The Velvet Underground & Nico at 50: Monumental album or just “fine”?
Welcome to the Music Roundtable, where music writers and fans discuss recent reissues, hot new releases, or just records we like. For this installment, on the 50th anniversary of The Velvet Underground’s debut, The Velvet Underground & Nico, three of our writers—one devoted fan, one skeptic, and one neophyte—discuss the album’s importance and differing levels of impact.
Sean O’Neal: It’s been 50 years since the release of The Velvet Underground & Nico, a half-century’s passage that seems impossible, in both respects. In many ways, it feels like the 1967 album has been around forever—far longer than a mere 50 years, so embedded in the DNA of modern music as to seem innate. But in another way, 50 years doesn’t really gel with how vital it still sounds. You could put this album next to that of nearly any modern rock artist, and they’d be embarrassed by how middlebrow and ProTools fussed-over their work seems in comparison. It’s among the purest distillations of what a rock band is a capable of, even as it planted the seeds for a dozen different genres—punk, goth, shoegaze, indie-pop, drone—within the wild, unfettered fucking around of a group of proud fringe-dwellers who were too cool (or pilled-up) to care about being liked. Its influence is eternal and annually renewed. It’s one of the handful of albums that can be called truly timeless, rendering anniversary celebrations such as these redundant.
What it can’t be called any longer, I suspect, is surprising—especially the older and more entrenched it gets. Me, I remember that day in 1994 when I first listened to it as a sort of romanticized Cameron Crowe montage in which I emerge on the other side, noticeably wiser, cooler, and ever so slightly more dangerous. But even then, I was probably the one-millionth high school kid that year alone to finally take note that every alt-rock star from Michael Stipe to Kurt Cobain had name-checked The Velvet Underground, then pick up the ’95 box set Peel Slowly And See (which I think I still owe Columbia House $50 for. Sorry!) I also came to the Velvets in a decidedly uncool manner, having first heard “Heroin” on the soundtrack for Oliver Stone’s The Doors movie and—realizing its slow, simple churn made it one of the few songs suited to my then-rudimentary guitar skills—proceeded to wear it into the ground, until my dad finally burst into my bedroom, demanding to know whether I was ever going to change chords.
But while it was already nearly 30 years old by that point, the fact that it could still baffle and annoy my Beatles and Zeppelin-loving dad speaks to the album’s singularity, and I’d say time has not yet diminished that. Listening to VU & Nico now (which I probably do about once a month), even after so many bands who seemingly based their entire careers off just “Sunday Morning” or “I’m Waiting For The Man” alone, I’m still struck by what an extraordinarily weird album it is. Lou Reed’s droning eighth-note churns, John Cale’s yawing viola, Sterling Morrison’s nimble slide-runs, Mo Tucker’s caveman percussion, all topped by Nico’s funereal, foggy Marlene Dietrich voice—there’s no accounting for the strange, beautiful chemistry these discordant elements create when together. There’s no reason why a bunch of amphetamine-fueled garage rockers who were talked into backing a primping, partially deaf German fashion model—just because Andy Warhol thought it would be neat—should sound as good as it does.
Similarly, it’s simply incredible that the same group could create this many varieties of songs and moods—ranging from giddy junkie nihilism to sardonic scenester critiques to one of the most tender love ballads ever written—or put the gentle, trilling “Femme Fatale” right up against the seesawing S&M dirge of “Venus In Furs,” then follow it all with the ragged addict’s blues of “Run Run Run” and make the whole thing feel cohesive and right. In a year when The Beatles were being credited for completely rewriting rock music with the acid Tin Pan Alley excursions of Sgt. Pepper’s, The Velvet Underground was doing exactly the same, albeit with grimier drugs. And even today, bands are still playing catch up.
Of course, the experimental naturally fades into the “influential” and, finally, the conventional. Today, no one’s going to be shocked by the album’s dark undercurrents of sex and death the way tea-sipping hippies were when it debuted. And after decades of artists copying or one-upping its transgressiveness—not to mention endless critical reappraisals like this one—The Velvet Underground & Nico is no longer the dangerous outsider. But that hasn’t changed the fact that listening to it can still be a revelatory experience, even for the initiated. While it’s hard to say it’s my favorite Velvets record (which tends to be whichever one I’m listening to at the time), I wouldn’t hesitate to say it’s the most important—not for the way it changed music in its wake, which has been well-established, but for the way it changed me. It’s the album that forever colored my perception of what music could be—and in a broader sense, what is and isn’t “cool.” And it made The Velvet Underground the band by which all others must be judged. It is most definitively the album that, forgive the cliché, I don’t know who I would be without.
Which is why I was a little bit dismayed, David, when you told me you thought it was “fine.” Fine? Fine?! I get that we have slightly different tastes in music, and maybe there’s a generational gap at play here, but it’s surprising to me that—my personal prejudices aside—an artwork that’s had such historic, demonstrable impact can be shrugged at the same way we talk about the sandwich place around the corner. So tell me: Do you believe Velvet Underground & Nico doesn’t deserve all the praise I just heaped upon it? And what’s it like to listen to this record and just feel “fine”?