“What he could do with five words was astonishing to me,” exclaimed Reed. some of it was, musically speaking, a breakthrough.” Cale’s monomaniacal viola on “Black Angel’s Death Song” is one of many minimalist-motivated Velvets moments.Ĭlick to load video Poet and writer Delmore Schwartzīefore Reed emerged from academia to reinvent rock, he was already being schooled in stylish subversiveness by his professor Delmore Schwartz, a New York poet and short story writer who’d begun building his legend in the 1930s with books like In Dreams Begin Responsibilities. “We were digging into all sorts of things,” Cale told Red Bull Music Academy, “intonations, tonality…. He played viola in the Theatre of Eternal Music, led by avant-garde godhead La Monte Young, and the ideas he onboarded from their minimalist drone manifestos helped forge the Velvets’ sound. John Calewas a classically trained musician, but before venturing into rock by forming The Velvet Underground with Lou Reed, he was in an even more uncompromising, iconoclastic ensemble. Pre-order The Velvet Underground: A Documentary Film By Todd Haynes – Music From The Motion Picture Soundtrack. ![]() But what were the inspirations that empowered The Velvet Underground to trash rock’n’roll tropes and replace them with the sound of the future? The result was one of the most influential sounds in rock history, prefiguring punk, alternative, and more. Equally informed by the seamy side of NYC bohemia and the comparatively lofty realms of literature and experimental music, the Velvets built a world where sexual taboos, illicit substances, and street-level decadence intertwined with modernist poetry, deliberate dissonance, and calculated musical minimalism. ![]() ![]() The Velvet Underground spent the second half of the 60s gleefully stomping conventional rock concepts to smithereens and fashioning the shards into something shockingly new.
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