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Review about Heroin ------Performed by Lou Reed | 07/30/2004 11:00:00 AM Heroin, an anti-anthem for the acid generation 8 out of 11 Found the view helpful In the year of our lord 1966 the world of popular music exploded with explicit or covert reverences to the delights of so called 'psychedelic'drugs like mariuanah and LSD. From The Beatles Got To Get You Into My Life to Frank Zappa's return of The Son of Monster Magnet, and from The Lovin ' Spoonfuls Daydream to Bob Dylan's Rainy Day Woman, they all displayed, almost as commercial advertisements, the pleasures of mind altering substances, preferably consumed somewhere in the happy happy joy joy society of the counterculture somewhere in sunny California. On the other side of the universe, down in New York city, young songwriters and bohemians Lou Reed and John Cale were allready putting together a band that would later be infamous as The Velvet underground, cynically named after a little cultnovel about S&M practices. The Velvets, who by then had allready joined the circus of drop outs and misfits in Andy Warhols Factory entourage, however, were far ahead of their time in their misapproval of the substitute nirvanas and pseudo mysticism offered by the fuzzy philosophies of people such as Timothy Leary and Ken Casey and the naive hippy dippy babbling about revolution and love. Their musical and lyrical expressions were not about love peace and flowers or descriptions of chemically enhanced trips to the paradise within, but more inspired by the hard alienating life at the bottom of the cultural foodchain. Prostitution, crossdressing, sado-masochism, social unease, and suicide were their topics,(long before punkrock claimed them as their favorit idiom,) and offcourse the drug of choice for every lost soul who was litterally dying to rather implode than to expand the mind and the consciousness, and so be relieved from the agony of existance: heroin. Having experience with the Dark Queen themselves and heavily under the influence of writers like William Burroughs and Arthur Rimbaud, Reed and Cale took the metaphorical syringe and spoon by hand and cooked up the song that almost four decades later still stands as the anti-anthem for an entire generation. Does The Beatles ' Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds ironically hold the scepter for being the ultimate 1960's popsong about the beautiful visions that hallucinatic drugs,especially LSD can create (ironically because the song was originally intended to be about a drawing by John Lennon's infant son Julian,and so an ode to the uninhibited childhood imagination, only later the band discovered it's coincidental initials, of which they naturally had a good laugh!), Heroin, expresses the pain and dispare, the Nitschian Death of God, the contempt for authority and society, but also the complete comfort in numbness, of the opiate experience. Switching from the exact realistic description of the 'fix', to the poetic hallowing of the feelings of freedom in solitude,and extatic nihilistic estrangement, Reed and Cale offer the ignorant listener an almost exhibitionist peep into the mind of the heroin user. By shooting the drug into the vein the 'I' figure kills God and therefore becomes God, immaculate and invincible to the slings and arrows of the big bad world outside. As enlightning as disilusionating as a near dead experience the heroin flash is offered as the closest step to suicide, a way out of the ordinary life which can only bring but misery and grief. The 'I' person beatifically "doesn't know and doesn't care anymore". Embracing Death is no longer a frightful thing, it's a free choice for redemption. Absolutely counterpointing the standard late sixties musicians' attempt at vaguely depicting the euphoric fairytales and myths of the 'psychedelic' experience. The bittersweet'n sour musical performance of Heroin in the Velvet's version is the perfect shroud for the lyrics. The two chord guitar drone, accompanied by the pounding drums (barely no cymbals were used) and the haunting, hysterical, dissonant, screeching of John Cale's viola, together with Lou Reed's sneering,cynical, sheer diabolical, or perhaps purgatorial vocals, and the whole song irratticly, constantly, nervously changing in tempo and intensity, gives the song that ominous edge it deserves. The listener is mercylessly dragged into the blissful oblivion and indifference, as well as the selfinflicted insanity and desperation, no matter how contradicting, of the 'I' person. As an icon of 1960's artistic expression Heroin should be forever revered as a classic example of universal songwriting, stretching the limits of fixed (sic) form and content, and through the generations up to date it is still apprased. The darkest side of the power of this song being that it obviously appeals to the easily influencible among us to try the drug or even justify addiction. And so this song, as many songs, has it's victims. Lou Reed and John Cale themselves have been through the horrors of being a smack fiend. It nearly killed them and left wounds on their minds and bodies they will never in eternity be able to recover from. "She is not a Lady I would dance with again, no matter how beautiful, seductive and yet comforting she looks". Nevertheless as a piece of high art from a generation as intense as the one coming of age in the late sixties and early seventies, as well as a source of musical and lyrical inspiration for what later would be called the Punk Movement, Heroin stands as an unique work, allthough being 'just a rock song' it is in it's own right undisputably as genious and intrigueing as grand classic compositons as Wagners Gotterdammerung and Tchaikovski's Rites of Spring, alongside other masterpieces in the same genre as The Rolling Stones' Jumping Jack Flash and John Lennon's Cold Turkey. RIXXX! 31-7-2004 Thanks to RIXXX! for submitting the review.