Lou Reed and Metallica – Lulu

I know what they say about Lulu. But I listened anyway, and found out they‰’re completely wrong. The negativity surrounding Lulu started before the album even came out, with critics tearing apart the odd combination of Lou‰’s deadpan voice and Metallica‰’s power riffs, and internet trolls turning the repeated line “I am the table‰” into an instant meme.

Reed, who has for years seen himself as (and been) heavier than the critics give him credit for, refuses to acknowledge that the collaboration was odd at all, and for good reason. Although critics are still hanging onto his Transformer days, Lou Reed moved on long ago, switching to a heavier style (a la his 2000 album Ecstasy) that better suits his dark, poetic lyrics. The lyrics of Lulu itself, based on a series of plays written by German expressionist Frank Wedekind, are some of Lou‰’s darkest and most pretentious, and therefore called for something heavier than Lou could have done on his own. The lyrics are a combination of horror and history, with enough literary and cinematographic references to evade even the most fastidious reader, something made clear from the beginning of the album‰’s first and best song “Brandenberg Gate.‰”

As for Hetfield being a table (although it is impossible to ever know for sure what Lou means in his lyrics), the lyrics seems to come from a climactic scene in Wedekind‰’s “Eardgeist: Earth Spirit,‰” wherein Lulu hides one of her many affairs by stuffing her lover under a table. Lulu, like the plays on which it was based, has been almost universally rejected by its contemporary audiences, but I for one am totally on board with what amounts to Lou Reed‰’s most adventurous lyrical experiment to date.