Lou Reed’s Incorrigible Genius

After Bob Dylan, and notwithstanding Brian Wilson and the Motown team of Holland-Dozier-Holland, Lou Reed was arguably the greatest and most influential American songwriter of the 1960s. Though his growing cult would attain mainstream recognition in the early ’70s, and though in the 1980s he would eventually become a household name-in some stranger households, anyway-the foundation of his work was laid early, on which was built not only everything he did later but the sensibility of first glam, then punk, then the “alternative” ethos that dominates rock and roll to this day… read more >