Great song, great album

Wherein And your sister is just mad because TKD is one-step away from being ballet in loose clothes


Rob Sheffield:

6.) New Sensations, Lou Reed. For years, I cherished this song for one of my all-time-favorite Lou Reed couplets: “I wanna press the buzzer for time to snooze / I wanna eradicate my negative views.” What a perfect clash of mundane detail and grandiosely poetic resolution. Then, for some stupid reason, I actually read the lyric sheet that came with the album. It’s not “I wanna press the buzzer for time to snooze.” It’s “I want the principle of a timeless muse.” Lyric sheets are evil.

That's one lyric I always heard correctly. Maybe I read the lyrics sheet early on. Anyway, this song is full of great couplets and triplets. Doubling up on the one Rob mentions:

I want the principles of a timeless muse
I want to eradicate my negative views
And get rid of those people who are always on a down

It's easy enough to tell what is wrong
but that's not what I want to hear all night long
Some people are like human Tuinals

I'm a huge fan of the "human Tuinals" line. But I think I'll go with the opening for my favorite lines of the song and of the album:

I don't like guilt be it stoned or stupid
drunk and disorderly I ain't no cupid
Two years ago today I was arrested on Christmas Eve

I don't want pain, I want to walk not be carried
I don't want to give it up, I want to stay married
I ain't no dog tied to a parked car

This is an album I've tried off and on to write about for a couple years...nothing worked. What I can boil it down to for me is this is a survivor's tale. Cheerful, whimsical, not too regretful, and often defiant. It's someone who is lucky to be alive and is at peace with the choices he's made. If this is storytelling on Reed's part or autobiographical songwriting, I've never bothered to take a look at his life to find out. I just play the music and sing along.

Did I mention defiant? The track Fly Into the Sun is probably the best example of that:

The earth is weeping, the sky is shaking
the stars split to their core
And every proton and unnamed neutron
is fusing in my bones

And an unnamed mammal is darkly rising
as man burns from his tomb
And I look at this as a blissful moment
to fly into the sun

I like that -- it's all sciencey.