Lou Reed - Metal Machine Music (1975)

All this machinery making modern music can still be open-hearted.  But that doesn't it's going to make anything good.

Lou Reed's 1975 album Metal Machine Music is a single composition stretched out over four sides of a double album, much like Yes's infamous 1973 release Tales From Topographic Oceans had been.  But unlike Yes's album, which at least had real instruments and vocals, Metal Machine Music is a collage of feedback, interference, white noise, and elements of static that recall what would happen when an analog television set was tuned to a channel that local stations didn't broadcast on.  You remember the TV-screen image you'd get from that - "snow."  Metal Machine Music is a snow job.

Lou Reed seemed to be responding to the modicum of commercial success he'd received with Transformer and "Walk On the Wild Side" by deliberately trying to scare away listeners in places like northern New Jersey and Long Island, two suburban locales that represented everything Reed hated about mainstream America.  He overreached.  He scared away part of his core fan base, listeners who had been with him since the days of the Velvet Underground.  Avant-garde music made with electronic backwashes had been common in the New York underground scene, to be certain, but I doubt no such experimental music has ever been less tuneful, less engaging, and less, well, musical than this.

The best I can say about Metal Machine Music is that listening to it in 2025 beats anything currently on the pop charts, until I realize that some of its worst moments might have inspired rap, a form that relies on computerized and mechanical sounds supporting angry recitations of lyrics about the 'hood.  Because, believe it or else, Metal Machine Music, though it did not chart (it may be in competition with Bloodstone's soundtrack album for their movie Train Ride To Hollywood as the worst-selling LP of 1975), created a cult following among fans who explain it as some sort of bold experimentation that was ahead of its time.  Not that they have necessarily listened to the album from start to finish; Reed's liner notes explain that it's not meant to be.  This of course files in the face of the large-scale compositions the British prog bands of the day were indulging themselves in, which are supposed to be listened to from beginning to end, and perhaps Reed, cynical New Yorker that he was, was parodying art rock the way the Ramones parodied the mainstream rock stars of the day.  Except that with Metal Machine Music, Reed parodied himself.

I actually did listen to the whole thing from start to finish.  How did I manage that?  Simple - it was so awful, I laughed at its awfulness.  The are records from lousy bands like Journey, Toto, and Uriah Heep, as well as any Rainbow album with Graham Bonnet on lead vocals, that make you lunge for the "off" switch on your stereo, but Metal Machine Music is not that type of record.  The noises are so outrageous, you can't help but laugh - at the sound, at the concept, at the idea the RCA would even put this out.  I was tidying up my house while listening to Metal Machine Music.  I ran the vacuum cleaner; it was like singing along.  In harmony.  I was inspired to listen to all of Metal Machine Music because, in their book "The Worst Rock 'n' Roll Records of All Time," Jimmy Guterman and Owen O'Donnell suggested that Bob Ludwig, the album's engineer, is the only person without a history of substance abuse who has listened to all four sides of it.  I accepted the challenge.  And I prevailed.  

Without even a single gummy.

Guterman and O'Donnell also declared Metal Machine Music to be the most unlistenable album ever recorded - including anything from Kenny Rogers.  The reference to Rogers was in fact quite appropriate.  Metal Machine Music, to describe the album in one sentence, is Lou Reed just dropping in to see what condition his condition was in.