Songs of mystery and imagination ... Lou Reed.
Photograph: Vanina Lucchesi/AFP
Lou Reed is a better poet that Bob Dylan. I realised this when I listened to him to understand Poe and Baudelaire, to get in the poète maudit mood of the National Gallery's exhibition Rebels and Martyrs. I played Reed's The Raven - his homage to Poe - and that sent me back to the Velvet Underground, and an encounter with a great American poet.
In the romantic age, poets drew on the ballad form. But in the era of recording, the magic we hear in a song is so much about a specific sound texture that it is hard to set the words on a page and see what is so special about them. The beauty I hear in Lou Reed's recordings is inseparable from a particular dry beat in which I can see the heat haze on a New York summer day. The music reeks of melting tar, as Reed - or rather the character whose voice he imagines - trudges uptown to meet his Man -
"He's never early / He's always late / First thing you learn is that you've always got to wait"
As I say, it's risky to separate these words from the desolate beauty of the music, and yet - you can! Read their simplicity, accuracy, purity. This is a poem, with the verity of some ancient ballad about death in the forest, except here the forest is Lexington Avenue in Manhattan. Reed's acute sense of place is one of the things that make him a true poet, a Coney Island Wordsworth.
What a contrast with Dylan, to whom we award the title of poet simply because he tells us he is one. Dylan's language is the verbal equivalent of flouncing around in a frilly shirt - he announces his artfulness with florid but often meaningless verbiage. Reed is a far better writer, creating coherent mythic voices, like the disillusioned death-seeker's in Heroin whose terrible situation he makes poignant by sheer clarity of expression:
"I have made a big decision"
Heroin is Reed's best song, but few of us can follow his anti-hero into hell, and it's understandable that Perfect Day is more famous. Has Dylan written anything as enduring? Reed will survive as a poet because as Perfect Day tells us in its sinister undertow,
"You're going to reap just what you sow"
and he has sowed beautiful words in the city's grey ground.
* Lou Reed's Coney Island Baby is re-released in August.
