One might think Reed is merely being deliberately contrarian, revelling in his unpredictability, and one would be half right. That Lou Reed’s discography is basically a collection of symptoms of Oppositional Defiance Disorder is one of the pleasures and frustrations of listening to his work. But there’s more than that. Lou knows there’s no success like failure, and that failure’s no success at all. As with Bob Dylan, the need for fame, success, and admiration battle with disdain for and alienation from the public. The equilibrium between these two impulses, messily achieved over time, is what makes the artist – Dylan or Reed – unforgettable, both as a pop star and as a difficult genius, both the friend and enemy of his own audience.
There are a number of artists who embody this dynamic as public figures. One thing that may be unique to Lou is that I think this is happening for him on a private level as well. The conflict between artifice and authenticity goes deep into his identity, as it does for a lot of queers. He performs identities and then gives them up as he fails in his ability to fully inhabit them. He becomes a heroin user and defines himself as such in front of everybody for the rest of his career – “it’s my life, and it’s my wife,” over and over again for decades – but he actually kicked heroin pretty quickly, much preferring amphetamines. He becomes a pioneering avant-garde proto-noise musician with John Cale in the Velvet Underground and then turns around and kicks Cale out of the band to write sweet quiet pop songs and attempts at hit singles. He writes an album “loaded with hits” and then quits his band before its release, quits music entirely for a year and a half. He’s a gay drug addict artist and then he goes home to work for his father and weds a suburban Jewish girl (the marriage doesn’t last).
And of course, he makes Transformer, at last his huge hit record with a very on-trend glam image to match, then rejects the whole conceit, and denigrates glam rock as a “faggot junkie trip”. His life is a string of failures to live up to the identities he takes on. His problem, or his gift, is that no self that his audience can digest fits him comfortably, and he always ends up tearing the latest self violently off like a too-small suit on a hot afternoon. He’s never really felt comfortable his whole life, since like so many non-heterosexuals he spent his youth presenting an idealised self to the world that was a betrayal of the taboo truth. When he did try, messily, to come out of the closet and declare some kind of authentic self to those close to him, he got high-voltage fried by adults who found the real Lou unacceptable.
His career compels me most of all because of how it acts out his and my own bitter struggle between whether to be someone who the world can accept and love – whoever that might be – or whether to be myself – whoever that might be. We search desperately for someone to be, for a life that might be liveable, for a self that might be real. Ultimately, the search is wrong-headed and doomed from the start. Looking for the easy solution of a ready-made way to be, we find only characters that don’t ring true, poses we can’t hold for long. Our true authenticity, in fact, saturates the struggle; it is the search itself.
I propose that for folks like me and Lou, the real meaning of queerness is defined by continual transformation, being permanently on the run from the straight authorities (real, imagined or both) that would try to force us to be something untrue. And then eventually, maybe, you grow older and stop worrying so much about it. I don’t know yet; I’m only thirty. The same age, by the way, that Lou Reed was when he recorded Transformer.
