drives to become his fantasy object in such a way that he may never leave her. It actually addresses the ‘dirty
fantasy’ (F2) or the second level of the
fantasy (Zizek 2006: 38) which is essential to maintain the ‘beautiful first
rate fantasy’ (F1). The guilt of the second
fantasy and the ‘conscious’ sinfulness of the relationship will never allow the
speaker to remain ‘balanced’ forever. Her association will bring a catharsis to
confess the guilt. The relentlessness that she is pleaded to apply upon the
subject has a ritualistic therapy of purification from the sins which brings
the psychological contradiction to a point that we are unable to clarify
through rationality since such a meeting
of the ‘real’ is linguistically
un-signifiable.
‘Don’t
forsake him, strike dear mistress and cure his heart’
The mixture of costumes
and sexualized fetish objects create the sense of downy sins in the nocturnal street
life which always has the typical habit of providing traumatic sexual arousals
in the inner consciousness. The interior guilt demands purification. On way of
purifying is the self-inflicted-pain or sadomasochism. The pain will purify
your sinful body. The agent of this purification is the female body which is a
traumatic real who is represented by a femme
fatale. Her image here, in this song, resembles the intrapsychic with a strong psychoanalytical connotation. The moral
principle of what is right and wrong collides with the reality principle. The
present market knows how to commercialize such inner fantasies. It merely
categorizes such into genres and makes an enormous amount of money out the
fantasies of the individuals since the fantasy can ultimately be commercialized.
The fetish and the sadomasochistic
nature that appears here can be compared with Rolling Stones’ popular song Rock Off [xi]
which says;
‘Heading for the overload,
Splattered on the dirty road,
Kick me like you've kicked before,
I can't even feel the pain no more.’(Exile on the Main Street: 1972)
The horrible tension between
the need for fulfillment of desires and the restrictions to deny the desire
create a ‘split’ subject. The intensity of desires is strongly portrayed in the
Stones’ song but it lacks the ideological direction to guide the listener as to
how he should divert his own desires rather than going after the same woman
again and probably exploiting her again. What Stones’ want is the release of
the sexual libido but the Velvets have at least their own ‘guiltiness’ about
what they do. Velvets go beyond from the point of the bodily fulfillment of the
desire. Nevertheless, the Stones’ song was not a pop ditties designed to an
easy-child-listener. With the line, ‘what's
the matter with the boy’, it is difficult to distinguish whether Rock Off is about a gay experience.
The extreme tiresomeness of the monotonous day life in the mechanical city
context with no human touch but only commercialized relationships with each
other is vividly captured by the lines below. The never ending sleep denotes a
physical escapism.
‘I am tired, I am weary
I could sleep for a thousand years
A thousand dreams that would awake me
Different colors made of tears’.
These are some of the
most beautiful and memorable lines ever written in rock culture, which
symbolize the agony and the delirium of the day which has been ‘snapped’ from
this generation. What is left for them is an unfulfilled dream and Velvets
prefer to sleep with a colorful dream in a fanciful world. A better world for
them is just a dream. You cannot now fight with a system which seems to never
end. It maybe they resort to drugs. It makes
your fantasy more colorful. At the same time, the ‘psychedelic trips’ can also
mean a sleep for a thousand years as they detach themselves from time and space
barriers of the material world. They would not intend to come back (in case of
an overdose) to this ugly world. The dreams become colorful with their drop of
tears that come from the pain of their inability to identify themselves with
the world they live in. They choose to depart from it rather than comment on it. If guilty, there is a punishment in her hand.
That leads to another guilt. Life is
paradoxical.
‘Taste the whip, in
love not given lightly
Taste the whip, now plead for me’.
This is also, according
to Velvets, not an easy love since this type is not quite common compared to an
accepted heterosexual relationship. On the other hand, The Velvets give a
sufficient respect and gratitude to the woman who is giving sexual pleasure to
them compared to the urge and the quickness in Stones’ Rock Off. The harassment that is inflicted through the whip is
revered and kindly asked to be repeated.
The mention ‘plead for me’ is, in a way, a form of spiritual request for
her to make him to be purified under the sharp hits of the whip. She is a
satanic inference to make ‘that’ plead instead of God. The tribalistic practice
of chastising the possessed of a disincarnated entity and releasing the subject
from the burden of the sins is metaphorically exorcised here. The Venus in Fur brings the 60s generation
to an ultimatum of their life paradox of guilt and purity.
The theme of the song
stands as one of the major psychedelic influences to entire rock music. The
song contributed to the initiation of more meaningful, self-expressive and
pessimistic attitudes to the arena of rock for the next couple of decades, especially
to the psychedelic 70s. The song was never an anthem of protest or not even
expressed clear-cut affirmation to the popular angst and generational anger of
Dylan or Stones or even The Who.
Instead, it declares a unique self-expressive inner majesty that none of the
contemporary protest songs had. Though highly personalized (due to the self-indulgent
heroin culture), the song never missed the dream for a better world, where the
evils of the metropolitan would one day disappear. The ‘dream’ becomes a
delirium of psychedelic doses of heroin since it goes beyond just a dream of an
ordinary man.
All Tomorrow’s Parties
This song is the third track
of their debut album Velvet Underground and Nico (1966). The song is
commonly hailed as Nico’s finest masterpiece, ‘a towering aural monument to
ephemeral glamour, with the pulse of dread and Reed’s destabilizing frantic
guitar’ (Scaruffi 2001: 22). The inner conscience and the protest towards the
infinite exploitation of the female body to create marketable fantasies in
customers has been the main focus in the song.
The song starts with an
eye opening rhetorical question of what costumes shall the ‘poor girl’ wear to
all tomorrow’s parties, where people stare at her as she caters to ‘the fantasy
object’ (Lacan 2004: 25) of the male subjects, who offer her something to wear
for all tomorrow’s parties. She must cover herself from the cloths that she
does not know where they come from. We assert meanings to her dress as ‘cute’,
‘sexy’ or ‘elegant’; all marketable in tomorrow’s fare. Her body is sold today
to commercialize the garments tomorrow which may be a party dress for
tomorrow’s never ending parties. Everything
is beautified and from which agent we buy the beauty tomorrow is the problem.
The ‘happiness’ (or ecstasy) in this age is determined by being more and more
beautiful and youthful. We got garments and costumes for that purpose.
We buy them to make ourselves and others happy. The market is right in the
middle of our desire to be beautiful and to survive in this world. The dress,
therefore, has meanings and stimulates power relationships with others as long
as it can ‘seduce’ others. It bypasses the ‘class signifier’ of modernity.
Through dress now one cannot derive anything and it is trans-class now.
But when this girl has
to wear a dress to which she cannot assert a meaning, she confronts with an
identity problem. It is obvious that if she is a model, she is used as a hanger
to hang cloths irrespective of her liking to the dress. The sudden introduction
of the midnight coming around shows that she becomes uncertain about the
midnight, which stands between the daytime and tomorrow. The tomorrow is the
sign for future and the future is not clear for the poor girl and that future
will never come. The adjective ‘poor’ can simply mean poverty but in the context
of the song it means more than the financial inability. It is nothing but the
poverty of the soul, which has been battered in such a way that a recovery is impossible.
It also means the indecision of choice and the uncertainty of future. Her
powerlessness to make her own choices too can generate this pathetic
helplessness.
An online commentary on
this song once mentioned about the Sunday clown that,
“Midnight is the doorway between today
and tomorrow. Tomorrow, the future, is what she's always worried about
(remember, she has far to go). As midnight
and tomorrow approaches, she gets panicked. She realizes she still cannot go
anywhere acting how she might act, and decides to turn to God. I believe
"Sunday's clown" is Jesus. Not that Jesus is a clown, but that the
way his image is produced can easily be a costume and any costume can be
described as clown-like. She turns to a "savior" and mourns her
behavior, hiding from everyone and crying. Even now though, she is hiding when
is crying. Her mourning is the only thing that is nature to her--everything
else she picks up from others--and even that, she hides.[xii]
If the song means Jesus
for the ‘Sunday Clown’ then the text goes into an anti-religious connotation to
mean that it humiliates Jesus who is also, in a way, a ‘hanger’ to hang
whatever clothes people wish to. This produces a variety of funny images, but
Jesus silently waits to be used by such devotees. It is the lack ideological
resistance which creates this ‘clown image’. If the song directs a man who takes care of
her as a guardian, then it again criticizes the inhumanity behind this act. Her
‘cry behind the door’ shows the agony of her inner collapse and the
helplessness that is not clearly seen by those who only see her party dress.
She is just a body. The answerless rhetorical question ‘why silks and linen of
yesterday’s gown to all tomorrow’s parties’ shows the rotation of the same old
linens to hang in her body but again she has to cry ‘behind the door’ after getting
back to the Sunday’s clown at the end of the day. We all live in a society
where ideologies have died and everything is permitted.
Now no one mourns for
her in the way they used to mourn for Christ who was in pain. But everybody now
enjoys the view. The last segment of the song brings forth dark images of a black,
mournful, gloomy and alienated soul, whose spirit rigorously seeks to rescue
from the endless repetition of the commercialized fetish to cater the stranger’s
fantasy. The song is a masterpiece to display the spiritual degradation of the
contemporary soul, which was taken away from the cyclonic devastation of the
commercialization, which denunciates all uniquely celebrated values of the good
old days.
Pale Blue Eyes
Man cannot escape from the fantasy painted in his mind from early
childhood psycho-sexual development. Woman, as a fantasy object creates in man an
endemic inescapability that will force him to stay with it as long as he meets
the body element for the fulfillment of his desire. The fantasy will benumb him
due to the unsignifiablity of what she is and what she is made of. This is in
Zizekian terms, ‘the real’ (Zizek, 2006: 96). The fatalistic dream is like the female
object portrayed in the song ‘Pale Blue
Eyes’ which appeared in the album Velvet
Underground (1969). It must be noted that, by this time, the true voice of
the Velvet Underground was becoming obsolete. It was also, by this time, that the
romantic themes of the beatlemania ditties have completely been taken over by
nostalgic female love and separation. However, this song de-romanticizes the empirical
experience of the detachment of love and the traumatic indulgence that the loss
causes. The line,
‘Mostly you just make me mad’.
shows how the appearance will make the subject deviate from the conscious
world into an unsignifiability (madness). There is recovery, but recapturing
the loss which forces him to hang on to the deliric pale blue eyes (the
blueness which would have been caused by psychedelic drugs or heroin). The
speaker compares her to a mountain top and to the peak which is the excessive
sublimation of the subject’s fetish desire. The unreachable apex contrasts with
the unfulfillability of the meeting of the fantasy. But to sustain the desire
one needs to give a try to reach the peak which is impossible. You no longer
live if you do not have her but the unreachability and the unretainment make
her further sublimated. That is said in the line, ‘if I could make the world’. It
convinces us that the speaker wants the world to be purified and re-made to
accommodate her in a better life and to make her in a mirror to reflect us all
including the narrator and herself, so that we all could see each other. The
speaker’s desire to make the world a better place is again obvious, despite the
metropolitan’s manic deformities to reduce all that is human to fetish
commodities. This commercialized nature, in her words, is that ‘money is like
us in time’/ it lies, but can’t stand up’ and eventually ‘skips the life
completely and stuff in a cup’. The seductive and diluting nature of money is
metaphorically displayed to us like a female. The hazy atmosphere of the
metropolitan which has been overshadowed by a common monotonous darkness
(Scaruffi, 2004: 35) and the loss of life to the disintegrated, blood-sucking,
hyper-digitalized humanity in the libidinal economy are never philosophically
sited in a song other than this. The
sign of degradation and the decline in the life are the ‘down for you is up’.
All that is forgotten in her pale blue eyes but the eyes are not real.
This paradox is never solved in the metropolitan. The guilt between her marriage and the drive
to break the law of fetishism takes over everyone. The metropolitan sins
continue to occur and the moral paradoxes too remain unsolved forever. The
human subject is completely de-humanized and alienated residing to drugs
perhaps to run away from the guilt. The sin and the devil are celebrated in a
ritualistic triumph.
Heroin
The Velvets made a drastic cultural and behavioral difference in their
very appearance in their attempt to go beyond the contemporary habit of the use
of hallucinogens such as LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) and other
psychedelics by using a more sinister substance like heroin. Heroin was a
post-Vietnam war phenomenon in America and, in that catastrophic war, nearly 42
percent of soldiers who served in Vietnam were addicted to heroin, and even
after the war was over, many continued to depended on this (Burlow and Durand,
2007: 403). Youngsters used to get to this ‘trip’ in their temporal escapism
from the trauma of modern life. Heroin, little by little, became part of the
dark side of the urban life of the youths who impaired the pain and trauma of
the urbanite, desensitized, excessively painful underground, which ultimately
made a platform for their cathartic self –expression which has fatalistically ended
up in the hands of drug traffickers to maximize profits in the advanced
capitalism.
It is with this contextualization that we analyze the song Heroin which appeared in the album Velvet Underground and Nico (1967). The
song makes no specific impression on the society on its being and functioning
as part of the social fabric in its hazardic de-humanization of the commercialization
process. The song does not suggest anything such as to make a deliberate intervention
in changing it, but shows how it remains so sinister and destined in the lives
of the youths. Velvets pessimistically reinforce a notion that we have nothing
left to do but to indulge in it. But they depict the reality in such a naked
and forceful manner that we ultimately cannot keep our eyes shut to the harsh
realities of the modern life. That impression is more important and eye-opening
than making a fake slogan to stop it.
The first stanza narrates to us the deliric indulgence of the hyper- real
psycho-activity in hypnotizing the fantasmatic kingdom and Jesus (both which
cannot be signified) and to travel through the beauty of the nice girls in
heaven (not the ‘polluted naughty ones’ in reality) towards death after the
injection of heroin to the body. The reality contradicts with the hyper-real
fantasy of a better world. It is only that dreamy world that the individuals
feel ‘heavenly’ but not the seductive and decadent earthly world which they
deny to identify with. This song takes the external adventure
of obtaining drugs into the internal realm and portrays the seduction of the
addiction with such power, beauty and grace that makes it all the more frightening.
You must feel the blood warmly flowing in the body to feel that you authentically
exist in this world. It must flow in the body with such an utmost heat that it
finally nullifies your soul. No religion, no preaching, no philosophy will
substitute the effect that heroin has on you. Heroin remains thereby yet
another ‘unsignified object’ such as a kingdom or Jesus and it will make you
forget about the traumatic existence of time and space. The masterly heaven is
replaced by a sinister and satanic substance.
‘I wish that I
was born a thousand years ago
I wish that I’d sail the darkened seas
On a great big clipper ship’
The actual but
hyper-real wish to fly away from the territorial (space) boundaries of the
current emptiness and solitude to a dream land by a clipper ship is depicted in
the second stanza. It clearly says that they want to sail away from this evil
city where individuals are no longer human, to another nostalgic entity free of
such vision. This notion shows a certain degree of escapism which is
unavoidable. What else can you do if you are extremely helpless? On the other
hand, they want to disguise themselves as sailors when they go to that land, as
they do not wish to carry their true identity which has been distorted to such an
extent that they ultimately hate it. Before
going to the final stanza I must mention here that whatever emphasis put on
heroin, the song never thematically fails to ignite the fire sparks for those
who wish to initiate in some way to make the world look better.
The final stanza stands
for the magnitude of the importance that has been ascribed to heroin, which is
compared here to life, wife and death. Heroin goes to blood, then to the brain
and neutralizes the ordinary feeling of life and improvises a vision that is
beyond the descriptive real; of an unconscious delirium. The hypocrisy of the
politicians, seductive individuals who may sell anything for money, soulless
tormented libido, emotionless mechanized romance and lust, hysteria, war,
vandalism and decadence of the generation who wasted their lives in the street
are all forcefully forgotten and made to enter into a colorful and prolonged
delirium.
‘Then thank God that I’m as good as dead
Then thank you God that I’m not aware
And
thank God that I just don’t care’
The Velvets are not
only pleased that they escape from the harsh reality but succumb to the
forgetfulness that this substance has created in them not to be awakened to the
bitterness of the reality again. They may vanish into the sinsterness of heroin.
The infinite escapism
that is so apparent in this song does produce an ultimate objectivism to remain
in the indulgence but, at the same time, it functions as an eye-opener to the
core of the very making of this social system, which kills the humanness of
individuals and transforms them into selfless machines of the production force
of commercial capitalism. The fatalistic questions that this song raises, such
as identity crisis, politics, the binary of illusion and enlightenment and the
sin and redemption are the very areas on which the present civilization must attempt
a swift and radical re-thinking to revolutionize the politico-cultural quagmire
of modern life. The Velvets as radical prophets reveal a modernistic truth in
an extended fashion and nihilistically demand a verdict upon which a salvation
and beauty can be restored to the benefit of the future generations to come.
Femme Fatale
The lyric Femme Fatale portrays the image of a Lolita-type
female who has the magical ability to cure contemporary sick male subjects,
whose inner souls are lost to the apparently lusty, commercially uplifted
femininity. Cosmopolitanism and its
sins, alienation and class seclusion have made youths drive to the underground,
which is the necessary result of modern capitalism. Scaruffi relates this song to the personality
characteristics of Nico in saying that,
‘The smoky vision of Femme Fatale, set in a depraved
Parisian bistro, soaked in delicate melancholy
whispered by Nico, part angel of evil and part mournful damned’
(Scarulff 2003: 33) and , ‘Nico, naughty brat and tenebrous angel, elegant and
sinister , fatal and elusive, emits tone deaf Teutonic laments in a neutral and worldly-wise tone’ (Ibid., p.
33).
Her personality goes much with the real content of
this song. Nico is a seductive, drug addicted beauty who had the ability to
make males find their ‘salvation’ with her sinisterness and lusty appearance.
The powerful image of this fatalistic femme fatale seeking you is initially
portrayed in the line,
‘Here she comes
You’d better watch your step
She’s going to break your heart in two’.
Her ability to
break your heart and to make you fragile in front of her is vividly depicted
through these lines and the care that someone has to take in dealing with her
is also signaled here. With her false colored eyes, she can build you up by
stimulating your desires and then, without any remorse, can destroy you by
eliminating the very desire that she planted in you minutes ago. Fragility is
the very character of modern commercial culture. Temporariness is the very
nature of consumer society. The life
span of a human relationship is reduced to the time that we take to consume one
commodity and go to another in this new age (Bauman 2004 p.122-123). Once the desire of an individual is
destroyed, his or her very drive to live will also be terminated and will
subsequently become an insignificant ‘clown’.
The next harmony
of the song re-tells us that everybody knows about how she is and what she does
to please herself. Then the lyric opens a very important as well as
controversial segment of the narration i.e she has given everyone a ‘number’
(like in a prison or in a concentration camp) and, thereby, nobody can escape
from her sight.
‘You’re even in
her book
You’re number 37
have a look
She is going to
smile to make you frown
What a clown’.
It
seems that she mocks at the entire world by earning her joy and happiness at
the destruction of the other. We can frown at her by amusement or by anger or
by disgust but nothing can make her angry or destroyed since she exists because
of the desire of the other. She exists because we desire her. It is the male world which created her and it
is the male world that she laughs at. It is the male world which gets destroyed
one day.
The
poet also reminds us that ‘she’s from the street’ which shows her urban
background and her familiarity to the city and its evils. When the line, ‘before
you start, you ‘re already beat, She’s going to play you for a fool’( VU&N
1967) is heard, what is felt by the listener is the inevitable defeat that is
destined in front of her and the immense power that is within her and her act.
If she employs ‘seduction’ to attract the other, it is because she wants to
make you feeble. According to Baudrillard (1929-2007) seduction by nature,
‘always seduces in order to perpetuate seduction; it
is always its own end (Lacan 2004: p.160) To seduce is to weaken. To seduce is
to falter’ (Baudrillard 1979 p.162).
She weakens the male ego by seduction and
destroys him little by little by taking him to her cobweb. She makes the male meet
his very desire with delay or waiting and one does not need go in search for his
desirous object (mostly the female body). With the meeting of desire that males
have been dreaming for, they actually meet their symbolic death but not the
pleasure. The pleasure must be earned by distancing from the pleasure object
and regulating it. The symbolic is both
the pleasure principle which regulates the distance from the Thing, and the
death drive which goes “beyond the pleasure principle” by means of repetition;
in fact “the death drive is only the mask of the symbolic order”. So, there is
deep psychological base for her to reside to kill the male with her intrigue use
of seduction.
Other
Important Songs:
One of the most
admirable songs not lengthily discussed in this paper is the monumental ‘Lady Godiva’s Operation’ (1968) which
discusses about a transvestite sex reassignment surgery (personal experience by
Lou Reed). The same deliric mesmerize of those of the other songs inspired by
heroin are portrayed here as well even though the contexts differ. The
post-anesthetic phase of the operation and the over-hearing of the
conversations of the doctors and other staff literary fix with the post-injection
phase of heroin. The blood, blades, fear, screaming uncertainty and final
healing are depicted in such a manner that the subject’s helplessness in front
of the master (doctor) and the dependency of a patient (may be we all become
such subjects one day) and the new identity that one can identify with, after a
successfully completed operation are detailed to a perfection of that of an
epic travelogue. The song has strong signals which metaphorically symbolize the
submission to the death instinct that is also an inescapable traumatic reality
within us.
‘Sister Ray’ (1968) too makes a fabulous sadomasochistic witness of
the sexual frustration of the youths of modern day. This song, according to
Scaruffi, ‘remains as the ultimate, definitive masterpiece of rock music
(Scaruffi, 1996: 32). The seduction and perversion are again shown in the line,
‘who is busy licking up her big man’ and ‘too busy on sucking on a ding dong’. The sexual deviance and the commercialized,
mechanized and emotionless body engagement depicted in the song undress the
Puritan middle class values and the hypocrisy of the older generation to such a
naked extent that no other song has done before or will not be done for decades
to come. What, in short, Velvets plead is death, which is another authentic
drive to destroy ourselves.
The repetitive mantra
version of the ‘Here She Comes’ (1968)
portrays the infinite waiting for a fantasy female object from the wood. The
true female from the city is not to be even dreamt. The endless repetitive
nature of a mantra being enchanted and empowered over and over for the fulfillment
of a hope swings between uncertainty and fulfillment.
The brief but powerful
‘Jesus’ (1997) is an open appeal for
help on behalf of everyone fallen out of grace and have ended up by being weak
in the endless agonizing trauma of modern life. Jesus has to emerge again to
cure our broken souls and guide us to the right path of redemption. This song
has an optimistic hope to offer for Velvet listeners.
Conclusion:
Even though less
popular, the Velvets have produced a much deeper and sophisticated form of rock
music to be remembered for decades. They also exemplified how artistic rock can
be produced for the intelligent crowd who will digest it and realize what music
can do when it is not influenced by commercial interests and profit motives.
They protested, in their own way, against a greater de-humanization process of
the capitalistic world order which their own generation became victims of. But
their struggle and protest cannot be identified with that of Dylan or the hippies,
since they belonged to a higher intelligent tradition of experiments, which is the
motto of reason-based modernism. They did not go out to be vociferous, since
they did not have many things to say. They were dark and withdrawn and continued
to represent the dark world as it is, without getting bogged down by the
bizarre and eclectic arrangements of the decade. This was not typical for many
other vociferous rockers at the time. They could exhibit uniqueness in their
music, because they were true to their own music as the true expression of
their life. They did not have any other life to represent. Existentially speaking, they were the most
authentic band which was true to what it said. They represented what they had
to represent. They, by no means, humiliated the little crowd they had and were
true to the generation they lived with.
The Velvets apparently
denied being identified with the contemporary social movement such as San
Francisco Hippies, peace movement, left wing or punks, all who have different
political agendas. They neither identified themselves with the counter-cultural
movement nor with the mainstream. They did not conform to the contemporary
middle class values or to the alternative, which again built another hegemonic
power. Instead, the Velvets found their own value system which was reclusive and
heroin indulgent, a dark and pessimistic rock band which made an extremely artistic,
intelligent and innovative music genre to express itself in a cathartic mode
through which it was able to produce images of a better world. The
non-psychedelic, nihilistic and cynical nature of their music encoded ‘signs’ to
mean that through this infinite darkness, the possibilities of illusionary
emergence of symbols of a futuristic better world are not completely obsolete.
Through the Velvets’ unconscious delirium and nihilism of the excessive use of
heroin what one can see is the foggy mirage of a fantasy for a better
world.
End Notes
[i] Formed in 1965 Velvet Underground consisted of Lou Reed, John Cale,
Sterling Morrison and Maureen Tucker. Nico who joined for the album Velvet
Underground and Nico left in 1968.
[v] http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/4595384/ns/today-entertainment/t/best-rock-bands-ever/#.UJz2meTqm8o
[vii] The punk subculture is a subculture that is based around punk rock. It emerged from the larger rock 'n' roll scene in the mid-to-late-1970s in
the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia. The punk movement has spread
around the globe and developed into a number of different forms. Punk culture
encompasses distinct styles of music, ideologies, fashion, visual art, dance,
literature, and film. Punk also lays claim to a lifestyle and community. For further
information see www. wikipedia.com
[viii] She is well
known in the 60s rock culture as the mistress of the Rolling Stone’s lead
singer Mick Jagger and former member
Brain Jones’.
[xi] Included in
Rolling Stones’ Exile on the Main Street (1972)
Appendix
0Abbreviations
VU
-Velvet
Underground
VU
& N -Velvet
Underground and Nico
WLWH -White
Light White Heat
References:
Baudrillard, Jean (1983) In the Shadow of the Silent
Majorities: Or, the End of the Social and Other Essays, Semiotexts, USA.
Baudrilard,
Jean (1979) On Seduction: A Selected Essays (trans. Mark Foster),
Telios, St. Louis.
Bauman, Zygmunt (2004) Wasted
Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts, Polity Press, United Kingdom.
Bauman, Zygmunt (2005) Work,
Consumerism and the New Poor, Open University Press, New York.
Burlow, David H. and
Durand, Mark V.(2007) Abnormal Psychology,
Thomson and Wadsworth, India.
Charlton, Katherine (1990) Rock Music Styles (3rd
Edition), McGraw Hill, Boston.
Eagleton, Terry (2002) Marxism and Literary Criticism, Rutledge, London.
Foucault,
M. (1970) The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences, Tavistock,
London.
Garrett, Stephanie (1992) Gender, Routledge,
London.
Harvard, Joe
(2007) The Velvet Underground and
Nico, Continuum, New York.
Herbermas, Jurgen (2003) The Future of Human Nature, Polity, London.
Kaufman,
Walter (1989) Existentialism from Dostoyevsky to Sartre, Meridian Publishing Company, Georgia.
Marcus, Greil (1979) Stranded: Rock and Roll for a
Desert Island, Random House, London.
Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich (2000) Communist
Manifesto, Penguin, London.
Lacan, Jacques (2004) Ecrits,
Rutledge, London.
Roxon,
Lillian (1969) Rock Encyclopedia, Grosset & Dunlap, USA.
Sartre, Jean Paul (1946) Existentialism is a Humanism,
Mithun, Calcutta.
Sartre, Jean Paul (2002) Being and Nothingness, Routledge,
London.
Scaruffi, Piero (2003) History of Rock Music (1951-
2000), iUniverse, New York.
Scaruffi, Piero (2007) History of Popular Music before
Rock Music, iUniverse, New York.
Scaruffi, Piero (2007), History of Jazz Music,
iUniverse, New York.
Townshed, David (1997), Changing the
World: Rock 'n' Roll Culture and Ideology, Verso, London.
Warren,
Holly George, The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock and Roll, (3rd
Edition), Fireside Books, New York.
Zak, Albin (1997) Velvet Underground Companion: Four
Decades of Commentary, Schirmer Books, NewYork.
Zizek, Slavoj (2006) Interrogating
the Real, Continuum, London and NY.
Zizek, Slavoj (2006b) Lacan: The Silent Partner, Verso, London.
Zizek, Slovoj (2008) Enjoy
Your Symptom, Routledge, London and NY.
Compact Discs:
i.
Velvet
Underground, Velvet Underground and
Nico (1967) Verve Records
ii.
Velvet
Underground , White Light White Heat (1968) Verve Records
iii.
Velvet
Underground , Velvet Underground (1969) MGM Records
iv.
The Rolling Stones, Exile on the Main Street (1972) Jimmy Miller
Online
Sources:
On their unconscious motif towards a better world, the Velvet Underground were revolutionaries in their own way.
Mahesh Hapugoda
Postmodernism encourages to disbelieve in meta-narratives or in an absolute truth that can possibly be shared by everyone. Now we live in a world where there is no 'truth' that either determines what we believe or any final goal that we can arrive at. Hence there is no final project or aim. We live in a kind of pluralism where everything is right and everything is wrong simultaneously. This skepticism started with existentialism which taught that truth may vary according to the subjective elements of the individuals. From a modernistic point of view there can be only one truth. For example, if 'A killed B', there is only one truth. That is, 'A killed B'.
.jpg)
