A few weeks ago I picked up Lou Reed's "The Raven." Reed performed along with a long list of actors and other performance artists the works of Edgar Allen Poe along with some of his own songs. He rewrote some of Poe's work to fit into the context of a Rock Musical. Reed of course is known as a legend in rock music especially for vitally influencing punk and new wave, but also he kept his wand in the literary world as well as he was mentored by poet Delmore Schwartz at Syracuse University in the early 1960s before moving on to the rock and roll lifestyle in New York City, co-founding the Velvet Underground, and collaborating with Andy Warhol among many others. Before I go on too long into a lecture on the history of Rock Music, I will point out that Reed finds Poe's poems and stories such as The Raven, Fall of the House of Usher, Pit and The Pendulum, The Tell Tale Heart all relevant and especially important in the Post 9/11 sphere.
I have the double cd recording if anyone would like to borrow it, and it is also available on Warner records, released in 2003.
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Oops, I forgot to demonstrate a little of this collaboration. The following comes from Reed's website as noted at the bottom.
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Vanishing Act
Teacher and Student
It must be nice to disappear
To have a vanishing act
To always be looking forward
And never looking back
How nice it is to disappear
Float into a mist
With a young lady on your arm
Looking for a kiss
It might be nice to disappear
To have a vanishing act
To always be looking forward
Never look over your back
It must be nice to disappear
Float into a mist
With a young lady on your arm
Looking for a kiss
I Wanna Know (Pit and Pendulum)
Young Poe
Young Poe:
Under the intense scrutiny of Ligeia’s eyes I have felt the full knowledge and force of their expression and yet been unable to possess it and have felt it leave me as so many other things have left, the letter half read the bottle half drunk finding in the commonest objects of the universe a circle of analogies, of metaphors for that expression which has been willfully withheld from me, the access to the inner soul denied.
Judges (Choir): I wanna know
Young Poe:
In consideration of the faculties and impulses of the human soul in consideration of our arrogance our radical, primitive irreducible arrogance of reason we have all overlooked the propensity. We saw no need for it, the paradoxical something which we may call perverseness. Through its promptings we act without comprehensible object.
We act for the reason we should not. For certain minds this is absolutely irresistible. The conviction of the wrong or impolicy of an action is often the unconquerable force. It is a primitive impulse. The overwhelming tendency to do wrong for the wrong’s sake. We persist in acts because we feel that we should not persist in them.
Judges and the dead people (Choir): I wanna know
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From the Lyrics for the Raven:
www.loureed.org
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