Twenty Nine Ways of Looking at Lou Reed

Four covers by women reveal the complex art of one of music’s great geniuses.

Musicians playing someone else’s song have to strike a balance between respecting the original and providing their own unique perspective. Truly great artists make interesting covers possible because their work is is so rich and complex that it encourages a rainbow of alternative views.

Four covers of Lou Reed classics by women from around the world (the U.S., Taiwan, Spain, Sweden) explore paths that Reed’s compositions allowed for but didn’t follow. Rather than subverting the originals, these artists reveal the counterstatement that Reed embedded into his original statement.

The song

The closing song on the third Velvet Underground album is among Reed’s darkest explorations. If the opener, “Candy Says,” explores the wish of transsexual Candy Darling to leave the physical world of her body and its limitations, “After Hours” depicts someone considering leaving the world altogether. It’s not so much a suicide poem as a just-say-no ode to abnegation, an acceptance (and even cherishing) of the notion that we can forfeit all the things we yearn for simply by acquiescing to eternal nothingness.

But the tune itself, and the phrasing of the vocal by VU drummer Maureen Tucker, avoid any note of apocalyptic drama (like the gothic closing tracks of Nico’s four solo albums). Tucker teeters between the hopes for a future of wine, shiny cars, someone who “will look into my eyes and say ‘Hello, you’re my very special one’ ”, and the elegant alternative of closing the door forever.

What makes “After Hours” so dark is that it doesn’t provide us with the comfort of a simple response (neither shiny pop nor gothic gloom). Two roads diverge, and Reed takes neither. If “Murder Mystery,” the maddeningly cryptic penultimate track (a rapid-fire collage of William S. Burroughs-inspired phrases and off-kilter melodies) posed a question about the indecipherability of existence, “After Hours” coyly flaunts its refusal to provide an answer to that riddle.

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