A formidable question, posed by Mark Sinker at Freaky Trigger, and a fetching/daunting examination of its many contours and contradictions. The surgery begins with a complaint (from a friend of Mark’s) about Nick Tosches’ review of Black Sabbath’s Paranoid in Rolling Stone, I think because Tosches seems to not address the record itself. Which leads to a trail of thought that includes Flaubert, the Grotesque (not the Fall album), Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, and the dread NoiseBoysism. Sinker on the latter:
Richard Meltzer, Lester Bangs, Nick Tosches: when James Wolcott dubbed them the Noiseboys, he did everyone (as so often) a disservice, including them, by collapsing them into just one wild-style jerk-store project and mislabelling it to match. They were friends in mischief, to be sure, but they were none of them particularly like one another in style or even tactic. What they did in fact share was a perverse attitude towards deep cultural knowledge, a feel for how to write and how to play and what was out there besides just rock. Elsewhere rockwrite was already sleepwalking uneasily — so they felt — towards a narrow pedantry, autodidact learning as a mode of borrowed bad authority. One escape route: knowledge as all-purpose bust-it-wide toolkit, as weaponry on behalf of the militant mutant grotesque that was rockthink’s earliest best contribution.
“This record is not for parties/dancing/background romance. This is what I ment by ‘real’ rock, about ‘real’ things. No one I know has listened to it all the way through including myself. It is not meant to be. Start any place you like. Symmetry, mathematical precision, obsessive and detailed accuracy and the vast advantage one has over ‘modern electronic composers.’ They, with neither sense of time, melody or emotion, manipulated or no. It’s for a certain time and place of mind.”
– Lou Reed, liner notes to Metal Machine Music
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“I think that, in this time of recession/depression
and with the whole music business tightening
its belt, it is truly thoughtful of Lou to cut recording
costs as much as MMM must have, especially
when you consider the stupefying self-indulgence
of so many of today’s rock ‘masterpieces’ with their
overproductions so baroquely lavish it all
turns to tinsel. Only James Brown, I think,
approaches Lou’s achievement here in terms of
sheer economy and minimal booking of expensive
studio time. MMM is actually, far from some
nihilist rampage, one giant WIN button.
Or more precisely, two since it is a
two record set.
– Lester Bangs, “The Greatest Album Ever Made” CREEM (1976)
{available in full here}
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Original CREEM review of MMM
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“The fact that he somehow made us all listen to this hour of feedback over and over, literally crawling into the speakers, trying to catch a glimpse of the hidden Evil, the outspoken cruelty of such a venture and the redeeming quality of living through it, while Lou obviously didn’t care about us or this release, proves in retrospect what a tremendous impact the man had on me.”
– Alexander Hacke, No Sell Out (The Wire, Nov. 2013)
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Lester Bangs, interview with Lou Reed, 1975
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“Well, I have. Played it, that is. Once. Which is one of the better feats of endurance in my life, equal to reading The Painted Bird, sitting through Savage Messiah and spending a night in a bus terminal in Hagerstown, Maryland. Yet, when my turntable mercifully silenced Lou Reed’s cosmic scrapings, I felt no anger, no indignation, not even a sense of time wasted, just mild regret.”
– James Wolcottreviews MMM in Rolling Stone
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Back cover of Kraftwerk’s RadioActivity (1975)Lester Bangs, “The Greatest Album Ever Made”
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“When Sally Can’t Dance sold well, Reed rubbished it himself (“I was imitating me”). And he bleached his hair, cropped and shaved a cross into it, and put out Metal Machine Music – The Amine B Ring. ‘An act of despicable elitism,’ wrote Ed Ward. Reed insisted that MMM stood comparison with Xenakis: four sides of screaming process-electronics, each exactly 16:01 minutes long. RCA put it out as a standard Reed release and suffered the consequences. Withdrawn within two weeks, it immediately becoming a rite of overamped passage for the true Lou fan, the prize, behind the feedbacking fuzz-drone, a dancing moiré of overtones, delicate and endless.”
– Mark Sinker, “Contract Breakers,” 2007 (The Wire)
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“As a chronically-depressed person, I find that Metal Machine Music actually does convey my mood at times. If you listen for a while, you can almost make something out of the din. I played a few seconds once for a co-worker (who moonlights as a singer), and she said it sounded like dinosaurs roaring, which I guess it does at that. At low volumes, the album can be almost soothing. Something about my brain likes the constant droning sound. I can’t sleep if my room is absolutely silent. That’s why I keep an electric fan going every night, even during the winter. I need the reassuring, constant hum. If nothing else, Metal Machine Music certainly comes in handy on the train, as it helps to drown out the sound of other passengers’ cell phone conversations.”
– Joe Blevins, “Metal Machine Music: Why I sorta like one of rock’s most infamous albums“
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Geeta Dayal, Slate, October 2013Teenage Rioter and MMM fan, Thurston Moore
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“The fact is, I haven’t listened to Metal Machine Music since coming to the UK thirteen years ago, but I remember it as quite listenable, in a post-rock ambient way, despite its notorious reputation. Sonically, the tape was surprisingly resonent and with the added bonus of the 8-Track’s permanent loop, I reckon it was an ideal MMM experience.”
– Thrifty Vinyl blog
“I’ve written about it before and I’ll write about it again, not least because you cannot really call yourself a rock writer if you haven’t written at least 15,000 words about the damned thing, which – here I go again – is an intense collision of surreal object, hate letter, emotional outburst, poetic assault, bubblegum serialism, artistic bombshell, infected ambition, celebrity breakdown, creative exhaustion, sinister confession, nervous tension, practical joke, artistic tantrum and psychedelic documentary.”
– Paul Morley, The Guardian, 2010
“The pleasures were there, if you only trusted the artist: La Monte Young’s Theater of Eternal Music Dream-House in your own home, and without all the phoney number-mysticism. But most fans and rock critics were unwilling to buy into such High Art justification. Other explanations proliferated for why Reed would choose to release MMM, two favourites being the revenge-on-the-record-company theory and the getting-out-of-a-management-contract theory.”
– Mark Sinker, “Contract Breakers,” 2007 (The Wire)
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“In its droning, shapeless indifference, Metal Machine Music is hopelessly old-fashioned. After a decade of aesthetic outrages, four sides of what sounds like the tubular groaning of a galactic refrigerator just aren’t going to inflame the bourgeoisie (whoever they are) or repel his fans (since they’ll just shrug and wait for the next collection). Lou Reed is disdainfully unveiling the black hole in his personal universe, but the question is, who’s supposed to flinch?”
– James Wolcott, Rolling Stone
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“…a very
sexy album
designed to
cut in heavily
on the hot
Barry White market.”
– Lester Bangs
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“I just think it’s one of the most remarkable pieces of music ever done by anybody, anywhere. In time, it will prove itself.”
– Lou Reed, quoted in Victor Bockris’s Transformer: The Lou Reed Story
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“Metal Machine Music was released the same week — twenty years ago — as Discreet Music.
“Discreet Music is soft,
calm, melodic and
reassuringly repetitive, without a single sound other than tape hiss about 1500 Hz, whereas MMM is as abrasive and unmelodic as possible, with almost nothing below —
and yet they occupy two ends of what was at the time a pretty new axis — music as immersion, as sonic experience in which you float.
“The roots of Ambient.”
– Brian Eno, A Year with Swollen Appendices, 1995
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“As a teenager MMM had summarised for me all the things I loved: modern orchestral music, free jazz, industrial music, heavy rock and feedback. I heard it as a guitar orchestra version of ‘Xenakis-and-likes’ and fantasised about setting it for orchestra. It took me more than 20 years to make this dream a reality: I’ve now done performances of MMM with five different ensembles in various countries, continuously revising and refining my transcription and arrangement each time.”
– Ulrich Krieger: Unclassifiable (The Wire, Nov. 2013)
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“No, it’s not the truth. I wouldn’t put out a record I don’t like just to get out of a contract. That’s ridiculous but it is a great story. It’s almost a shame to say it’s not true. But in fact it’s not true. I made it because I liked it, not to get out of a contract.
– Lou Reed interviewed in Metal Machine Music Revisited, by John Doran in Quietus
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Amazon.comWas this review helpful to you? (Christgau’s Consumer Guiide)
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“Most of you won’t like this and I don’t blame you at all. It’s not meant for you. At the very least I made it so I had something to listen to. Certainly Misunderstood: Power to Consume (how Bathetic): an idea done respectfully, intelligently, sympathetically and graciously, always with concentration on the first and formost goal. For that matter, off the record, I love and adore it. I’m sorry, but not especially, if it turns you off.”
– Lou Reed, liner notes to MMM
That MMM is now living and breathing as an enduring, taunting piece of contemporary composition means that Lou is on the way to having the last laugh (another of his favourite things). Not so much because Metal Machine Music is, after all, an elaborate conceptual joke, but also because – and I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – it is not. It is, unless being a rock critic I am entirely wrong, quite an insight into the turbulent spirit of the age.”
– Paul Morley, The Guardian, 2010
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Alejandro Cohen “High Velocity, A Tribute to Metal Machine Music
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JD: I tell you what though I’ve found myself listening to it in the bath a few times this week and it’s been quite relaxing. It’s not something I could imagine doing with the original. LR: Well, yeah… What are you listening on headphones? JD: No, on speakers. LR: What kind of speakers could you possibly have in your bathroom?
– Lou Reed interviewed in Metal Machine Music Revisited, by John Doran in Quietus
“Later I came to understand that Lou took the rejection of it by fans and press alike very personal. This piece was a serious piece of love – love of sound and the guitar. Even more so, MM3 came as a late artistic confirmation. He had been right all along. MMM had come home. Completely unexpected by him, a younger generation of musicians and listeners now got it. At 2009’s Lollapalooza MM3 played a ten minute noise interlude between well known Reed songs to the frantic cheers of a large audience.”
– Ulrich Krieger: Unclassifiable (The Wire, Nov. 2013)
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“What’s most distressing is the possibility that Metal Machine Music isn’t so much a knife slash at his detractors as perhaps a blade turned inward. At its very worst this album suggests masochism.”
– James Wolcott, Rolling Stone
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“It was great, great fun. I was trying to do the ultimate guitar solo. And I didn’t want to be locked into a particular drum beat, or pattern or a particular key or beat that was the idea. Just guitars, guitars, guitars.”
– Lou Reed interviewed by John Doran in Quietus
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“As way of disclaimer.I am forced to say that, due to stimulation of various centers (remember OOOOHHHMMM, etc.), the possible negative contraindications must be pointed out. A record has to, of all things Anyway, hypertense people, etc. possibility of epilepsy (petite mal), psychic motor disorders, etc… etc… etc.
A by no means comprehensive or conclusive survey of a Canadian power trio who once upon a time (much less so now) got under the skins of more rock critics than any other rock or pop artist going.
“For the record, those three are drummer Neil Peart, who writes all the band’s lyrics and takes fewer solos than might be expected; guitarist Alex Lifeson, whose mile-a-minute buzzing is more numbing than exciting; and bassist, keyboardist and singer Geddy Lee, whose amazingly high-pitched wailing often sounds like Mr. Bill singing heavy metal. If only Mr. Sluggo had been on hand to give these guys a couple good whacks…”
– Steve Pond, review of Rush live in Los Angeles, Rolling Stone, 1980
Geddy Lee’s high-register vocal style has always been a signature of the band – and sometimes a focal point for criticism, especially during the early years of Rush’s career when Lee’s vocals were high-pitched, with a strong likeness to other singers like Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin. A review in the New York Times opined that Lee’s voice ‘suggests a munchkin giving a sermon.’ Although his voice has softened over the years, it is often described as a ‘wail.’ His instrumental abilities, on the other hand, are rarely criticized.
– Wikipedia entry on Rush
– Mark Coleman and Ernesto Lechner, The New Rolling Stone Album Guide, 2004
“Like an overattended child, this album is spoiled. It reeks of horns and harps, harmonica quartets, assorted animal noises, and a 41-piece orchestra.”
– Richard Goldstein, review of Sgt. Pepper in the New York Times, 1967
“So, as expected, it had to be the Beatles themselves to do the job of (one-more-time) summing up the recent by summing up the whole thing in a soft cataclysmic combination of death, sleep and multiplicity/variety, as if they hadn’t done it before… so this time it would have to be a really real end-of-culture/end-of-the-world thing. And that’s precisely what Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was/is. Bringing with it the consequent death of art forever (until someone forgets) and subsequent everybody-influenced-by-everybody-but-particularly-by-the-Beatles-and-Sgt.-Pepper, eventually dispersing it everywhere and thus inevitably devaluing the specific Sgt. Pepper focal point.”
– Richard Meltzer, The Aesthetics of Rock, 1970
“The comparison with Gershwin, in fact, is not unjustified. Just as ‘Embraceable You’ and ‘I Can’t Get Started’ were flawless popular songs but ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ was disastrous pretention, so with the Beatles. At the level of ‘Baby Let Me Drive Your Car’ or ‘Hard Days Night,’ they’d been inventive, funny, acute and that’d been enough; in Sgt. Pepper, they retained the same qualities but their new ambitions demanded something more. Ingenuity and quickness weren’t remotely enough, and the loss in power proved fatal. They went flat: after all, what does third-rate Art have on Superpop?”
– Nik Cohn, Pop From the Beginning, 1969
“Rock musicians were creating new music, so writers had to create new criticism. Writing had to be an appropriate response to the music; in writing about, say, Sgt. Pepper, you had to try to write something as good as Sgt. Pepper. Because, of course, what made that record beautiful was the beautiful response it created in you; if your written response was true to your listening response, the writing would stand on its own as a creation on par with the record.”
– Michael Lydon, review of Paul Williams’s Outlaw Blues, Rolling Stone, April 19, 1969
“Usually, people point to [Goldstein’s] Sgt. Pepper review as the moment he got his scarlet T, for turkey. He panned the record, dig, at precisely the instant when everybody was getting rather off on it. In recent times, certain revisionists and cynics have not only forgiven him, but consider him to have been right–what a joke.”
– Richard Meltzer, preface to “Redd Foxx Gets off the Pot” in A Whore Just Like the Rest, 2000
“Goldstein was disappointed with Sgt. Pepper. After an initial moment of panic, I wasn’t. In fact, I was exalted by it, although a little of that has worn off. Which is just the point. Goldstein may have been wrong, but he wasn’t that wrong. Sgt. Pepper is not the world’s most perfect work of art. But that is what the Beatles’ fans have come to assume their idols must produce.”
– Robert Christgau, Esquire, 1967
“Any of these songs is more genuinely creative than anything currently to be heard on pop radio stations, but in relationship to what other groups have been doing lately Sergeant Pepper is chiefly significant as constructive criticism, a sort of pop music master class examining trends and correcting or tidying up inconsistencies and undisciplined work, here and there suggesting a line worth following… Sooner or later some group will take the next logical step and produce an LP which is a popsong-cycle, a Tin Pan Alley Dichterliebe. Whether or not the remains of Schumann or Heine turn in their graves at this description depends on the artistry of the compiler.”
– William Mann, The Sunday Times, May 29, 1967
“That a song [‘A Day in the Life’] of such intellectual sophistication and artistic resourcefulness should arise out of the same tradition that only a dozen years ago was spawning ditties like ‘Rock Around the Clock’ seems almost unbelievable. But the very swiftness of the development indicates its real nature. Unlike other popular arts, rock has not been forced to spin its substance out of itself. Instead, it has acted like a magnet, drawing into its field a host of heterogeneous materials that has fallen quickly into patterns. No other cultural force in modern times has possessed its power of synthesis.”
– Albert Goldman, “The Emergence of Rock,” New American Review, 1968
“If being a critic were the same as being a listener, I could enjoy Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Other than one song which I detest (‘Good Morning, Good Morning’), I find the album better than 80 percent of the music around today. But it is the other 20 percent–including the best of the Beatles’ past performances–which worries me as a critic.”
– Richard Goldstein, “I Blew My Cool Through the New York Times,” 1967 (from Goldstein’s Greatest Hits)
“So, if Sgt. Pepper passes, what am I grousing for? Well, it did work in itself, it was cool and clever and controlled. Only, it wasn’t much like pop. It wasn’t fast, flash, sexual, loud, vulgar, monstrous or violent. It made no myths.”
– Nik Cohn, Pop From the Beginning, 1969
“Almost immediately, Sgt. Pepper was certified as proof that the Beatles’ music — or at least this album — was Art. But what mattered was the conscious creation of event — the way in which the summing-up-the-spirit-of-the-times style of the music (which for the most part has not survived its time) was perfectly congruent with the organizing-the-spirit-of-the-times manner in which the album was released and received. Which is to say that Sgt. Pepper, as the most brilliantly orchestrated manipulation of a cultural audience in pop history, was nothing less than a small pop explosion in and of itself. The music was not great art; the event, in its intensification of the ability to respond, was.”
– Greil Marcus, “The Beatles” chapter in The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll, 1979
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