1st place: The Velvet Underground & Nico with “The Velvet Underground & Nico” (1967)
The beginning of underground music as we know it. We are now familiar with their sound language, but back then it was completely new: the sound is raw, garish and relatively monotonous, the music sounds as if you could touch it. Slightly offset drums. Two chords, alternately played over the guitar. A single note that booms throughout the entire song.
About Lou Reed, who half speaks, half sings: about drugs, failed existences, patent leather sex, the Sundays and Mondays after wild parties where you turn into a howling clown.
About waiting in the wrong part of town, the sweet nothing… Well, “Oh! “Sweet Nuthin'” was on a different album, but you can hear it, the nothingness, between the songs, on the Velvets’ debut, the one with the famous banana.
Peel slowly and see. People die, ideas live forever, as it says in the trailer for Greta Gerwig’s current “Barbie” film. The glamorous starlets of the sixties are almost all dead, Edie is just a photo, the factory has been demolished, Warhol’s superstars are history, Nico has fallen off her bike, Warhol has died as a result of the after-effects of the assassination attempt on him.
But the songs are still there, and they sound as if they were being played every single time at that exact moment, in the distance of decades past. Because while the Beach Boys and the Beatles relied on large orchestras in 1967, The Velvet Underground took away everything that was not needed.
“‘I’m Waiting For The Man’ sounds like it was just recorded. Drug dealers are always late. But it also works if you have to wait for the bus or the Uber Eats delivery”
But what they kept still sounds like it was just recorded to this day. “Sunday Morning” in its reduced, menacing sweetness: “Watch out, the world is behind you!” “I’m Waiting For The Man”? “He’s never early, he’s always late/ First thing you learn is that you always gotta wait” still applies today: drug dealers still always come too late.
But also suitable if you have to wait for the bus or Uber Eats delivery. You have to listen carefully. For example in the bridge of “Venus In Furs”: “I am tired, I am weary/ I could sleep for a thousand years/ A thousand dreams that would awake me/ Different colors made of tears.”
The poetics of the lines are not empty: of course, the colors blur because your eyes water from exhaustion or grief. The fossil of a moment. The longing for a time that you never experienced. It was probably actually pretty awful back then, in New York in the ’60s.
Maybe life is always similar in big cities. Without the Velvets, there would have been neither Nirvana nor Sonic Youth nor all the other scrappy, ambitious indie music. Actually, all “deconstructivist” rock since the Nineties has its roots, apart from punk, in the Velvet Underground. At the same time, no one sounds like her. They were their own genre and remain so to this day.
Juliane Liebert