# I love Lou Reed'S : metal machine music, incredible stuff date from1975 avant-garde?



## deprofundis (Apr 25, 2014)

Im speechles guys Lou Reed of Vevlet Underground fame , issue this in 1975, im discovering it tonight , and by god mean this is a work of art, beautifull, droning noise, guitar laden, hmm.. sweet, what do you think guys.

:tiphat:


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## Guest (Oct 10, 2017)

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## Guest (Oct 10, 2017)

I still have my '75 vinyl double album. He could have retitled it, "Things you can do with ring modulation." Since I was very into using electronics in music at that time, I listened to MMM quite intensely because I was trying to use ring modulation in different ways. I had a very cool foot pedal (Foxx Studio Model 7) that allowed me to mess with guitar, bass and electric keyboard signals in crazy ways (I couldn't afford a synth then although MMM doesn't actually use one). 

Yes, I liked the album although critics and rock fans generally hated it and considered it a put-on like they do "Revolution 9." It's always how I separate enlightened listeners from slugs. Great art has been produced from put-ons--check out dada and cubism. 
As long as you're getting outside the box--and I don't care how you get there--that's what matters.


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## Merl (Jul 28, 2016)

It's awful but it was brilliant for clearing people out after a house party. Rick Wakeman"s 'Journey to the Centre of the Earth' was always first choice though. That could clear a 200 person house party in next to no time. Anyone who could survive both was either really really stoned, asleep or dead.


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## Alydon (May 16, 2012)

I read somewhere that this is probably the most unbearable piece of music ever written (I use the term loosely). I have tried to listen to it and Metal Machine Music is truly terrible though a master class of its type - experimental, pretentious and self indulgent offal. There are a few others who surpass Reed though, Stockhausen, John Cage and Boulez just for starters in the line of individuals who tried to destroy the concept of musical form, not to even develop it or actually compose anything actually worth listening to. Lou Reed is redeemed though as he did write some fantastic albums and I'm sure the above title was Reed taking time out and dreaming something up that would really get up the musical press's backs.


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## EddieRUKiddingVarese (Jan 8, 2013)

Where do you think I get the inspiration for my stuff.........


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## Ras (Oct 6, 2017)

I'm one of those squares who don't get "Metal Machine Music". 
Lou Reed used a similar concept for the instrumental track "Fire Music" - from the extended version of "The Raven"-album. But I think "Fire Music" is better - what a shame he didn't make a longer thing out of it... it's over and gone after a few minutes.

Zeitkratzer made an album based on Lou Reed's "Metal Machine Music":


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## Guest (Oct 15, 2017)

I suppose I am what Trump would call the snobby elitist who prattles on about what constitutes great art while foisting off "masterpieces" no more competent than what a 6 year old paints when they couldn't go outside for recess because it was raining. Actually, I reject the idea of a masterpiece altogether. Hitler did that with dada art. He attacked the dadaists as pretenders who couldn't pass off their "art" without a swollen set of instructions to tell people how to appreciate it. The Nazis held an art tour of dadaist works as a kind of "Come see what we are saving you from" thing. So many people turned out that the Nazis then shut it down early. They ironically became what they claimed they hated: elitists who felt they had the right to dictate to the rest of us what constitutes great art.

To me, great art conveys secrets that mediocre art--no matter how well executed--cannot. That's why i have a fondness for certain types of Trance and Chill music even though I often get put down for listening to "crappy techno." It says something to me other types of music does not because it wasn't equipped to. It's why I listen to such a wide variety of music--because no one type has all the secrets of universe in it. Each tells a different part of the whole story. Chopin tells one part, Schubert tells one part, Ellington tells another, King Crimson yet another, Kraftwerk still another, Cage yet another. Merzbow yet another.

So _Metal Machine Music_ is, in my opinion, great art. If you play it to get me out of your house, you're going about it all wrong. Playing Adele would probably do it--no, it would definitely do it. In fact, I ordered MMM on CD from Amazon last week and just ripped it to my portable hard drive this morning. After I finished listening to it, I listened to Bruckner's Symphony No. 8 which I think was a nice follow up.


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## 38157 (Jul 4, 2014)

Alydon said:


> Stockhausen, John Cage and Boulez just for starters in the line of individuals who tried to destroy the concept of musical form, not to even develop it or actually compose anything actually worth listening to.


To feel that experimental composition is an affront to composition as an art form is to assume that the musical patterns from which it breaks have inherent value though, don't you agree? Do you consider any break from established common practice period forms as "destruction"? You can never destroy musical form, all music has a form by virtue of the fact that it exists in time and space. Music literally cannot be without form, so you can never destroy form, and the composers you mentioned never attempted to destroy it; only to explore radically different musical structures.

If you don't like it, that's one thing, and you're entitled to your opinion. But your hefty claim that these composers didn't try to compose "anyhing actually worth listening to" you surely realise is your own personal emotional, subjective response to some music you happened to dislike (apparently due to its unfamiliarity - give it the time of day, as you grow to understand it, you might like it. You also might not, but you might feel less vehemently against it).

Assuming that certain composition forms have inherent worth and others don't is a positivist view, as it assumes that through analysis, you can discover whether something has a "good" form or a "bad" form (Heinrich Schenker tried to do this). In this text, Taruskin quotes Hirsch: "for positivism, meaning is an epiphenomenon, a secondary quality of linguistic forms themselves" - in your assertion that some forms have worth and others do not, you're making the assumption that meaning is derived from form, when in reality, based on a huge plethora of factors, different people will read different forms in different ways and will get different things from them.


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## Guest (Oct 20, 2017)

And let us not forget that all the great forms were at one time considered noise. I'm writing a Bach-Luther thread right now where I pointed out that baroque music was considered noise by those artists steeped in the Renaissance tradition. To them, baroque was out of tune because they tempered the scales, it didn't flow smoothly but constantly changed tempo and key, it started and stopped gratuitously, etc. But today, baroque is considered one of the great musical forms and its composers--the Bachs, Vivaldi, Telemann, Corelli--as among the finest ever produced. Just takes some getting used to. It's not when new challenging music comes along that concerns me. I welcome that. It's when none comes along and people seem stuck in a rut of boring music that concerns me greatly. We could use a good shakeup right now.


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## Phil loves classical (Feb 8, 2017)

Alydon said:


> I read somewhere that this is probably the most unbearable piece of music ever written (I use the term loosely). I have tried to listen to it and Metal Machine Music is truly terrible though a master class of its type - experimental, pretentious and self indulgent offal. There are a few others who surpass Reed though, Stockhausen, John Cage and Boulez just for starters in the line of individuals who tried to destroy the concept of musical form, not to even develop it or actually compose anything actually worth listening to. Lou Reed is redeemed though as he did write some fantastic albums and I'm sure the above title was Reed taking time out and dreaming something up that would really get up the musical press's backs.


I would say Stockhausen, Cage and Boulez succeeded, while Reed failed. Key is organization, I don't feel MMM is organized well.


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## Daniel Atkinson (Dec 31, 2016)

Alydon said:


> There are a few others who surpass Reed though, Stockhausen, John Cage and Boulez just for starters in the line of individuals who tried to destroy the concept of musical form


It's one thing to dislike those composers but another think to bleat out that false information.

If anything, you should know that Stockhausen and Boulez where obsessed with form and that creating new, overarching forms where what they strived very hard for and succeeded at.

On John Cage was fairly correct, though "destroy" is an exaggeration. Cage wanted to remove the ego, which caused a letting go of not only form as we know it but also a lot of the conventional role of the composer with "the work".

But none of this is even remotely relevant to Lou Reed

Daniel


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