Inevitably the steady slumber of Kanye West’s video for his song ‘Famous’, the repeated inhalations and exhalations, the subtle grabs for the bedsheets, the settling oneself on pillows, the occasional whinny and snore, have been disrupted by louder noises of condemnation as the preeminent artist of his generation once more finds his way to the altar of controversy, and at the same time takes his seat in a pew.
Lena Dunham is one of several artists and contemporaries who have voiced their displeasure with the video. ‘Now I have to see the prone, unconscious, waxy bodies of famous women, twisted like they’ve been drugged and chucked aside at a rager?’, she asked incredulously via a post on Facebook, calling the work, which was inspired by Vincent Desiderio’s 2008 painting Sleep, ‘one of the more disturbing ‘artistic’ efforts in recent memory’.
But in the rush to condemn, missing from the discussion has been one notable personage: Lou Reed, who in July 2013, mere months before his all-too-early death at the tender age of 71, wrote a staunch defence and one of the liveliest and most perceptive pieces of music criticism in the modern era with regard to West’s then-recently-released sixth studio album Yeezus.
Of course Lou Reed isn’t around to give his point of view on the ‘Famous’ video. But why wasn’t he part of the video, in the thick of the action, whether denuded like all the others from Taylor Swift to Kim Kardashian or attired in his infamous black T-shirt and jeans?
After all, in one of the most memorable pieces of gonzo journalism ever written, all the way back in March 1975 for Creem, Lester Bangs could already call Lou Reed ‘a completely depraved pervert and pathetic death dwarf […] the guy that gave dignity and poetry and rock ‘n’ roll to smack, speed, homosexuality, sadomasochism, murder, misogyny, stumblebum, passivity, and suicide, and then proceeded to belie all his achievements and return to the mire by turning the whole thing into a monumental bad joke’. As Kanye excerpts in the intro to the ‘Famous’ video, ‘Rap is the new rock and roll’.
No – Lou Reed should be there, lying flat on his back between Kim and Kanye, or harnessed from the ceiling like some perverse contraption, fearsome yet human, Catherine the Great’s horse and a god from the machine.
