Lou Reed and Metallica Lose Even Me

Up until this point I was one of the few people who liked the Lou Reed and Metallica collaboration, an album almost universally panned as a bomb of a project. Lou and the boys finally lost even me. It was the video that did it. Daren Aronofsky, who directed the unbearably bad film Pi was called in to handle the video. And here it is- Notice how it is a boring black and white video of Lou and the boys doing the song without anything else going on. You call in a big shoot Hollywood director and all he comes up with is this? That's extremely stupid. There's some double exposure effect, and beyond that, it's Lou and the boys playing in Metallica's studio. That's a choice I don't really get, especially with Lou Reed going on and on about hanging out with Warhol and Warhol's experimental cinema, etc. I really don't get how this was going to turn around the public perception of the album as a catastrophic artistic failure. It won't. The pubic perception is that the album is really just Lou Reed doing a bunch of spoken word over repetitive metal riffs from Metallica. That's sort of what it is. I actually hear a lot more then that going on in the music. From footage of live performances a lot of the guitar parts you might think are Metallica are actually Lou Reed. As for the video I don't see anything of interest going on. So they lost even me eventually. It's unfortunate. For a while, I believed that this particular album would lead rock out of the kind of dark ages that it's been in for about ten years where The Strokes and The Killers started getting a lot of press. The Strokes were somehow safe and acceptable to sell vodka and American Apparel clothing, and so they won the lottery and became the new face not only of rock but of the arts in a more general sense. If that's a world dying, it is dying because rent is now in New York three times what it is in Las Vegas. You could take current metal bands or goth bands over The Strokes. I certainly would. I can go on and on about the Primitive North America compilation and the Metalhit Free Download Series, the Gothic Daydreams compilation, but none of those bands are doing anything that truly radical that I've heard. Akitsa is probably the closest. It was not the disappointment of the season. Large chunks of Philip K. Dick's notebook were just released that consist of schizophrenic religious rantings for hundreds of pages. That thing is an abortion. If anybody really came off well on the Lou Reed and Metallica project, it was me. I was able to expand my readership substantially by writing about the project. However, that was more true of other topics this summer and fall- Human Centipede 2, for example. Perhaps, when IFC releases Human Centipede 2 I will probably hide in my room and watch it over and over again and listen to a whole lot of Michael Savage.