HEROIN LYRICS

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Heroin Lyrics
Artist(Band):Lou Reed
Review The Song (3)Print the Lyrics
I don't know just where I'm going
But I'm goin' to try for the kingdom if I can
'Cause it makes me feel like I'm a man
When I put a spike into my vein
Then I tell you things aren't quite the same

When I'm rushing on my run
And I feel just like Jesus' son
And I guess I just don't know
And I guess that I just don't know

I have made big decision
I'm goin' to try to nullify my life
'Cause when the blood begins to flow
When it shoots up the dropper's neck
When I'm closing in on death

You can't help me not you guys
All you sweet girls with all your sweet talk
You can all go take a walk
And I guess I just don't know
And I guess I just don't know

I wish that I was born a thousand years ago
I wish that I'd sailed the darkened seas
On a great big clipper ship
Going from this land here to that
I put on a sailor's suit and cap

Away from the big city
Where a man cannot be free
Of all the evils in this town
And of himself and those around
Oh, and I guess I just don't know
Oh, and I guess I just don't know

Heroin, be the death of me
Heroin, it's my wife and it's my life
Because a mainer to my vein
Leads to a center in my head
And then I'm better off than dead

When the smack begins to flow
Then I really don't care anymore
About all the Jim-Jims in this town
And all of the politicians makin' crazy sounds
And everybody putting everybody else down and
all the dead bodies piled up in mounds

Wow, that heroin is in my blood
And the blood is in my head
Yeah, thank God that I'm good as dead
Ooohhh, thank your God that I'm not aware
And thank God that I just don't care
And I guess I just don't know
And I guess I just don't know

If you find some error in Heroin Lyrics,
would you please submit your corrections to me? Thank You.
Thanks to pfeifers_marco@gmx.de for submitting the lyrics.




Review about Heroin

umm, i think you mean nietzsche... | Reviewer: Anonymous | 1/18/2007

you sound pretentious because you can't spell properly. big words and no spell check equals collective shudder by alot of learned people.

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tchaikovsky? | Reviewer: Anonymous | 10/23/2006

and who wrote The Rite of Spring? not Tchaikovsky but Stravinsky. Both of Russian descent but a world apart...

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Heroin, an anti-anthem for the acid generation | Reviewer: RIXXX! | 7/31/2004


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

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