rotting condition, Reed's message – powered by a ferocious four-piece band – slams home with the urgency of tomorrow morning's headlines.

In fact, the fourteen songs on New York – which runs nearly an hour – are fierce, poetic journalism, a reportage of surreal horror in which the unyielding force of actual circumstances continually threatens to overwhelm the ordering power of art. Reed, of course, is no stranger to unhinging scenes of squalor. On his inestimably influential early albums with the Velvet Underground and through much of his solo work in the Seventies, Reed cast a cold eye on virtually every manner of human excess.

But times have changed, and Reed's attitudes have changed with them. A walk on the sexually undifferentiated wild side is no longer simply an outrageous means of spitting in the face of the bourgeoisie but a potentially fatal journey. And it's hard to muster the deranged, existential glee of drug-soaked scenarios like "I'm Waiting for the Man," "White Light/White Heat" and "Sister Ray" as crack condemns a generation of inner-city youth to a dreadful night of the living dead. "The past keeps knock knock knocking on my door," Reed sings on "Halloween Parade," a moving, almost wistful update of "Walk on the Wild Side," "and I don't want to hear it anymore."

Most tellingly, Reed, a veteran of the 1986 Amnesty International Conspiracy of Hope Tour, has developed a political outlook that grounds his work and lessens his characteristic detachment. From that new vantage, Reed sees New York as a microcosm of the rest of the country, the hardest hit and therefore most devastated victim of eight years of Ronald Reagan.

Moreover, besides taking on such typical rock-star concerns as the environment, Native Americans and Vietnam vets, Reed tackles the last taboo of American political life: class. He realizes that even in the worst of times, people do not all suffer equally. On "Dirty Blvd.," the story of a Hispanic child growing up in a welfare hotel, he sings, "Outside it's a bright night, there's an opera at Lincoln Center/Movie stars arrive by limousine/The klieg lights shoot up over the skyline of Manhattan/But the lights are out on the mean streets."

To carry the weight of his words on New York, Reed assembled a killer band consisting of drummer and coproducer Fred Maher (a veteran Reed sideman), bassist Rob Wasserman