The Best Of The Velvet Underground (Words And Music Of Lou Reed)

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Listening to <i>The Velvet Underground</i> can feel like walking into a small, late-night gathering with close friends: It’s warm, it’s fuzzy, it’s a little imprecise. But in that imprecision is a sense of quiet epiphany, the feeling of revelation that forms around moments you might otherwise mi. There’s laughter in it (“Beginning to See the Light”), and there’s tenderne, too (“Pale Blue Eyes”). But there’s also a reckoning with big questions about doubt (“I’m Set Free”), purpose (“Jesus”), and how we share our inner selves with the outside world (“Candy Says”) that runs deeper than the album’s sweetness lets on. Lou Reed said that <i>White Light/White Heat</i> wa, in part, a reaction to the delusions of hippie culture—the way free love led to broken hearts and supposedly innocent drug use devolved into people too disconnected from reality to function. But if the band has a psychedelic album—not in the carnivalesque sense, but in the sense of pointing one on a strange personal journey—this is it. .

via Apple Music

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