Dear Dirty America

Goodbye, Lou Reed. You’ve stepped off this great wheel of life, but I’m sure you’ll be back again.

Rolling Stone delivered the news and a thorough overview of the life-long rocker’s career and shaping American music from the Sixties until today:

With the Velvet Underground in the late Sixties, Reed fused street-level urgency with elements of European avant-garde music, marrying beauty and noise, while bringing a whole new lyrical honesty to rock & roll poetry. As a restlessly inventive solo artist, from the Seventies into the 2010s, he was chameleonic, thorny and unpredictable, challenging his fans at every turn. Glam, punk and alternative rock are all unthinkable without his revelatory example. “One chord is fine,” he once said, alluding to his bare-bones guitar style. “Two chords are pushing it. Three chords and you’re into jazz.” (read the rest here)

I didn’t know much about Lou Reed, but a couple of summers ago I found his Magic and Loss album on my computer. I still don’t know how it got there. I certainly didn’t steal it, nor did I purchase it. I ended up listening to “Magician (Internally)” hundreds of times that summer.

The woefully plucked guitar strings reverberating off my bare apartment walls while giving color to the sober lyrics wishing for a miracle and ever mindful of the burning inner spirit hampered and trapped by the failing, shaky human shell are especially eerie now that Lou Reed is gone:

Lou Reed was 71 years old. As a side note, it should be known that some nutritionists think that is only half the age a human being can live. Just think if you told Lou Reed yesterday, “You can’t die yet! You’re only middle aged!” Apparently if we eat the right kinds of fiber and fulfill the body’s vitamin and mineral requirements, we could live as long as Li Ching-Yuen, the Chinese mountain-wanderer who possibly lived for 256 years.

No disrespect to Lou Reed or his ghost, however, it’s good to think about personal nutrition and physical longevity. Unless you don’t want to live that long. Living too long is a valid concern, too.