London Review of Books’ editor Mark Greif on the Velvet Underground:
“The Velvet Underground showed that aural pain becomes pleasure especially when listening to it constitutes an act of affiliation with a higher, because worse and more ‘transgressive’, standard of life. The person who doesn’t like being abused by Cale’s viola, or the badly recorded guitars of White Light/White Heat, is stupid, straight. The person who learns the pleasure of the abuse, who will listen to the 17 minutes of ‘Sister Ray’ and then put it on again, has ascended to a higher sphere – or rather descended into the underground – simply by the act of listening, with or without actual access to works, spoon, smack, transvestites, tenements, whips or leather boots.”
In some interesting senses, the essay seems an overgrown collegiate “compare and contrast” writing exercise, posing the Velvet Underground against the Grateful Dead, East Coast vs. West Coast, punk against hippie. Although we usually think of the former as having succeeded the latter, because of the Velvets’ prescience and the Dead’s longevity they were contemporaries.
