The Things He Does to Please: Lou Reed’s Lulz Affair With Pop

(to celebrate 40 years of New Sensations of course)

His red joystick: Lou Reed

The specific pitch of the Lou Reed character is so singular that Chuck Klosterman pegged him as the epitome of Advancement Theory. Per the Fargo Rock City guru (and the theory’s developers, Jason Hartley and Britt Bergman), it’s the diametric opposite of “overt,” a new height (depth?) of inexplicable motive. Such as: A stone-faced collapse of all human emotion like the array of Facebook react options, where “you broke my heart and you made me cry / You said that I couldn't dance” shares the same tone as “I’m sorry I hit you.” In the same song as the latter, Reed proclaims “Endlessly jealousy eats through my skull / Endlessly jealousy makes me feel dull.” It’s precisely this type of contemptuous mad lib that made Reed a pioneer of the galaxy brain, be it the pisstake on racism (“I wanna be black, have natural rhythm / Shoot 20 feet of jism”) or the flipside about what an average (white) guy he is (“You wouldn’t know me if you met me face to face”).