Near the beginning of this brilliant new album, Lou Reed sings: "It's been a long time since I've spoken to you." The line has a resonance far beyond its literal meaning. In the years following the breakup of the Velvet Underground, Reed's bizarre and half-baked semistardom became a travesty of his art, as one of the most magical
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raw nerves of our time coarsened into a crude, death-trip clown.
Whereas Reed with the Velvets had once broken our hearts with a compelling vision of sin and redemption, he now broke them by turning his post-Underground LPs into floating freak shows. While much of Reed's solo work was far from bad, one has to remember that his admirers expected him to surpass Bob Dylan, and the Velvets' LPs had promised nothing less. So each comeback failed—not so much as rock & roll but as myth—and the repeated failures only compounded the problem. As he says in "Street Hassle," not defending himself but simply explaining what went wrong:
You know, some people got no choice
And they can never find a voice...
That they could even call their own
So the first thing that they see
That allows them the right to be
Why, they follow it
You know what it's called?
Bad luck.
While a less vulnerable artist might have been able to resolve these contradictions, the salvation-obsessed Reed wasn't even a very adept or convincing sellout. Because he was so sensitive, his posturing as the Rock & Roll Animal was too painfully cruel to be valid even on its own slumming terms. It's possible total dishonesty could have made Reed a commercial success, but the partial and intermittent dishonesty he practiced marred even his good records almost beyond repair. Still, we waited. If he couldn't produce the expected masterpiece, he could at least give us a dignified admission of failure.
Street Hassle, oddly enough, is both: a confession of failure that becomes a stunning, incandescent triumph—the best solo album Lou Reed has ever done. Side one begins with an electrifying, Promethean challenge. As the hauntingly familiar chords of "Sweet Jane" lurch into focus, they are abruptly slapped down by Reed's sneering commentary: "Hey, if it ain't the Rock & Roll Animal himself.../Fucking faggot junkie." "Sweet Jane," that incalculably beautiful hymn to human endurance, has become the emblem of Reed's decay, a sleazy, crowd-pleasing rocker. By trashing the song so completely at the outset of this record, Reed deliberately raises both the stakes and our expectations almost impossibly high.
He delivers, too, with an ease close to casualness. Of course, every trick and technique Reed has ever learned is present here, but Street Hassle doesn't advertise its virtuosity. Instead, it's completely uncluttered and unexpectedly direct.
When an artist down on his luck aims high and connects, one expects to hear
