IS LOU REED’S METAL MACHINE MUSIC (1975) a real album or a put-on?
Reed’s notorious fifth solo album—roughly an hour of guitar feedback, with no vocals, no songs, no clear edges or boundaries beyond the seemingly arbitrary division into four “tracks” of roughly equal length, arguably no melody or rhythm (though to my ear it does at least remain somewhere in the neighborhood of E-major)—makes that question inescapable, along with several others. Does intention matter in art, and if it doesn’t matter there, where does it matter? Is there such a thing as “formlessness,” or must our minds always find forms, impose shapes, for perception to occur at all? If, occasionally, an artist decides to trust wholly to those formalizing processes of the mind to make all the decisions that we would normally expect artists themselves to make, is that a legitimate move in the game of art, or is it, as Pauline Kael once said of Last Year at Marienbad, “like making a mess and asking others to clean it up”? If I enjoy the record, does any of this matter? Why, when I do enjoy it, is my enjoyment lessened by the feeling that Lou Reed’s ghost is snickering at me?
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