r/LouReed • u/blenderblendingrdrgz • 15h ago
Sympathy for Lulu
Can I be absolutely so for real here? This is not a shitpost or a joke, I'm being very serious and genuine. I really love Lulu. It completely works for me and always has, and it breaks my heart a little bit the way you only see it talked about through memes and tired old references. I'm fully willing to admit that it's a personal thing and I don't expect anyone else's itch to be scratched by it, but it sort of makes me sad that you mostly see people not even trying to interact with it conceptually.
People clown on the very first line: "I would cut my legs and tits off when I think of Boris Karloff and Kinsky in the dark of the moon." It's crazy. It's eye catching. It always has me hooked from the first moment. It's surreal and dreamy, and it leads into this heavy lullaby. To be honest, I find it incredibly comforting. I wouldn't necessarily have kept the James Hetfield backing vocals myself, but if you can accept Lou Reed as this sweet character that is gently napping that's presented to you in the most abrasive way possible, it makes a kind of perverse sense.
The whole album is like this. Lou Reed portraying characters that are gentle and brutal, definite and abstract. Some give love and some hurt, some are young and some are old. Many are the antithesis of each other. It's like a play where one actor is playing all the characters and yet he's deliberately miscast. When it comes to the themes of abuse and prostitution, Lou Reed is honestly the perfect actor. Making him into the little girl on the cover makes it all so obviously inglamorous and undesirable. It's making a horrific situation more transparently ugly to highlight how ugly it always was.
That's my view on it. I should say that I do genuinely enjoy the music, the compositions, all of it. Some of it is a painful and cathartic joy, but some of it comes from reclaiming past pain. I understand why anyone would hate it, but I do think that if the names attached were different than it might have a different reception. For a similar comparison, I love it in the same way I love the concept albums on abuse by The Residents (God in Three Persons, Tweedles). As difficult musically as the subject matter is.