Barry Shank on the Drone of the Velvet Underground

In light of the death of Lou Reed, we offer an excerpt from Barry Shank's forthcoming book The Political Force of Musical Beauty (out in April 2014). This is from Chapter 4, which considers The Velvet Underground.

 

A restricted field of cultural production is Bourdieu’s term for artists who produce for other artists and the prestige they can convey, not directly for a market of consumers and the cash they provide. Unlike the typical restricted field, the restricted field that the Velvets created was not the mere reproduction of an avant-garde within the popular, mimicking the efforts of so-called downtown composers to transform the means of production of music. This restricted field was instead a specific intervention into the field of popular music. John Cale’s viola would have meant little without Lou Reed’s deep investment in the precise craftwork of the popular song. Sterling Morrison’s commitment to the capital R of “rhythm guitar” and Moe Tucker’s reversion of the bass drum back to its primary function as the keeper of all beats, not simply the downbeat, produced a rhythmic reinforcement of the drone that characterized the sound of the Velvets even after Cale was forced out of the band. The drone of the Velvet Underground reopened the question of the popular by alienating it from its dominant concretization—the market.

The Velvets’ drone-infused restricted field enabled popular-music artists to claim the authority of the popular while they articulated values that ran directly counter to mainstream beliefs. I am not referring here to the simple and obvious point that the Velvets wrote and performed “pop songs” about heroin and sadomasochism. Instead I argue that the drone that is foregrounded in the band’s signature sound was the central sonic technique used to establish a restricted field of popular-music production. By establishing this possibility, the music of the Velvets made audible the popular critique of the dominance of market evaluation—as a mainstream popular standpoint. This critique worked at the level of music before it was a conscious thought or desire held by the musicians. That is, their music was heard and felt as a meaningful sound before the musicians conceptualized its function. The drone was central to their music not because it was believed by the musicians or their fans to be a critique the market definition of the popular, but because the drone was beautiful. Indeed, the power of Velvets’ drone-based critique was rooted in its beauty.

The story of the Velvets’ intervention into the popular begins before the individuals in the band met each other. When Terry Phillips met Cale and Tony Conrad at a party in the summer of 1965 and invited them to join Reed in the Primitives, a diverse set of influences flowed together. Most accounts of the band acknowledge the significance of Reed’s study of narrative and character with the writer Delmore Schwartz at Syracuse University. These accounts typically highlight Cale’s work with La Monte Young’s Theatre of Eternal Music. Perhaps they mention the specific contributions of the rest of the band: Morrison, Tucker, and, for one album, Nico. The accounts all speculate on the impact of Andy Warhol. I will cover those events and influences. But most previous accounts ascribe the impact of the Velvets to a merger of pop and art without clearly articulating what art and pop meant and, most important, what it meant to truly combine art and pop in 1965–67. As Bernie Gendron, Simon Frith and Howard Horne have shown, it was during this period that popular music underwent a significant change, which was stimulated by the infusion of high-art values. But neither of these classic studies takes into account the continuing power of the marketplace to define value, even once high-art values began to influence popular-music production. When the Beatles and the Who combined art and pop, their success was measured by their record sales. When Bob Dylan went electric, he was both championed and castigated for merging the artistic and political conventions of what was then called “folk music” and pop. But “Like a Rolling Stone” went to number 2 on the pop charts. The Beatles reached the top 10 with almost every release. Before the Velvets, chart success was the measure that mattered for popular music. Only after the Velvets was it possible for new articulations of art and pop in music to be judged by their sound and the impact that their sound had on those who made music after them. That is, after the Velvets’ experiments with pop and art, it became possible to hear popular music in terms that were familiar from art, terms of influence and impact, rather than accountings of sales figures.

With the reevaluation of musical meaning that was enabled by the beauty of the drone, every other aspect of the Velvets’ sonic signals took on heightened significance. Tucker’s version of “African” beats was not heard as white misappropriation. Reed’s lyrical precision was not judged according to the conventions of folk-descendant singer-songwriters. Morrison’s mastery of rhythm guitar, where it was commented on at all, was not compared to the classic models of John Lennon, Keith Richards, and Robbie Robertson. Beneath the drone, outside of the sphere of market calculation, the Velvet Underground’s sound created its own terms for critical evaluation and, in so doing, carved a new political aesthetic from the driftwood of the popular.