For an entire year, I slept beneath a picture of Lou Reed kissing David Bowie, because who better to watch over me in my sleep than the image of these two beautiful artists engaged in an intimate moment.
I begin my Sunday mornings with a cup of green tea and Velvet Underground’s “Sunday Morning.” I’ve always amused myself with this choice of song as I begin the day that concludes each weekend, basking in the simple chords and melodic nature of Lou Reed’s voice.
This past Sunday had already evolved to afternoon when I noticed what may very well have been one of the most jarring tweets of my life. The internet informed me that Lou Reed was dead at 71 years old. How much less personal can you get than declaring in less than 140 characters that someone is dead? Especially when that man is the one who wrote “Sweet Jane,” the track that marked my first attempt at learning what I believed to be a 'sexy' song on guitar.
His death felt early by our generation’s standards for life expectancy. Lou Reed, who means more to the vein of music that I follow than does Paul McCartney, is gone.
My initial reaction was a strange inability to get “Walk on the Wild Side” out of my head. Yes, I tell myself, I know it was Lou Reed’s most mainstream hit. Maybe I should be focusing more on his earlier, lesser known work. But if we’re excluding “Jack in his corset and Jane in her vest,” Reed’s invitation to “walk on the wild side” invited me out of my teenage comfort zone and into an alternate world presented by the soul and depth of non-Top 40 music.
Now a greater sinking feeling has set in. The man who influenced so many of the artists I adore and who generated my intense love affair with music, from Talking Heads to Patti Smith, is gone. And it’s not just the loss of Reed himself that is rocking me to the core.
Above all, I am acutely aware that a major part of a musical generation is gone. Reed’s death serves as a reminder that we’ll lose others sooner than we think. What does it mean when we lose a cornerstone of an entire generation, and what do we do when the greatest influences of today’s artists are gone from this Earth?
This all leads me to an even stranger place of trying to determine what will comprise the final legacy of contemporary artists. I question what it will be like when the rest of the artists so important to our generation start to go. Who will these people even be? We all know that Justin Bieber won’t exactly be the millienials' musical legacy, but I’m hard-pressed to figure out who will be as monumental as Bowie or Reed in years to come. Sitting in my musical ivory tower, I’m compelled for one reason or another to point a finger at a smattering of artists. Lady Gaga, HAIM, Beyoncé, Radiohead and Bono come to mind. But I know that I cannot see into the future, no matter how hard I try or into which Pitchfork-shaped crystal ball I try to peer. The loss of Lou Reed has left me with one feeling above all: the hope that my children can find their own off-the-beaten-path artists to guide their way through adolescence and young adulthood.
"Then one fine mornin' she turns on a New York station/She doesn't believe what she hears at all/Ooh, She started dancin' to that fine fine music/You know her life is saved by rock 'n' roll."
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