Album Review: The Velvet Underground & Nico [1967] #3

When The Velvet Underground & Nico was released in 1967 it became a commercial flop which quickly led the producer and artist behind the famed album art, Andy Warhol, to quickly jump ship taking with him the singer Nico and leaving Lou, John, Sterling and Maureen to their own devices.

This might seem unfortunate but in my opinion, it isn't quite as surprising as people might find it today and I'll even go as far as to claim that the album was doomed to be a commercial failure from the get-go. '67 was the year after Pet Sounds and Revolver, it was the same year as Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band and The Doors' self titled. It wasn't a year in which the mainstream crowd had a craving for an experimental album containing drug abuse, sex and proto noise rock. People wanted fun psychadelic pop-centered rock music. However it was exactly the kind of record that a man like Andy Warhol would support and while we today can see that it was both incredibly original and innovative, that wasn't something that would be picked up by the major populus until several years later.



The Velvet Underground & Nico is one of my personal favorite albums and definitely my favorite album of the whole Rate Your Music Top 100. It mixes simple songs like Sunday Morning and Heroin with an originality and uniqueness that is nowehere to be found in similar albums from a similar time. Even today it stands as one of the most unique records of all time, even when paired with the bands later releases there isn't really anything that quite compares to what the band achieved with the debut.

And even disregarding the beauty of the more accessible parts of the album, there's still songs like the eight minute proto noise rock jam which is European Son and tracks like Venus In Furs where John Cale's electic violin, an instrument that I don't think can be found in a similar record from the same era, gets to take the front over guitars and drums and shines with its originality.

The lyrical themes of The Velvet Underground & Nico explore different subjects such as drug abuse, sexual deviancy and prostitution among many other things, often disguised under melodies that speak a whole different thing of the mood and subject of the songs. I often see it credited as actually being a conceptual album about the daily life of a heroin addict in the city of New York. Sunday Morning being about the addict waking up and heading out in search of a fix, Here Comes The Man being the addict waiting for their dealer:

He's never early he's always late
First thing you notice is you always gotta wait

And the single Heroin's theme being an obvious end to the story. I personally believe the theory is a stretch and that the idea mainly stems from an interpretation of the different drug themed songs on the album, the aforementioned three being the main ones involved in the theme of heroin addiction, a theme that the band would continue to involve in their music in their following album White Light/White Heat.

Today it's almost 50 years since The Velvet Underground & Nico was released. Andy Warhol is long since gone, The Velvet Underground's long going producer Tom Wilson is also long gone and both Lou Reed and Nico has passed away. It's been almost half a century and this record still holds up as one of the greatest of all time, yet another piece of music history to be found in the top 10 of this list.

I personally adore this record and hold it as one of the greatest pieces of music released, the earliest masterpiece in the genre of rock music and the start of several long going careers that would come to shape the music that we know today.

I keep pointing out that I believe that these records should be required to be heard by anyone interested in music at the end of all these reviews and maybe it's something that could be said for over 75% of the records on this list. It is honestly just 100 records and almost all of them deserve their place on the list. However I will add it once again and I will say that if there's one record that I do believe that everyone owes to themselves to hear from this list, then I personally suggest listening to The Velvet Underground & Nico as it's the, in my opinion, greatest album on this list and also one of the single greatest pieces of music ever created by human hands, and I pray that one day I'll find a record that outshines it in every single way.

The Velvet Underground & Nico
The Velvet Underground
10/10
Anton Öberg Sysojev