A world without Lou Reed feels inconceivable to me. He’s any punk rock kid’s dad—all of punk rock’s dad, really—and I’d assumed the fact he’d initially survived his drug years meant the heroin had converted his blood to some high-tech preservative that rendered him not only timeless but immortal. God knows his what’s-it-to-you fuckery permanently opened all kinds of roads and minds when it came to mixing and matching genders, races, styles, sorrows. He was the deepest superficial guy rock ‘n’ roll never knew, a tabula rasa of high-low poetry and one-note chords, the reigning king of Open and Shut, not to mention Ugly Is Beautiful. In high school I dressed as Nico partly because it was the closest I could get to Lou. All the way through college, I had one sign on my dormroom door: “LOU IS GOD.” In the first week I moved to NYC, I actually met him. I was ogling a display of his Between Thoughts and Expression in the window of the old 8th Street Barnes and Noble, and turned around to discover him looking at me looking at his book. “I don’t believe it,” I said. “Believe it, dude,” he responded, and sped down the street before I could ruin the purity of the drama. It was at that moment I knew I was supposed to grow old in this Crazy Apple. I do take some solace in imagining that, wherever Lou is now, he’s shoving the 31 years he lived longer than Lester Bangs in the late music critic’s face. But, man. Today I am totally inconsolable about a city, planet, universe without my Lou. From now on it’ll be another loneliness I carry: forever waiting for my man.
Archive | Categories
Brassy Lady, Brassy Tacks: A Bulletin
After a few weeks of the Brokenhearted Bertha diet (chocolate and whiskey administered intravenously), this broad is back to her daily regime of brown rice, kale, and broiled fish, both figuratively and literally. Said Paul Cézanne: “I must be more sensible and realize that, at my age, illusions are hardly permitted and will always destroy me.”
You Do Not Mess With the Queen
There are times when the only singer I can bear to hear is Aretha Franklin. She doesn’t belong to any one of my former relationships. She doesn’t belong to any particular era of my life. She belongs to all of them or, rather, everything belongs to her. I know every one of her songs inside and out, and have been learning them since before I could talk. Our family cat, adopted 18 months after my birth, was named Aretha Franklin Rosman. It’s like that. I have every album recorded by this woman, and most of them on vinyl. Sometimes when I’m feeling blue I just ogle her record covers. She’s unfathomably beautiful—feline and sly-eyed and blowsily ladycurvy—and I know everything divine and earthly rolls through that big, matter-of-factly churchified and cracked-up, sooth-the-savage-beast of a voice. I need her to be strong so I can be strong, and in her music, as far as back as her Columbia Records years, she has never, ever let me down. I don’t care about her personal life, and I really don’t want to have coffee with her, no more than I’d like to have tea with the Queen of England. Royals, especially those who have earned their throne, are best worshipped from afar. I know someday she won’t be on the same planet as me but I’m grateful she has been for so long and even more grateful that her music pours through my ears when I leave that man, tote that barge, straighten that spine, open that heart in all my worst and best moments. Truly, Aretha is the Queen of Soul, and I am lucky to have lived under her reign. We all are.