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Monday, October 28, 2013

KEXP Presents: Julia Holter

Somewhere between the experimental nature of Laurie Anderson and the ethereal artiness of Kate Bush lies Los Angeles musician Julia Holter. Her new album Loud City Song was her first to be recorded outside the comfort of home with a group of musicians, and that adventurous spirit shines through in songs that shimmer with jazzy overtones.

Holter recently visited the KEXP studios in advance of her set at the 10th annual Decibel Festival in Seattle. Watch the composer and her band perform "City Appearing" here, then catch the entire performance on KEXP's YouTube channel.

Source: http://www.npr.org/event/music/241370239/kexp-presents-julia-holter?ft=1&f=1039
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Jay-Z defends deal with store accused of profiling

NEW YORK (AP) — Jay-Z — under increasing pressure to back out of a collaboration with the luxury store Barneys New York after it was accused of racially profiling two black customers — said Saturday he's being unfairly "demonized" for just waiting to hear all of the facts.

The rap mogul made his first statement about the controversy in a posting on his website. He has come under fire for remaining silent as news surfaced this week that two young black people said they were profiled by Barneys after they purchased expensive items from their Manhattan store.

An online petition and Twitter messages from fans have been circulating this week, calling on the star to bow out of his upcoming partnership with Barneys for the holiday season, which will have the store selling items by top designers, inspired by Jay-Z, with some of the proceeds going to his charity. He is also working with the store to create its artistic holiday window display.

But Jay-Z — whose real name is Shawn Carter — defended himself, saying that he hasn't spoken about it because he's still trying to figure out exactly what happened.

"I move and speak based on facts and not emotion," the statement said. "I haven't made any comments because I am waiting on facts and the outcome of a meeting between community leaders and Barneys. Why am I being demonized, denounced and thrown on the cover of a newspaper for not speaking immediately?" he said, referring to local newspaper headlines.

The two Barneys customers, Trayon Christian and Kayla Phillips, said this week they were detained by police after making expensive purchases.

Christian sued Barneys, saying he was accused of fraud after using his debit card to buy a $349 Ferragamo belt in April. Philips filed a notice of claim saying she would sue after she was stopped by detectives outside the store when she bought a $2,500 Celine handbag in February.

As the criticism grew, Barneys said Thursday it had retained a civil rights expert to help review its procedures. The CEO of Barneys, Mark Lee, offered his "sincere regret and deepest apologies."

Kirsten John Foy, an official with the Rev. Al Sharpton's National Action Network, said he would meet with Barneys officials on Tuesday to discuss the racial profiling allegations.

Jay-Z — who rose from a life of crime in Brooklyn to become one of the most heralded rappers and one of entertainment's biggest superstars — has in the past called for a boycott of labels perceived to be racist, and has become more political in recent years, from speaking out about the killing of black teenager Trayvon Martin to campaigning for President Barack Obama.

Jay-Z said in this case, he's still trying to find out what happened —which is why he was silent.

"The negligent, erroneous reports and attacks on my character, intentions and the spirit of this collaboration have forced me into a statement I didn't want to make without the full facts," he added.

He also dismissed reports that he would profit from the collaboration. He said he's "not making a dime" from working with Barneys. Instead, his Shawn Carter Foundation, which provides college scholarships to economically challenged students, will get 25 percent of all sales from the collaboration.

"This money is going to help individuals facing socio-economic hardships to help further their education at institutions of higher learning," he said. "My idea was born out of creativity and charity... not profit."

He also said that "making a decision prematurely to pull out of this project wouldn't hurt Barneys or Shawn Carter but all the people that stand a chance at higher education," he said. "I have been working with my team ever since the situation was brought to my attention to get to the bottom of these incidents and at the same time find a solution that doesn't harm all those that stand to benefit from this collaboration."

Jay-Z said he understood what it felt like to be racially profiled — but also didn't want to jump to unfair conclusions.

"I am against discrimination of any kind but if I make snap judgments, no matter who it's towards, aren't I committing the same sin as someone who profiles?" he asked. "I am no stranger to being profiled and I truly empathize with anyone that has been put in that position. Hopefully this brings forth a dialogue to effect real change."

Earlier Saturday, Sharpton held a rally at his National Action Network headquarters in Harlem, saying black New Yorkers should put shopping at Barneys "on hold" if the retailer's response is inadequate.

But it is not the only retailer accused of racially profiling its customers.

Some Sharpton supporters who attended Saturday's rally said they had been profiled in other stores, too. Shane Lee, 51, said he went to the high-end store Bergdorf Goodman to buy shirts last year and the sales staff would not assist him.

"Instead of helping me, they were staring at me," said Lee, who is black. "I felt so uncomfortable that I just left."

A Bergdorf Goodman official did not return a call seeking comment Saturday.

On Friday, Rob Brown, a black actor on the HBO series "Treme" said he was stop because of his race while shopping at Macy's flagship Manhattan store. Brown said in his lawsuit that he was detained nearly an hour by police June 8 after employees contacted authorities about possible credit card fraud.

Macy's didn't comment on the litigation but said in a statement it was investigating.

___

Online:

Jay-Z's website: http://lifeandtimes.com/

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/jay-z-defends-deal-store-accused-profiling-223751712--finance.html
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GOP set to question Sebelius on health law

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius sits on a panel to answer questions about the Affordable Care Act enrollment, Friday, Oct. 25, 2013, in San Antonio. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)

FILE - In this Aug. 1, 2012 file photo, Jeffrey Zients testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington. President Barack Obama is calling Zients to help correct problems with the new federal health care website. The White House says Zients will assist a team that is said to be working around the clock on the site, www.healthcare.gov. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)

WASHINGTON (AP) — Republicans plan to seek answers from Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius on the Obama administration's troubled start for its health care website to buy insurance, and are raising concerns about the privacy of information that applicants submit under the new system.

GOP lawmakers said Sunday that the Obama administration will face intense scrutiny this week to be more forthcoming about how many people have actually succeeded in enrolling for coverage in the new insurance markets.

Medicare chief Marilyn Tavenner is scheduled to appear during a House hearing on Tuesday, followed Wednesday by Sebelius before the House Energy and Commerce Committee. The officials will also be grilled on how such crippling technical problems could have gone undetected prior to the Oct. 1 launch of that website, healthcare.gov.

"The incompetence in building this website is staggering," said Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., second- ranking Republican on the panel and an opponent of the law.

Democrats said the new system needs more time and it can be fixed to provide millions of people with affordable insurance. Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear, a Democrat, said the system was "working in Kentucky."

But the federal online system experienced another problem on Sunday.

A component of that system that has been working relatively well experienced an outage. The federal data services hub, a conduit for verifying the personal information of people applying for benefits under the law, went down in a failure that was blamed on an outside contractor, Terremark.

"Today, Terremark had a network failure that is impacting a number of their clients, including healthcare.gov," HHS spokeswoman Joanne Peters said. "Secretary Sebelius spoke with the CEO of Verizon this afternoon to discuss the situation and they committed to fixing the problem as soon as possible."

Jeffrey Nelson, a spokesman for Verizon Enterprise Solutions, of which Terremark is a part, said: "Our engineers have been working with HHS and other technology companies to identify and address the root cause of the issue. It will fixed as quickly as possible."

Blackburn said she wanted to know much has been spent on the website, how much more it will cost to fix the problems, when everything will be ready and what people should expect to see on the site. Blackburn and Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., raised questions about whether the website could guard the privacy of applicants.

"They do not have an overarching, solid cybersecurity plan to prevent the loss of private information," said Rogers, who is chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.

HHS spokeswoman Joanne Peters said when consumers fill out their applications, "they can trust that the information they're providing is protected by stringent security standards and that the technology underlying the application process has been tested and is secure."

The botched rollout has led to calls on Capitol Hill for a delay of penalties for those remaining uninsured. The Obama administration has said it's willing to extend the grace period until Mar. 31, the end of open enrollment, providing an extra six weeks. The insurance industry says going beyond that risks undermining the new system by giving younger, healthier people a pass.

Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., who has urged the Obama administration to postpone the March 31 deadline, said she is concerned applicants would not have a full six months to enroll. Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., who is seeking a yearlong delay to the penalty for noncompliance, said there is a need for a "transition period to work out the things."

The administration was under no legal requirement to launch the website Oct 1. Sebelius, who designated her department's Medicare agency to implement the health care law, had the discretion to set open enrollment dates. Officials could have postponed open enrollment by a month, or they could have phased in access to the website.

But all through last summer and into early fall, the administration insisted it was ready to go live in all 50 states on Oct. 1.

The online insurance markets are supposed to be the portal to coverage for people who do not have access to a health plan through their jobs. The health care law offers middle-class people a choice of private insurance plans, made more affordable through new tax credits. Low-income people will be steered to Medicaid in states that agree to expand that safety-net program.

An HHS memo prepared for Sebelius in September estimated that nearly 500,000 people would enroll for coverage in the marketplaces during October, their first month of operation. The actual number is likely to be only a fraction of that. The administration has said 700,000 people have completed applications.

Blackburn spoke on "Fox News Sunday," Beshear appeared on NBC's "Meet the Press," Rogers was on CNN's "State of the Union," Manchin was interviewed on ABC's "This Week" and Shaheen made her comments on CBS' "Face the Nation."

___

Follow Ken Thomas on Twitter at http://twitter.com/AP_Ken_Thomas

Associated PressSource: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/89ae8247abe8493fae24405546e9a1aa/Article_2013-10-28-Health%20Overhaul/id-eeb7156116774de7b0f82b6ff92af9cb
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Minneapolis confronts chaotic race for mayor

In this Sept. 18, 2013 photo, Minneapolis mayoral candidate, Captain Jack Sparrow holds up a poster for a proposal he has put forward for community ownership of an NFL football team. Sparrow, who initially showed up at campaign events in full pirate drag, is a self proclaimed "occupirate" who espouses Occupy Wall Street ideology. (AP Photo/Star Tribune,Jeff Wheeler)

In this undated 2013 frame from a campaign ad video that went viral, Minneapolis mayoral candidate Jeff Wagner, an airport baggage handler, emerges from a local lake in a swimsuit. Wagner calls himself a regualr guy who is trying to wake people up. (AP Photo/Wagner Campaign,HO)

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — The next mayor of Minneapolis might be one of two City Council members. It could be one of two former City Council presidents, or a former county commissioner. Or maybe it will be Captain Jack Sparrow. Or the hairy dude who comes striding out of a lake in an online campaign video, points at the camera and promises to stop visiting strip clubs if he's elected.

It's a weird and wide-open race for mayor this year in Minnesota's largest city.

With no incumbent on the ballot, an exceptionally low candidate filing fee of $20, and the city's continuing experiment with a novel voting system, the November general election has a whopping 35 contenders on the ballot.

"It's like mayor soup," said Katherine Milton, a Minneapolis voter and arts consultant who is one of many trying to figure out the city's "ranked choice" voting system. "It's like putting together a 5,000-piece puzzle."

The cluttered contest comes at an important moment for this city of 393,000, as its population has begun to shoot up after decades of decline. Popular outgoing Mayor R.T. Rybak made himself a high-profile booster-in-chief by luring young professionals and empty nesters with the city's dozens of parks and lakes, many miles of bike trails, thriving restaurant and nightlife scene, diverse cultural amenities, pro sports venues and legal gay marriage.

After 12 years, Rybak, 57, is calling it quits. That means the first serious test for ranked choice voting, which asks voters to pick a first, second and third choice for the job. Those selections come into play if no candidate gets more 50 percent of the first-choice votes, triggering a series of automatic runoff counts.

That's put the candidates in an unusual position.

"It's an unnatural act for a politician to ask to be somebody's second choice," said Mark Andrew, a Democratic former county commissioner who's among a handful of front-runners. "But if people tell me they are supporting someone else, then I ask to be their second choice."

That dynamic has even led to political opponents — gasp — saying nice things about each other. Betsy Hodges, a Democratic city councilwoman and another leading candidate, has had kind words for Don Samuels, a fellow councilman, and Cam Winton, a Prius-driving, gay-marriage supporting moderate Republican who hopes that ranked choice is his opening in this heavily Democratic city.

"They have shown integrity in this process, and if you vote for either of them you know you're getting what you voted for," said Hodges, hoping their supporters keep her in mind as a fallback choice.

Hodges and Andrew both said they frequently encounter voters who complain of not understanding the system, which was instituted in 2006 as a progressive reform that eliminates costly, low-turnout primaries and gives voters a wider selection of candidates.

The race features eight relatively conventional contenders who boast a wide range of experience in local politics. After that, things get freewheeling.

"I'm just a regular guy who is trying to wake people up," said Jeff Wagner, an airport baggage handler whose offbeat swimsuit video went viral.

Then there's the frequent but always unsuccessful candidate who will appear on the ballot as Bob "Again" Carney. And the aforementioned Captain Jack Sparrow, a self-proclaimed "occupirate" who espouses Occupy Wall Street ideology. Sparrow — it's his legal name — initially showed up at campaign events in full pirate drag, but he's lately taken to wearing business suits to be taken more seriously.

"Twenty bucks down and you too could be the mayor," said Casey Carl, the Minneapolis city clerk, who's proposing an increase to the lowball fee. Neighboring St. Paul, which also has ranked choice voting, has a $500 fee, and just four candidates for mayor this year.

A handful of other U.S. cities including San Francisco and Oakland, Calif., also employ ranked choice voting. It has had little impact in Minneapolis elections before this year, with Rybak's popularity making the also-rans moot.

Whoever comes out on top Nov. 5 will be faced with keeping up economic growth and managing property tax rates while addressing the problems of the public school system and the struggling north side, where the heaviest concentration of non-white residents live.

"I'm a little confused by it," said voter Carl Goldstein, a nonprofit executive who says he's trying to sort out the names and choices. "I think in theory it's a good method, but I don't know. I think we have to try it a few times and see if we like the results."

Associated PressSource: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/386c25518f464186bf7a2ac026580ce7/Article_2013-10-28-US-Minneapolis-Mayor/id-1441cfc681b94ca7b1a75c5156698352
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JPMorgan Chase Agrees To Pay $5.1 Billion To Feds

[unable to retrieve full-text content]JPMorgan Chase agreed pay $5.1 billion to settle litigation over mortgage assets sold during the housing bubble. The deal, announced late Friday afternoon, is to resolve claims the company misled Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac before the housing market crashed. It is part of a tentative $13 billion deal the company is trying to reach with federal and state agencies over its mortgage liabilities.Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/NprProgramsATC/~3/sAzNIK60HQ4/jp-morgan-chase-agrees-to-pay-5-1-billion-to-feds
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Here Are The Top 5 ‘YesPlease, MoreThankYou’ Moments From ‘Say Hello…’ Last Night’s Episode Of ‘Scandal’

Gladiators, the postpartum Scandal recaps are officially underway! I type this with the most attractive human being in the universe strapped in my Boba Wrap (shouts out to PITNBr Pamela), and it’s all very surreal. Speaking of surreal… last night’s episode though? So much weirdness popping off, right? Lisa Kudrow showed up out of nowhere (we knew she was coming, but still– I was totally surprised), Olivia showed her softer side (AKA the side of her that is scurred shizz-less of her Dad), and Jake is seriously, for real back in the building?! What’s really good with this season right now? Click inside for more!

On the one hand, this episode was kind of hilarious, right? First, the Gladiators had a new client in the sexting Senator who we all know was a shouts-out to the one and only Anthony Weiner. This guy was soooo the worst with all his sext buddies reading all his ridiculous sexts aloud in a court of law. Madness.

Then we had this really interesting storyline that involves Huck, Jake, Papa COMMAND, and that dude Huck totally killed last week. We still don’t know all of the details, but that Operation Remington stuff is at the center and I’m very curious to find out what exactly went down, why that dude had to die, and what the President has to do with all of it. In the meantime, let’s get to drama from last night!

The Top 5 YesPlease, MoreThankYou Moments From ABC’s Scandal
Season 3, Episode 4: Say Hello To My Little Friend

1. Okay, Olivia’s Daddy Issues Are Getting Scary Now

Olivia was SO weird in this episode! I never in a million years thought I’d hear her say that she needed to look the other way, or walk away from a situation. Literally, the definition of Olivia Pope is never looking the other way or walking away from a situation that needs… situating, LOL. So when Jake came at her about her father and his involvement in pretty much everything awful, I was shocked to hear her say she wanted nothing to do with it. This is a def a side of Liv that we’ve never seen; it’s really sad and kinda scary, but something tells me she’s not gonna be able to turn a blind eye for long.

Quote It:

I need to be a good girl and go back to sunday dinners.

(Olivia)

2. Quinn. Is. INTERESTED!!!

So Quinn‘s crazy ass follows Huck to his AA meeting, where he confesses to falling off the bandwagon and having some ‘whiskey’ AKA killing the shizz out of someone. But here’s the creepy part– Quinn was, like, DYING to know what went down, in a really messed up way! She kept pressing Huck to find out who he killed, but she tried to play it off like she was worried about him. Finally Huck flipped out on her (he gets really scary when he’s mad… right?) and was all, Bish please. YOU ARE INTERESTED! As in, don’t act like you want me to get this off my chest for me, when you’re a creepy little Baby Huck and you want to hear all the details because you get off on this shizz too. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again– I’m really scared to see how Quinn might turn out by the end of this season. Like. Really scared.

3. Oh, Hai Lisa Kudrow

Okay, I like where this storyline is going! Lisa Kudrow popped up in this episode as the disapproving Congresswoman Josephine Marcus, and it looks like she’s going to function as some political competition for Fitz. Cyrus had to get some dirt on her (after Mellie‘s big blunder), and it turns out that she was a teen mother who gave her baby up– of course this should make for some pretty juicy stuff next week.

4. Mellie & Fitz Have A Moment

Okay, this was a small moment, but I thought it was really interesting. So, Mellie made these really nasty comments about Congresswoman Marcus, and when they went public, Mellie had some ‘splaining to do. She made a public apology, but nothing could save her from the wrath of Cyrus (who’s steadily workin’ on his next heart attack– am I right?). But I loved, loved, loved this moment when Fitz defended her and told Cy to back the eff off. Did y’all see Mellie‘s face? She got all gooey-eyed for Fitz for, like, two whole seconds! And then she pulled away looking pissed. I think in that moment she realized that Fitz has this way of being there for her sometimes, but without being in love with her. Mellie is so damn tough! And I think it’s easy to forget that deep down, she probably really loves Fitz, and is much more torn up over his relationship with Liv than she lets on.

5. The Return Of Jolivia???

Awwwww shizz! It’s going down! Jake and Olivia cuddled up at the end of the episode and when they started making out I was all like Ummmmm why am I into this? LMAO! I love Olitz and I loved that moment when Fitz called her, but Liv kinda had a bad day and she deserved a make out session with a hot guy. Period. I mean, we all deserve that when we get bad news (i.e. our sexting client is innocent, but his wife is a damn killer).

Coupla questions: So, did the Senator’s wife lit’rally get away with murder? Is anyone else totally okay with Olivia making out with Jake? Can Abby & David make this happen or what? And finally, how hilarious was that scene between Cyrus and James?! Y’all know which one– James was straddling Cy in the bed, trying to get a quote, but it totally came off like he was tryna get something else… LMAO! Shonda, you slay me gurl.

Quote It:

Don’t knock a fried twinkie ’til you’ve tried one.

(Congresswoman Marcus)

Your father– he would slit your throat and drink your blood if he thought it would serve the Republic.

(Jake)

Are you wearing cowboy boots? This isn’t the Bush White House. We wear shoes.

(Cyrus)

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/pinkisthenewblog/~3/lJohnk4JUiQ/here-are-the-top-5-yesplease-morethankyou-moments-from-say-hello-last-nights-episode-of-scandal
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What Lou Reed Taught Me

Lou Reed onstage in Amsterdam in 1975.

Gijsbert Hanekroot/Redferns

Lou Reed onstage in Amsterdam in 1975.

Gijsbert Hanekroot/Redferns

Lou Reed was the first rock star to truly mess up my mind. It was the end of the '70s; I was in high school. With no older siblings and few friends to guide me — my sweet boyfriend was a classical cellist — I was stumbling around trying to educate myself about the foundations of the punk scene I desperately wanted to make my home. I haunted record-store cutout bins because the remaindered albums there, commercial failures, were cheap. I'd buy whatever looked vaguely roughneck (The Clash and the scruffy early Springsteen had revolutionized my life) or theatrical (after Bowie and Kate Bush started the wheels turning). One day, I saw a cover shot of Reed, whom I recognized because I had that Velvet Underground banana album, wearing aviator shades and looking both Hollywood-glamorous and oily. A car's headlight made a starburst in the plastic that hid his eyes.

The album was Street Hassle, the first solo album that Reed, an acknowledged godfather of punk, made with that movement's snotty children spitting back at him. Released in 1978, Street Hassle was a self-corrective — Tom Carson, in his Rolling Stone review, called it "an admission of failure that becomes a stunning, incandescent triumph," an antidote to Reed's post Velvets plunge into all kinds of excess. But the way I heard it, having not yet discovered the melodrama of Berlin or the glam glory of Transformer or the mean noise of Metal Machine Music, was as a corrective to me, the listener. Reed made me realize that, for all of my self-stylings as a rebel in love with noise that stripped away bulls—-, I didn't know the first thing about how rock music could provide a certain kind of unsought enlightenment.

You might call it moral clarity. Ellen Willis did, writing about the Velvet Underground in her landmark essay on the Velvets, first published the same year Street Hassle came out. Identifying Reed as an "aesthete punk" whose relationship to the urban demimonde he always wrote about was intellectual, stylized and distanced, Willis noticed that because he also really grasped the pain of those shadowed characters he wrote about, he ended up a moralist: a writer primarily concerned with the choices that make up people's lives, choices to hurt or help others, to be safe or potentially self-destructive, to love or to harden the heart. "The point was not to glorify the punk, or even to say f—- you to the world, but to be honest about the strategies people adopt in a desperate situation."

Listening to Street Hassle, with its songs about feelings no one would ever want to admit, with titles like "Dirt" and "Leave Me Alone," I slowly realized what most of the punk or New Wave rock I loved so much rarely gave me. Clarity! Most music was too earnest, too clever, too deliberately gorgeous or bloody exciting to require what Reed's demanded, which was that a listener sit with the ugliness of a moment and really grasp the fatal mistakes and collapses that go hand-in-hand with the risks that bring humans to life.

Reed's songs are actually often quite pretty, his pop ear well-tuned by the '50s rockabilly and doo-wop he loved as Long Island teenybopper kid. But he would always show the sweat on the lips of the beauty queens and muscle boys he sang about. The fact that those queens were often in drag, and the boys were paying the rent with their erotic encounters, is in some ways secondary. (In another way it's central, since few other rockers fleshed out those characters, especially the queer ones, the way Reed did.) Reed was just as willing to explore conventional married life unsparingly, as he did on his turning-forty album The Blue Mask, the New Wave crossover hit New Sensations or his late-in-life albums about partnered bliss with his artistic soulmate Laurie Anderson. What matters most in Reed's music is the commitment to what's difficult, whether it's expressed through distorted guitar, lyrics whose exposure of a self or a situation peels deeper with each verse, or the kind of melodic richness that doesn't comfort but instead renders a song's singer vividly vulnerable.

Street Hassle's centerpiece, now considered one of Reed's greatest accomplishments, taught me that getting just what I wanted from a song (uplift, for example, or sloppy catharsis) wasn't always the best thing. "Street Hassle" includes bluntly sexual lines that turned me on, but also made me feel the edge of my own prudery. It explores how one person dehumanizes another and, just a few minutes later, how losing one person can make a person feel real and whole for the first time. It's a song suite that doesn't sound at all like punk; it features strings, female back-up singers and Reed definitely crooning. There's also an uncredited spoken-word passage by the then-rising Springsteen that adds in some of that future superstar's trademark grandiosity, serving as a telling contrast to Reed's own cooler storytelling. The song's triptych of scenarios is very Velvets: A probable transvestite picks up a male hooker at a bar; a drug dealer worries about how to get rid of an overdose victim's body; and, in the last verse, a more anonymous lover laments his man's departure in naked, needful agony. A lot happens musically around these stories, but every violin stroke, guitar bend and percussive push intensifies the focus on Reed's core message: that opening up your being — to sex or drugs or just to feeling — is inevitable, dangerous and the main purpose of life.

Lou Reed's music takes in and gives us back the whole picture. Describing another one of Reed's signature works, the Velvet Undergound opus "Heroin," Patti Smith once fittingly assessed Reed's breadth of vision. "'Heroin,' to me, is one of our more perfect American songs," she said, "because it addresses a very conflicting subject that has so many stigmas attached to it. It addresses the deeply painful and destructive elements of it, and also whatever is precious about it, just with Lou's beautiful, simple, direct language." Reed himself often explained that he was simply doing what artists in other media do; novelists or filmmakers don't limit their subject matter. Dedicating himself to rock and roll, though, kept Reed committedly exploring the visceral in ways other artists could avoid. In the funky rhythms he borrowed from early rock 'n' roll and especially in the drone and noise that connected him over the years to both minimalist composers like La Monte Young and hard rockers like Metallica, Reed moved through what felt like confusion toward a sense of grace.

Sometimes what Reed moved through was a minefield. He didn't worry about offending anyone or, preferably sometimes, everyone. Street Hassle, for example, also contains "I Wanna Be Black," a proto-rap unspooling of racist stereotypes that makes fun of white hipsters by forcing a deep wallow in ignorance. Plenty of Reed fans find Metal Machine Music, his 1976 excursion into nothing but guitar feedback, unlistenable. Others feel that way about his theatrical collaborations with Robert Wilson; I myself sat through the time-stopping Timerocker at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1997 and felt every spring in my seat. Even Reed's most accessible efforts proudly bear painful twists: The gorgeous ballad "Pale Blue Eyes" turns on a blunt justification of adultery; my favorite of his almost-pop dance numbers, "Vicious," is a lighthearted account of personal repulsion.

And then there's "Perfect Day," Lou Reed's "Hallelujah." Like Leonard Cohen's irreverent secular hymn, this one has been milked for exultation by many interpreters. Duran Duran covered it; so did the talent show diva Susan Boyle. It was featured in Trainspotting (in a scene that played upon the theory that Reed's perfect imagined lover is heroin, not a person), got an all-star charity remake in the late '90s and most recently, formed the basis for a Sony Playstation ad. It's a song that will live on, both enhancing and apart from Reed's expansive legacy.

But, like the essence of Lou Reed, "Perfect Day" is tricky. In the original recording, Mick Ronson's piano gives Reed's stately melody a French feel, something like an Edith Piaf song. David Bowie's production adds heft: the thing swells. Reed goes along for the ride. The choruses ring, anthemic, but why is Reed singing about how his ideal lover just keeps him hanging on? At the end of the second verse, Reed's voice dips and his diction clips. "You made me forget myself," he nearly whispers. "I thought I was someone else. Someone good." And the song ends in anger, with Reed muttering, over and over again, "You're going to reap what you sow." The soft focus that seemed to dominate the song in its beginning has sharpened. As Lester Bangs, the writer most passionately dedicated to understanding Reed, once wrote, "If 'Perfect Day' is autobiographical, he must be the most guilt-ridden person on the face of the earth."

See, there's the whole picture. Happiness intermingled with self-loathing. Freedom all tied up in dependency. Rage bubbling through tenderness. It took discipline to put all of this into a song, a determination to not soften into earnestness or excuse the hard stuff in the name of romance. "The core of Reed's sensibility is his visceral aversion to corn," the critic Robert Christgau once put it, succinctly. For the last three decades of his life, Lou Reed was a tai chi practitioner; he learned how to move slowly through uncomfortable positions. All the art he's left us will continue to help us learn to do that, too.

Source: http://www.npr.org/blogs/therecord/2013/10/27/240841092/what-lou-reed-taught-me?ft=1&f=10001
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