DIAL TONE VOCALS FOR THE SQUALOR AND THE SQUALID

 

Somewhere in the digital jungle, a rock-and-roll malcontent, some leather-jacketed heretic strumming discord on the X platform, dared to spit on the sacred banana, that Warhol-stamped relic of the Velvet Underground’s first brawl with eternity. The album title said it all, The Velvet Underground and Nico, released in 1967, a crusty, rusty , crud laden slice of the New York underbelly where the junkies, the poets, the whores, the crossdressers, the street artists of all shades and ways of expression, gathered. It was a love letter to the squalor of the squalid. Headed by Lou Reed and buffeted the Euro-drone of John Cale's tuneless avant gard clamour and Nico's dial tone singing, it was the nightmare that came after the sweet dream of the summer of no-fault love . My friend was having none of that stuff, you see. .She called it overrated, a tired artifact, and I, hunched over my screen, growled like a beast cornered in a Bowery alley, muttering curses about the young who chew up history and spit out TikTok platitudes. The Velvets’ debut wasn’t just a record—it was a Molotov cocktail lobbed into the smug face of the Sixties, a sonic fistfight born not by design but by the sheer, brutal necessity of a band becoming itself, forging avant-noise like a blacksmith hammering steel in hell’s own forge. While the longhairs out West chased utopian sunsets, crooning of free love and endless horizons, and the Brits draped their riffs in centuries of aristocratic echo—blues and Berry twisted into polite rebellion—the Velvets stood apart, alien, unyielding. They didn’t beg to differ; they *were* difference incarnate, spawned in the claustrophobic gut of New York City, that teeming, screaming cauldron of 17,843,000 souls, a metropolis choking on its own ambition, commerce, and madness. Lawyers schemed, CEOs barked, junkies twitched, hookers prowled, and experimentalists—those splintered poets of the underground—scratched at the edges of sanity, all fueled by speed, smack, and a sardonic snarl. The city was a 24-hour assault, a cacophony of violence and neon, demanding you scream back or be crushed. The Velvets screamed. Their sound was no peace-and-love lullaby but a primal, minimalist howl—raw, jagged, deliberate—like a switchblade cutting through the hippie haze. Lou Reed, that street-saint of the dispossessed, turned his back on the hack tunesmith’s life, shunning the saccharine babble of flower-power bards. His lyrics were a blade, spare and sharp, slicing open the city’s underbelly: suicide, dope, the shadowed lives of queers in a world that wished them erased. This wasn’t art for art’s sake, not some Laurel Canyon daydream spun by pampered troubadours. It was war, a dispatch from the front lines of a New York that gave you all the vibes you could choke on—then dared you to survive.

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The Velvets

 

A recent reading somewhere in the wilds of the internet revealed a disgruntled rock and roller who wondered why 60s icons The Velvet Underground are considered important at all, expressing finally that she considered the famous Andy Warhol "banana" cover debut album to be wildly overrated. I harumphed, muttered something about youth being wasted on the young and then then composed the following paragraph, less a defense than rant . Note the absence of album titles or the names of songs; the paragraph is aimed , I guess, at those who know what I'm talking about and are able to fill in the missing details. 

The first Velvets album was an absolute masterpiece, created almost by accident—simply by the band becoming itself and crafting the kind of avant-noise it would be known for. While American and British rock were growing increasingly arty, instrumentally ambitious, and philosophically poetic—driven by a belief that the future belonged to the younger generation and that future was utopian—the Velvets begged to differ. Not so much begged, in fact, as simply were different: in musical interests, background, and general worldview. California bands leaned into the idea of unlimited space and freedom to do your own thing. European bands drew heavily on centuries of culture and musical legacy, blending blues and Chuck Berry into their evolving sound. But the Velvets were formed in cramped New York City, with a population estimated at 17,843,000 at the time—a crowded center of industry, commerce, and culture. It was full of lawyers, CEOs, eccentrics, junkies, prostitutes, and splintered underground experimentalists—a pressure cooker fueled by speed, heroin, and a street-level deadpan. The city was noisy, galvanic, violent, in-your-face twenty-four hours a day. The only response was to make a noise of your own, a sonic mask against the relentless collapse of the surrounding world.There was little interest—or use—for singing about peace and good vibes. New York gave you all the vibes you could handle—and couldn’t handle—whether you wanted them or not, all at once. The songs were about the world the band emerged from: suicide, drug addiction, gay life in a society that wished gay people would vanish quickly. The music was minimalist and primitive—purposefully and effectively so.Lou Reed instinctively reversed course from his prior work as a hack songwriter. He rejected blather and incoherent poesy, offering the Velvets lyrics that were blunt, spare, and aimed to reflect the raw truth of a world far removed from Laurel Canyon or other bastions of pampered art-making.