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I think Lou Reed is a "true artist" outside of the commercial realm, which is a quality to his credit but also to his detriment. Sometimes these artists also fo

I think Lou Reed is a "true artist" outside of the commercial realm, which is a quality to his credit but also to his detriment. Sometimes these artists also forget they are entertainers. I saw him 15 years ago in Leuven, Belgium and he played a great concert with all his new songs, ofc at the end of the night the crowd was crying out for more, especially "perfect day" and "walk on the wild side". He conceded and did play them but with great disdain, and it was obvious that he loathed playing them. 15 years later that is really all I remember from the concert. As a comparison, I also saw the rolling stones (7 years ago in edinburgh), who in contrast were more than happy to play their classic hits, with the original vigour and energy. And it is one of my best memories. I understand both, but it seems the line between artist and entertainer is a fine one and I can't help but think that the artists who share in the joy of entertaining are probably happier in the process. I guess what I'm trying to say is that Lou Reed is a bit of a tortured soul who probably makes his own path harder than it needs to be - and this article confirms that.

eweise 3y ago
I guess I got lucky. I saw him on on his New York album tour. Great songs on that album so no need to hear prior hits although I think he did play walk on the wild side.
pixl97 3y ago
Being a victim of one's own success is a common fate for artists. We see this in edgy animated shows all the time where something shocking eventually turns into fan service.
- disqard 3y ago
  I learned the phrase "audience capture" recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31938353 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31938353
kjkjadksj 3y ago
What a poor attitude honestly. He’s lucky enough to come up with hit songs that have been known for decades, he should be smiling anytime someone asks him to play one because that means he made it in a way the vast majority of musicians never do.
- popularrecluse 3y ago
  Not everyone makes music for the consumption and enjoyment of other people. Sometimes it's just a side-effect.
  - mannykannot 3y ago
    Fair enough, but here, we are considering the situation where Lou Reed chose to perform before a paying audience. Dave Brubeck, who performed almost to the end of his life, never seemed tired of playing 'Take Five' as the finale to his set, and it was not even his composition.
    - maleldil 3y ago
      And the audience should be aware that he didn't like playing those songs. There are many artists that are like this, and it's fine. You're not entitled to the artists playing your favourite songs.
    - jjulius 3y ago
      The difference is that Brubeck and Reed each have different approaches to music. That's great that Dave loved playing 'Take Five' for the entire span of his career, but there's nothing wrong with other artists wanting to move on from something they've done in the past. The idea that artists owe us something or should play whatever the crowd wants with aplomb is misplaced, in my opinion.
      - mannykannot 3y ago
        The point here is that it is implausible that Lou Reed was, in fact, uninterested in "[making] music for the consumption and enjoyment of other people" when he was performing for a paying audience (well, I'll grant that he might have been uninterested in whether they enjoyed the performance.)
motohagiography 3y ago
If you do something impossibly difficult that you are the only person in the world who can do it (being Lou Reed), and if you grow or change or don't do it the way other people who can't do it expect, the whole world turns on you and hates you for failing to maintain their illusions and their belief that their memories have meaning in the present. I sympathize w/ not wanting to play those songs. Imagine you had this huge multi-decade personal journey, and no matter what you build or become, nobody will let you be anything other than the guy you were for a few weeks as a kid when you first wrote that song long before most of them were even born.
- JKCalhoun 3y ago
  It seems that so many people my age mustered out of finding new music sometime in their college years. As they age they return to that music to, I imagine, remember that time in their life. I asked a co-worker what he would listen to to remember this time of their life? Maybe I'm an idiot. Maybe no one wants to remember their 30's, their 40's, their 50's.... Anyway (off on a tangent) the point is that people go to Lou Reed concerts to remember when they were in college making a mix-tape including "A Perfect Day" for their boyfriend. While I feel bad for the artist "artistically", plenty of artist are of course making bank by playing wineries to 50-somethings that now have deeper pockets and want their love shack, baby.
  - coldtea 3y ago
    >Anyway (off on a tangent) the point is that people go to Lou Reed concerts to remember when they were in college making a mix-tape including "A Perfect Day" for their boyfriend. I think those are precisely the type of audiences someone like Lou Reed would hate to have.
  - reducesuffering 3y ago
    > so many people my age mustered out of finding new music sometime in their college years. There’s a collective pull too. If you’re open minded enough to appreciate new music, but your peers usually don’t, you end up enjoying things alone or only able to musically connect with college age people. The ability to enjoy music with the other similar age peers around you will generally pull you to the older stuff they enjoy too. (Unfortunately hasn’t worked for me)
jncfhnb 3y ago
The correct answer here is that the business layer in between Lou and his fans should be honest in what Lou intends to play.
- jonstewart 3y ago
  Lou Reed died ten years ago.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - musicale 3y ago
    Didn't stop 2Pac.
  - flir 3y ago
    The whole damn thread is in the present tense. I was starting to think I'd missed a resurrection or something.
    - saberience 3y ago
      Ditto it’s been driving me crazy. Why is everyone talking about Lou as though he’s still alive???
  - jncfhnb 3y ago
    Whatever. Nothing unique about Lou in this regard.
coldtea 3y ago
>Sometimes these artists also forget they are entertainers. That's exactly what I (and many others) expect from artists. We don't want sing-and-dance men and women to amuse us.
- musicale 3y ago
  Without the performing part you're not really a performing artist anymore. Performing artists are free to alienate their audiences if they wish, but the consequences aren't necessarily positive for anyone.
  - coldtea 3y ago
    >Without the performing part you're not really a performing artist anymore. Performing is not the same as entertaining. Performing just means putting up a performance, that is playing in front of an audience. It could be a "top hits meddley crowd pleaser"or it could be an expression of things you want to explore as an artist, or anything in between. >Performing artists are free to alienate their audiences if they wish, but the consequences aren't necessarily positive for anyone. That's for the artist to decide. Some artists could not give less fucks about the consequences, and if they did they'd be in boy bands.
    - rainonmoon 3y ago
      Absolutely. And I dare say the consequences for Lou were plenty positive. He was a rare example of an artist who did exactly what he wanted and had the fortune to make a lasting career out of it. You can look at his collaborator-slash-foil Iggy Pop for another example, albeit sort of on the other end of the spectrum. Dude shows up on all kinds of stuff that probably does nothing for old purists but piss them off, but he's got nothing left to prove and he's having fun doing it. If people want their artists to be jukeboxes, they're gonna love it when they catch up to the invention of the iPod in 2001.
  - squeaky-clean 3y ago
    > but the consequences aren't necessarily positive for anyone Only if your only idea of a positive consequence is money.
alpineidyll3 3y ago
People who create new things with real impact always end up paying a price. Directly or indirectly there is a thermodynamic necessity that work will emit heat. Some people prefer to live reversible lives and that's fine, but to irreversibly change the world you're going to pay.
Angostura 3y ago
That rather reminds me of this sketch from the old BBC comedy show Big Train https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1YNEtaHbzA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1YNEtaHbzA
whartung 3y ago
I remember when David Bowie essentially announced his "Greatest hits, and I'm not going to play them again" tour. Simply, he wanted to give the fans a last chance to see their old favorites, but not be hindered by them in the future. I don't know how that worked out for him, I imagine fine. It's not like he was needing the money. But I think that was a fine response to this problem artists have with deep catalogs. I remember seeing a Van Morrison concert, and I didn't recognize a thing he performed. Not just the songs, the style of music. If you want to hear the hits, there are a bunch of tribute and cover bands that will play those. Considering the composition of many modern incarnations of older bands may well not include any of the original performers, even the acts themselves are essentially cover artists, they just get to use the name and logo.
- maxfurman 3y ago
  Bowie's last major tour was in 2003 and he played plenty of his old hits. So it doesnt seem like it worked out for him.
  - jjulius 3y ago
    I dunno, it seems like it did. I get the sense that, despite how it was billed, I don't think that the intent was to cease entirely, rather to set the expectation that he's not going to feel obligated to play them and would put an emphasis on newer works first. >Bowie felt that a burden had been lifted by retiring the old hits he felt he was forced to perform, and said "[Retiring my old hits on tour] was a very selfish thing to do, but it gave me an immense sense of freedom, to feel that I couldn't rely on any of those things. It's like I'm approaching it all from the ground up now, starting with 'Okay, we know what songs we needn't do anymore. What, of my past, did I really like?' You pick things that were really good songs, and you try to recontextualize them, by giving them current, contemporary rhythms. And we've been knocking around ideas like 'Shopping for Girls' from Tin Machine, 'Repetition' and 'Quicksand' from Hunky Dory. Certain songs that I probably haven't ever performed onstage. They're working shoulder to shoulder with the new material, and I'm starting to see continuity in the way that I work." >Generally, most songs that Bowie performed on the tour were played live in years to come, with only a small number of songs from the Sound+Vision Tour set list truly being retired forever; the most notable songs never to be played live again were "Young Americans" and "Rock 'n' Roll Suicide". Bowie only played "Space Oddity" on tour a single time afterwards, although Bowie did perform the song three times on other occasions. In future tours Bowie would in fact begin to play lesser-known songs, only occasionally punctuated by his well known older "hits", and bias towards playing material written after 1990. After finishing the Sound+Vision tour, Bowie returned to his band Tin Machine for their second album. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound%2BVision_Tour https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound%2BVision_Tour
namuol 3y ago
My dad’s first big rock concert was Lou Reed and he tells of the show exactly as you have. Funnily enough he also was very disappointed by the Stones, and how they seemed so cocky on stage and that they didn’t care to sing half the lyrics aloud. Of course this was back in the late 70s/early 80s. I’m under 40 but while we’re on the subject of rock “legends” on stage, no performance I’ve seen has matched Elvis Costello I saw in 2011 or so. He played acoustic guitar without a band backing him nor any kind of stage lighting to speak of, and it was mesmerizing.
lazyeye 3y ago
Lou Reed needs to understand that other people funded his life and he needs to meet them half-way.

eweise 3y ago

I guess I got lucky. I saw him on on his New York album tour. Great songs on that album so no need to hear prior hits although I think he did play walk on the wild side.

pixl97 3y ago

Being a victim of one's own success is a common fate for artists. We see this in edgy animated shows all the time where something shocking eventually turns into fan service.

disqard 3y ago
I learned the phrase "audience capture" recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31938353 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31938353

kjkjadksj 3y ago

What a poor attitude honestly. He’s lucky enough to come up with hit songs that have been known for decades, he should be smiling anytime someone asks him to play one because that means he made it in a way the vast majority of musicians never do.

popularrecluse 3y ago
Not everyone makes music for the consumption and enjoyment of other people. Sometimes it's just a side-effect.
- mannykannot 3y ago
  Fair enough, but here, we are considering the situation where Lou Reed chose to perform before a paying audience. Dave Brubeck, who performed almost to the end of his life, never seemed tired of playing 'Take Five' as the finale to his set, and it was not even his composition.
  - maleldil 3y ago
    And the audience should be aware that he didn't like playing those songs. There are many artists that are like this, and it's fine. You're not entitled to the artists playing your favourite songs.
  - jjulius 3y ago
    The difference is that Brubeck and Reed each have different approaches to music. That's great that Dave loved playing 'Take Five' for the entire span of his career, but there's nothing wrong with other artists wanting to move on from something they've done in the past. The idea that artists owe us something or should play whatever the crowd wants with aplomb is misplaced, in my opinion.
    - mannykannot 3y ago
      The point here is that it is implausible that Lou Reed was, in fact, uninterested in "[making] music for the consumption and enjoyment of other people" when he was performing for a paying audience (well, I'll grant that he might have been uninterested in whether they enjoyed the performance.)

motohagiography 3y ago

If you do something impossibly difficult that you are the only person in the world who can do it (being Lou Reed), and if you grow or change or don't do it the way other people who can't do it expect, the whole world turns on you and hates you for failing to maintain their illusions and their belief that their memories have meaning in the present. I sympathize w/ not wanting to play those songs. Imagine you had this huge multi-decade personal journey, and no matter what you build or become, nobody will let you be anything other than the guy you were for a few weeks as a kid when you first wrote that song long before most of them were even born.

JKCalhoun 3y ago
It seems that so many people my age mustered out of finding new music sometime in their college years. As they age they return to that music to, I imagine, remember that time in their life. I asked a co-worker what he would listen to to remember this time of their life? Maybe I'm an idiot. Maybe no one wants to remember their 30's, their 40's, their 50's.... Anyway (off on a tangent) the point is that people go to Lou Reed concerts to remember when they were in college making a mix-tape including "A Perfect Day" for their boyfriend. While I feel bad for the artist "artistically", plenty of artist are of course making bank by playing wineries to 50-somethings that now have deeper pockets and want their love shack, baby.
- coldtea 3y ago
  >Anyway (off on a tangent) the point is that people go to Lou Reed concerts to remember when they were in college making a mix-tape including "A Perfect Day" for their boyfriend. I think those are precisely the type of audiences someone like Lou Reed would hate to have.
- reducesuffering 3y ago
  > so many people my age mustered out of finding new music sometime in their college years. There’s a collective pull too. If you’re open minded enough to appreciate new music, but your peers usually don’t, you end up enjoying things alone or only able to musically connect with college age people. The ability to enjoy music with the other similar age peers around you will generally pull you to the older stuff they enjoy too. (Unfortunately hasn’t worked for me)

jncfhnb 3y ago

The correct answer here is that the business layer in between Lou and his fans should be honest in what Lou intends to play.

jonstewart 3y ago
Lou Reed died ten years ago.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- musicale 3y ago
  Didn't stop 2Pac.
- flir 3y ago
  The whole damn thread is in the present tense. I was starting to think I'd missed a resurrection or something.
  - saberience 3y ago
    Ditto it’s been driving me crazy. Why is everyone talking about Lou as though he’s still alive???
- jncfhnb 3y ago
  Whatever. Nothing unique about Lou in this regard.

coldtea 3y ago

>Sometimes these artists also forget they are entertainers. That's exactly what I (and many others) expect from artists. We don't want sing-and-dance men and women to amuse us.

musicale 3y ago
Without the performing part you're not really a performing artist anymore. Performing artists are free to alienate their audiences if they wish, but the consequences aren't necessarily positive for anyone.
- coldtea 3y ago
  >Without the performing part you're not really a performing artist anymore. Performing is not the same as entertaining. Performing just means putting up a performance, that is playing in front of an audience. It could be a "top hits meddley crowd pleaser"or it could be an expression of things you want to explore as an artist, or anything in between. >Performing artists are free to alienate their audiences if they wish, but the consequences aren't necessarily positive for anyone. That's for the artist to decide. Some artists could not give less fucks about the consequences, and if they did they'd be in boy bands.
  - rainonmoon 3y ago
    Absolutely. And I dare say the consequences for Lou were plenty positive. He was a rare example of an artist who did exactly what he wanted and had the fortune to make a lasting career out of it. You can look at his collaborator-slash-foil Iggy Pop for another example, albeit sort of on the other end of the spectrum. Dude shows up on all kinds of stuff that probably does nothing for old purists but piss them off, but he's got nothing left to prove and he's having fun doing it. If people want their artists to be jukeboxes, they're gonna love it when they catch up to the invention of the iPod in 2001.
- squeaky-clean 3y ago
  > but the consequences aren't necessarily positive for anyone Only if your only idea of a positive consequence is money.

alpineidyll3 3y ago

People who create new things with real impact always end up paying a price. Directly or indirectly there is a thermodynamic necessity that work will emit heat. Some people prefer to live reversible lives and that's fine, but to irreversibly change the world you're going to pay.

Angostura 3y ago

That rather reminds me of this sketch from the old BBC comedy show Big Train https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1YNEtaHbzA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1YNEtaHbzA

whartung 3y ago

I remember when David Bowie essentially announced his "Greatest hits, and I'm not going to play them again" tour. Simply, he wanted to give the fans a last chance to see their old favorites, but not be hindered by them in the future. I don't know how that worked out for him, I imagine fine. It's not like he was needing the money. But I think that was a fine response to this problem artists have with deep catalogs. I remember seeing a Van Morrison concert, and I didn't recognize a thing he performed. Not just the songs, the style of music. If you want to hear the hits, there are a bunch of tribute and cover bands that will play those. Considering the composition of many modern incarnations of older bands may well not include any of the original performers, even the acts themselves are essentially cover artists, they just get to use the name and logo.

maxfurman 3y ago
Bowie's last major tour was in 2003 and he played plenty of his old hits. So it doesnt seem like it worked out for him.
- jjulius 3y ago
  I dunno, it seems like it did. I get the sense that, despite how it was billed, I don't think that the intent was to cease entirely, rather to set the expectation that he's not going to feel obligated to play them and would put an emphasis on newer works first. >Bowie felt that a burden had been lifted by retiring the old hits he felt he was forced to perform, and said "[Retiring my old hits on tour] was a very selfish thing to do, but it gave me an immense sense of freedom, to feel that I couldn't rely on any of those things. It's like I'm approaching it all from the ground up now, starting with 'Okay, we know what songs we needn't do anymore. What, of my past, did I really like?' You pick things that were really good songs, and you try to recontextualize them, by giving them current, contemporary rhythms. And we've been knocking around ideas like 'Shopping for Girls' from Tin Machine, 'Repetition' and 'Quicksand' from Hunky Dory. Certain songs that I probably haven't ever performed onstage. They're working shoulder to shoulder with the new material, and I'm starting to see continuity in the way that I work." >Generally, most songs that Bowie performed on the tour were played live in years to come, with only a small number of songs from the Sound+Vision Tour set list truly being retired forever; the most notable songs never to be played live again were "Young Americans" and "Rock 'n' Roll Suicide". Bowie only played "Space Oddity" on tour a single time afterwards, although Bowie did perform the song three times on other occasions. In future tours Bowie would in fact begin to play lesser-known songs, only occasionally punctuated by his well known older "hits", and bias towards playing material written after 1990. After finishing the Sound+Vision tour, Bowie returned to his band Tin Machine for their second album. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound%2BVision_Tour https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound%2BVision_Tour

namuol 3y ago

My dad’s first big rock concert was Lou Reed and he tells of the show exactly as you have. Funnily enough he also was very disappointed by the Stones, and how they seemed so cocky on stage and that they didn’t care to sing half the lyrics aloud. Of course this was back in the late 70s/early 80s. I’m under 40 but while we’re on the subject of rock “legends” on stage, no performance I’ve seen has matched Elvis Costello I saw in 2011 or so. He played acoustic guitar without a band backing him nor any kind of stage lighting to speak of, and it was mesmerizing.

lazyeye 3y ago

Lou Reed needs to understand that other people funded his life and he needs to meet them half-way.