Anyone who’s ever had a heart
Wouldn’t turn around and break it
And anyone who’s ever played a part
Wouldn’t turn around and hate it
???Up on YouTube the other day, I accidentally discovered a bookish woman of a certain age singing Lou Reed’s “Turn To Me.” What was fascinating was the profound way she connected with the heart of song–something I found, well, moving. And so I started to wonder how many other raw-but-connected Lou Reed covers were floating around in YouTube’s digital aether.
As it turns out, there are many.
It occurred to me that it might be interesting to compile some of those singers in an emotional map of Reed’s work. My criteria wasn’t vocal chops or musicianship or presentation or any glimmer that they might professionally move beyond their video postings. Rather, I chose the singers who fully occupied Reed’s songs, whether humorous, warm, lonely or harrowing. The short-listed videos were those where the singers were in the emotional moment with Lou.
And taken as a group, something further is suggested–that these performers didn’t so much choose their Reed songs as the songs chose them. And in this, the project becomes the precise philosophic opposite of, say, American Idol: there’s no sense of watching careerist strategies here–instead, there’s a kind of benign, heartfelt compulsion at work.
Early on, Lou Reed was an obscure artist, then a dangerous one and then mistakenly seen as a sensationalist. These performers, most of them everyday sort of people, aren’t having any of that lazy-pundit rock criticism. They’ve all looked beyond his transgressive themes, beautiful losers and hard drugs. They’ve instinctively reached inside Reed’s dark hipsters and tragic demimondes and with touching humanity have teased-out surprisingly universal truths . . .
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