Music Video Of the Week - May 8, 2026

"Harry Truman" by Chicago  (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.)

Music Video Of the Week - March 6, 2026

"Laughter in the Rain" by Neil Sedaka  (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.)

Music Video of the Week - January 23, 2026

"Golden Years" by David Bowie  (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.) 

Lou Reed - Metal Machine Music (1975)

All this machinery making modern music can still be open-hearted.  But that doesn't mean 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 listening to 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.

Music Video Of the Week - November 28, 2025

"Bohemian Rhapsody" by Queen  (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.)

Music Video Of the Week - November 21, 2025

"Good Enough" by Bonnie Raitt  (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.) 

Music Video Of the Week - November 14, 2025

"Fox On the Run" by Sweet  (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.)

Music Video Of the Week - November 7, 2025

"Why Can't We Be Friends?" by War  (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.)

Music Video Of the Week - October 31, 2025

"Train Ride" by Bloodstone  (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.)

"Chuckles Bites the Dust" - Fifty Years

I don't know if I can say anything about the funniest "Mary Tyler Moore Show" episode of all time that hasn't already been said.  It takes based on the silliest idea - a clown dressed as peanut dies at a circus parade because an elephant tries to shell him - and runs with it, stepping on the gas from the start and not letting up until the very end and making you laugh about death all the way through.

And because I can't say any more about this episode, which first aired on CBS fifty years ago today, I am simply going to post it here. 

 

Enjoy.

Music Video Of the Week - October 24, 2025

"Downtown Flyers" by Streetwalkers  (Go to the left in the upper-right-hand corner.)

Music Video Of the Week - October 17, 2025

"Love Is the Drug" by Roxy Music  (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.)

Music Video Of the Week - October 10, 2025

"Still Crazy After All These Years" by Paul Simon  (Go to the link in the upper right-hand corner.) 

Music Video Of the Week - October 3, 2025

"Squeeze Box" by the Who  (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.) 

Music Video Of the Week - September 26, 2025

"Born to Run" by Bruce Springsteen  (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.)

Music Video Of the Week - September 19, 2025

"To the Last Whale . . ." by David Crosby and Graham Nash  (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.) 

Music Video Of the Week - September 12, 2025

"Wish You Were Here' by Pink Floyd  (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.)

Music Video Of the Week - August 15, 2025

"Keep On Tryin'" by Poco  (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.)

Music Video Of the Week - July 11, 2025

"Rhiannon" by Fleetwood Mac (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.)

Music Video Of the Week - July 3, 2025

"Anthem" by Rush  (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.)