![]() ![]() "The pressure had built up under the street and it went 20 feet up in the air, with flames shooting up. Coming out of the studio in an abandoned church, Reed watched a manhole cover fly by. First came a slight electrical brownout ("when that happens we always say it's either a nuclear attack, an earthquake or Con Ed"). The mood of the new album was set on the first day of recording. Just as artists tend to be an early warning system for society in general, Reed suggests, New York seems to be doing the advance work for a national apocalypse. At 47, his features remain impassive, somewhat dour, but whatever edge has been lost from Reed's looks seems to have been reinvested in his music. He blocks most inquiries into the past, even the recent past ("I'm really bored with that kind of tedious question," "I don't care enough about critics to care about those questions"), and refuses to talk about his nine-year-old marriage or his wife Sylvia Rodriguez. It's apparent Reed enjoys neither talking publicly nor writing lyrically about himself. For years, Reed's quite public lifestyle kept rock's obituary writers on alert, but these days, with his preppy glasses and softened looks, he appears more the seasoned intellectual than the rock survivor. You could also tack Reed's old promo pictures to the wall and get a visual trace on the stages of his development: rock poet, ambisexual degenerate, glitter dandy, punk godfather, family man, social rocker. You can listen to his records chronologically - actually there are a few from the mid-'70s that you might want to skip - and they form an audiobiography of a man coming to terms with himself and his city from the '60s through the late '80s. Where Reed's compulsions used to be internalized, they are now externalized. From the Velvet Underground, where "Heroin" and "I'm Waiting for the Man" reclaimed the horror of drugs from the '60s flower power movement, to 1986's "The Original Wrapper" with its line "Don't mean to come on sanctimonious/ But life's got me nervous and a little pugnacious," Reed has often explored the tensions and terrors of the modern psyche. I'm not angry about it, it's just a take on what's going on." And not a new take. "It's gotten completely out of control and insane and the whole system has broken down. You might even be like the kid in "Dirty Blvd." who finds a magic book in the garbage and says, "At the count of three, I hope I can disappear." "I'd be hard-pressed not to write about it," Reed says. In 1989, if you walk down the streets of New York, read the Post and watch television, you won't believe what you see at all. Once upon a time, Lou Reed wrote about how his life was saved by rock 'n' roll when "one fine day I turned on a New York station, couldn't believe what I heard at all." Now those same stations are likely to be filled with news reports about the fire this time. For a long time I had thought a lot of politics was internal this album is more character-oriented, and maybe not speaking about internal battles so much." If Reed's attentions have been turned outward on "New York" - the back streets of the mind supplanted by the mean streets of city - it's not hard to understand why. "There's a very visible line of demarcation. ![]() "What they mean on this one is there are discernible issues - or issues they can discern very clearly," says Reed, who has always had a hate-hate relationship with the press, and a slightly better one with the public. After a series of uneven albums in the '80s, critics have been gushing again, calling "New York" Reed's best solo album since 1973's "Berlin" and the first since 1978's "Street Hassle" to revive the sense of anxiety that marks his finest work. Is "New York" the work of a newly politicized, middle-aged vanguardist or a return to form by one of rock's most intriguing personas? "For what it's worth I thought 'The Velvet Underground With Nico' was very political," Reed says of the seminal rock album that came out 22 years ago. Is the Rock 'n' Roll Animal turning into a Political Animal? For much of his career, Reed (who performs at sold-out Warner Theatre concerts tonight and tomorrow) was simply a chronicler of decadence and decay, but in recent years he's appeared on the "Sun City" single and video, toured with the first Amnesty International extravaganza and played numerous benefits for New York's homeless. The 14 cuts form a scathing song cycle, each setting up the next, like paragraphs in an unflinching State of the Union speech. With terse narrative urgency couched in raw, tripped-down rock 'n' roll that recalls his days with the Velvet Underground, Reed catalogues political indifference, the plundering of a disenfranchised underclass - blacks, Hispanics, gays, children, women - and the corruption of the environment. NEW YORK - Lou Reed's new album, "New York," is a state of mind with its own five boroughs: disease, drugs, violence, poverty and desolation. ![]()
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