LogFAQs > #961999887

ChichiriMuyo posted...

I re-listened to Heroin since so many people are rating it so highly and I suspect I underrated it a great deal given the merits of its lyrics and its timing and such, but I'm going to let my rating stand. I'll be that outlier. I won't listen to the full album again to re-rank it. The fact is the song gave me a headache, and the album gave me a worse one. It was literally painful to listen to, and the pain keeps going even after I've stopped listening, and I just don't get how anyone could like that.

Funnily enough, when I did my top 250 song project, I brought up how "Heroin" gave me a headache my first listen. It might be important to note that the name of the band is taken from a book on 'the sexual corruption of our age' with leather gear on the cover. "Venus in Furs" is explicitly about sadomasochism. So, to me, that first-time headache is part of the atmosphere that makes The Velvet Underground and Nico such a singular experience - this is a pain certain people are equipped to enjoy. That headache also went away with time; I think the album is a sonic encapsulation of the so-called deviancy of its time. It's messy, dissonant, sometimes painful, but the world of art opens up to so much more potential once you adjust to its existence.

I want to copy what I wrote about Heroin here so I can justify using it in the results presentation:
The first time I heard Heroin, John Cales wailing electric viola literally gave me a headache. Which is to say, I immediately fell in love and never looked back, an eternal fixture of my top two songs since I made my very first list a decade back. The appeal is in no way straightforward as I claim of so many of my other favorite songs on an album full of proto-whatever, Heroin remains the one song without significant connective tissue to music at large. Every element is so committed to supporting this sole idea that nothing could be taken or expanded upon. This exists at the forefront of experimental rock while shooting past the negative implications to land safely in the art rock zone no matter how hard this song goes, it maintains a strange accessibility.

Heroin finds four instruments and the human voice in perfect discord. The two guitars generate an introspective backbone while Moe Tuckers drumming starts with a low energy pattern. At first, Cales viola joins to merely drone in the backbone, Tuckers drumming picking up speed. Heroin is marked by crescendos, in which the drums threaten to skitter off while the viola begins to sear. Lou Reed delivers a quiet certitude, musing over the chaotic state of the world and citing heroin as the easy escape. Cales viola is the drug itself, Tuckers frantic drumming the rush. By the final crescendo, things truly go off the rails Moe Tucker momentarily stops drumming, so overwhelmed by the chaos. The viola transitions into a wailing monstrosity, yet Reeds certain voice ties everything together. This is a song so ahead of its time that it only dates itself through a Vietnam reference. Heroin may not be pleasant, but it exists as a riveting experience of music without limits.