Heroin

[NSAM]

i know this is a musical/lyrical thread but i am interested (and i don't know how you look upon lyrics in comparison with "pure poetry")

I recently heard for the first time the velvet underground (lou reed's) song Heroin. On first inspection i thought it was a rather unremarkable song but after a few listens i was mesmerized by the beautiful shimmering simplicity of the lyrics and music, which i think profoundly represents the careless and (ironically) childlike nature of the song.

Personally (from my chemically naive standpoint) i think it is a more effective, poignant and contextually relevant ode to drug taking than Pete Doherty or any of his opiate ingesting ilk could compose with all of their much lauded and complex songwriting.

WHat do you think? you really have to listen to the song to appreciate it's effect.

[steve100254]

Hi:

I was mildly amused to see that on my first post I run across a reference to Pete Doherty! Are you a fan? Do you post on FDB? Regarding the V.U. I really am interested in how you could not have heard Heroin and yet there's that reference to Pete. Do tell.

[NSAM]

Personally (lifestyle aside) i actually do really like Pete Doherty's work, and the hostility above is really just to try and influence some sort of response/debate in a viral marketing kind of way.

I suppose i haven't really heard this song because of my age, although i am familiar with a lot of lou reed's other stuff (especially transformer).

what do you think about about drug related songs like these? I am really intrigued by the romanticisation of drug's at the moment

[quikmart]

Believe me, after experiencing hard core use, the romanticism wears off. Lou Reed is a junkie who made money from the fact.

[steve100254]

I am not that familiar at all with Mr. Reed's work. I own VU & Nico but it gets little playtime. I know some factoids like Metal Machine Music was done completely high and to get the record company off his back. I know that Iggy Pop wanted to be a singer in a band but didn't pursue it until he saw VU and exclaimed, "I can sing better than him!"
My "rock star" friends say (sarcastically) things like "Yeah, everything's better when you're high,man!"
Famous really talented junkies include Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, David Crosby, and Eric Clapton. But you prob. know that already. Apparently Ray Charles was a user right up until his death. He was what? Seventy some?

[metal134]

To quote Bill Hicks; "If you don't think drugs have done good things for us, then I want you to do me a favor. Go home tonight and take all your albums, all your tapes, all your CD's and burn them. Because the musicians who have made all that great music that has enhanced your life throughout the years; rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrreal **** high on drugs."

[quikmart]

I believe that Bill Hicks could in fact throw out his entire record collection without making much of a dent in the total history of music. I know that his comments could be thrown out without the least effect on the history of ideas.

The fact that musicians have used drugs does not make music the product of drugs. There is no way to know how popular music might have evolved without them. The truly great (take Hendrix as an example) would certainly have sucked it up and created anyway. Isn't it possible that in the course of a longer and more disciplined effort, he might have created music even more an enhancement to our lives? I think it's possible that without the crippling influence of drugs, we might have seen rock music acheive the depth and complexity seen in the work of classical composers (not, as far as I know, a group dependent on heroin or other substances to inform their work). Second or third tier creators (I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings, but I'm going to use Kurt Cobain as an example), whose music was rudimentary though attractive, could have done as well if they tried hard - and there would still be studio effects to assist them in filling in the sound (effects certainly not developed by people on hard drugs). Then someone like Cobain could have survived to improve and show what he could really do. I do believe it's a shame he never got the chance.

Lou Reed went beyond these questions in any case. He proselytized for drugs, using a lot of brave words (...and thank your God that I just don't care, etc.) belied by the fact that he kicked - he kicked a long time ago. I guess he did care after all. I wonder how Reed himself feels about what he did with the Velvet Underground. I'd like to give him the benefit of the doubt, and believe that he fells ashamed.

For every rock god on heroin, there are a thousand dead junkies in the street. How does that enhance your existence for ya, Mr. Hicks and Mr. metal1234? Is it just the price we pay for a good record collection? Why don't you let in some of the ethnic music rock is based on if you need raw excitement and immediacy? Why not try to appreciate the attractions of music other than that found in your pile of vinyl? Can you really not imagine music without drugs?

Finally, I believe this is a poetry thread. I'd just like to add that Lou Reed is by no stretch of the imagination a poet. He wrote song lyrics, some clever.

[NSAM]

I was not advocating drugs by any means by starting this thread

And simply observing from a highly sanitized analyitical perspective.

And i do not intend to glamorize their usage or trick some tragic "poet" into such a violent romanticism. simply highlight this facet as on of the many issues tackled with words, namely questions thrown at an apathetic opiate

and no he was not a poet. but i didn't know where to put it in literature terms.

I was simply interested

Stay in school and don't do drugs etc,
James

[blp]

Well, not much discussion of the lyrics so far. Just to continue in this vein briefly, Reed apparently stopped performing the song at some point and, when asked why, replied, 'I got sick of people coming up to me saying, "Hey Lou, man, I started taking heroin because of your song."'

I'm a big Velvets fan, but the lyrics did take me some getting used to. They're pretty basic in places, to whit. 'All the politicians making crazy sounds/ and all the dead bodies piling up in mounds.' But it's moving. It's a song about emotional pain and I think it's that that puts it several notches above Doherty. Doherty, with all his 'I'm just a dilly boy' is just a narcissist and a romanticist and a self-mythologiser. There's an escapist strain in 'Heroin' too, but no apparent vanity, just anger at the hypocrisy and urban grimness of the present and a yearning for a sort of freedom and adventure that seems to come out of a book: 'I wish that, I'd sailed the darkened seas / in a great big clipper ship / going from this land into that / oh, in a sailor suit and hat'. This is a sort of poignant yearning for something obviously out of reach (so you take heroin instead and 'just don't care'), whereas Doherty just seems to be in rock'n'roll fantasyland.

Reed 'in no sense a poet'? I dunno.

'Stephanie says
that she wants to know
why it is though she's the door
she can't leave the room...

...but she's not
afraid to die
the people all
call her Alaska
between worlds
so the people ask her
'cos it's all in her mind.'

Reed studied poetry with the poet Delmore Schwarz, to whom the song 'European Son' is dedicated.

[NSAM]

Well, not much discussion of the lyrics so far. Just to continue in this vein briefly, Reed apparently stopped performing the song at some point and, when asked why, replied, 'I got sick of people coming up to me saying, "Hey Lou, man, I started taking heroin because of your song."'

I'm a big Velvets fan, but the lyrics did take me some getting used to. They're pretty basic in places, to whit. 'All the politicians making crazy sounds/ and all the dead bodies piling up in mounds.' But it's moving. It's a song about emotional pain and I think it's that that puts it several notches above Doherty. Doherty, with all his 'I'm just a dilly boy' is just a narcissist and a romanticist and a self-mythologiser. There's an escapist strain in 'Heroin' too, but no apparent vanity, just anger at the hypocrisy and urban grimness of the present and a yearning for a sort of freedom and adventure that seems to come out of a book: 'I wish that, I'd sailed the darkened seas / in a great big clipper ship / going from this land into that / oh, in a sailor suit and hat'. This is a sort of poignant yearning for something obviously out of reach (so you take heroin instead and 'just don't care'), whereas Doherty just seems to be in rock'n'roll fantasyland.

Reed 'in no sense a poet'? I dunno.

'Stephanie says
that she wants to know
why it is though she's the door
she can't leave the room...

...but she's not
afraid to die
the people all
call her Alaska
between worlds
so the people ask her
'cos it's all in her mind.'

Reed studied poetry with the poet Delmore Schwarz, to whom the song 'European Son' is dedicated.

thank you.

[blp]

On the subject of drugs and creativity, Rimbaud's famous ambition of 'disordering all the senses' turned out to be unproductive for him. In other words, he was good up to the point where he started taking a lot of drugs, then ran out of steam.