Hardly Strictly Lou
There’s lots to love in Will Hermes’s new Lou Reed bio, The King of New York, and I’m so glad I got to present on a Lou panel with Hermes back when his project was in its infancy. I’m up to about 1975 in the book: the Velvets are done but the 1969 live LP is attracting new listeners, the solo career is well underway, and Rachel is on the scene. But I’m still meditating on Lou’s Bettye Kronstad years, the period when he tried to retreat into something resembling normalcy. “Coney Island Baby” takes root here, with its fantasies of playing “football for the coach” especially bittersweet (we’re talking about a queer Brooklyn kid with zero athletic ability and likely no childhood fantasies of playing football for anyone). Part of the reason I chose USC for my master’s degree was that I wanted to know what it was like at a big sunny football school, having only really known the concrete of NYC and the dismal grey skies over SUNY Binghamton. Lou attended Syracuse as an undergrad, so he got a taste of the fratbro scene and the depressingness of upstate New York in one shot. “Perfect Day” also takes root with Kronstad: it’s a tableau of a bunch of normie shit that sure seems idyllic when you’re in no sense a normie.1 My happiest times in relationships were always the normie ones — buying cat food, singing the “ninety-four seven, the Wa-aaave” bumper at the laundromat. I do try to be a nicer human being than Lou Reed was, but the commonalities are many.
Someone posted a clip from The Nanny that was an obvious callback to the opening pizza scene in Saturday Night Fever (1977).2 Because I’m ADHD, this sent me rabbit-holing into Saturday Night Fever and considering how certain aspects are echoed in Barbie (2023). Both involve traveling to/through “grownup” and less heightened worlds the protagonists lack the social skills for and generally have little context for. SNF is, famously, a “social realist” text hidden inside string swells and light-up floors. The grownup-world people in SNF look down upon the young disco dancers for being seduced by the dazzle, where in Barbie even the smack-talking teenagers of the Real World are too conditioned to the grind of modern life to be impressed by the two grandiose Barbie World outernationals. But these teens are bourgeois Westsiders. We don’t get to see how Barbie and Ken would go over in, say, East L.A., where the cars’ intricate pinstripe detailing isn’t aesthetically so far off from Ken’s cowboy embroidery. Something I love about SNF is how it (accurately) critiques notions that “social realism” and “disco flash” exist on a binary. The working class have expressed themselves through flashy clothes and dances and cars for ages! The binary is more about who has the resources to make the glitter pass as high-end. It’s fascinating that Englishman Nik Cohn fabricated the facts of his investigative 1976 article “The Tribal Rites of Saturday Night,” the source material for the movie, but he based the character studies and general tone of it on real blokes he knew from the mod scene, peacocking it up like ’60s analogs of chavs or Teds. Twas ever thus, you know? The real genius of Barbie may be on the meta level — all the costumes and the pink on Barbenheimer weekend, where moviegoers of a wide wide range of cultural backgrounds and financial realities adapted the Barbie iconography to themselves and said, “Barbie may not be real but I’M real and I’m going to use my own creativity and personal style to make whatever abstract concept Barbie is shapeshift into ME for a few hours.” And then, as Pauline Kael wrote in her Saturday Night Fever review, “When the music stops, you return to being ordinary.”
Obsessed with the modal verb “could” in the prechorus of Dua Lipa’s “Dance the Night” — the breakout single from the Barbie soundtrack. “I could dance / I could dance / I could dance.” It disconnects the dancing from the present; she’s never physically on the floor at any point, but dancing is something you can ostensibly watch her do when her heart breaks and her world shakes. It’s a blurry, contradictory song that never clarifies whether her slay is abandon or merely a Londoner’s stiff upper lip.
I’m still making my mind up about Olivia Rodrigo as an artist, but omg omg omg omg Kelly Clarkson’s Kellyoke cover of “Vampire.” The kids today don’t know that you can belt in head voice. Those elongated vowels! Kelly is here to give y’all lessons in how to do it.
It’s telling, though, that Lou was a fan of Salinger’s story “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” in which the miserable Seymour Glass has a nice afternoon with a kid and then offs himself.
A movie Fran Drescher was in!
