This essay is from THE SELF-DESTRUCTION ISSUE of VICE magazine. Find it in a store near you, or get 4 issues each year sent straight to your door, by subscribing.
Is there such a thing as an evil song?
The idea seems overwrought, maybe, but if any piece of music could be portrayed as actively harmful, it’s “Heroin.” Sure, there are innumerable songs in the world that express repugnant ideas and reprehensible sentiments, but “Heroin” is different: its sheer beauty is aspirational. The music’s transit between grace and rush is seductive, the clarity and certainty with which Lou Reed lays out the thinking behind his “big decision” coming across as strength rather than weakness. From “I’m closing in on death” through “I’m better off than dead” to the chilling entreaty “Heroin / Be the death of me,” the singer calmly betrothes himself to nothingness.
Over the 60 years of its public existence, thousands of people must have been tempted to try the needle after listening to “Heroin.” Some fraction likely got into serious trouble. It’s a song with an unknown body count.
The Velvet Underground didn’t invent cool—that would be Brando in The Wild One, Dean in Rebel Without A Cause—but “Heroin,” along with the group’s unsmiling all-black image, perfected the idea of nothing-can-touch-me. The line to punk is direct. The name Richard Hell chose for his band the Voidoids echoes the “Heroin” lyric “I’m gonna try to nullify my life” in the way it revels in the idea of drugs as a way to delete yourself from the world. While Hell was scribbling poetry and shooting up on the Lower East Side, over in Cleveland, Rocket From The Tombs’s Pete Laughner was singing “Ain’t It Fun,” asking, “Ain’t it fun when you know you’re gonna die young?” Lester Bangs warned Laughner that “You’re killing yourself just so you can be like Lou Reed,” and in 1977 he duly died of drugs-and-drink-induced pancreatitis, aged 24.
Sober historians would disagree, but you can hallucinate a further line from “Heroin” to “Oxy” by Future and Juice WRLD. The latter, a 21-year-old at the time, overdosed in a private jet after swallowing codeine and oxycodone, just one of a string of young rappers of our time, including Lil Peep, Mac Miller, and Rich Homie Quan, to die through combinations of pain-killing opioids with anti-anxiety drugs and other substances. Although probably more aware of the Stones and Led Zep than the Velvets or the Stooges, these rappers belonged to a hip-hop generation that embraced the concept of “rock star” with all its associations of reckless excess and made it their own, in these tragic cases retracing the footsteps of Brian Jones, Keith Moon, and Jon Bonham.
“Over the 60 years of its public existence, thousands of people must have been tempted to try the needle after listening to ‘Heroin.’ Some fraction likely got into serious trouble. It’s a song with an unknown body count”
There is of course nothing romantic about self-destruction. Quick or slow—the turned-blue body, young and still “hot” even when stone cold, versus the decades-long downward slope of haggard ill health, lost looks, dead eyes, eventual organ failure—it all adds up to the same dismal outcome: an ugly mess for other people to clean up, a wake of broken hearts, scarred memories, and survivor’s guilt.
Yet seen from a distance, with a cold aesthete’s eye, self-destruction can be a compelling subject for songwriting and a motive force that results in great art. It can also create a shapely arc to a career, an exclamation mark or crescendo. Premature mortality can ensure immortality.
So logical and ordained seem the fates of Sid Vicious, Ian Curtis, Kurt Cobain, Richey Edwards, et al, it’s hard to imagine an alternative reality in which they are still with us: getting older, waistlines and discographies ever-expanding. These performers lived out—died out—the deep logic of their music. Not for them the long, protracted career of solo albums and side projects, comebacks and reunions, the twilight appearances on Later… With Jools Holland or I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here. Instead, a clean cut-off.
For better or worse, an early exit can lend an appalling authenticity to the artist’s work, if that work expressed emotions—like self-hatred or depression—that explain the ending and create narrative coherence. It doesn’t work, though, when the death has no relation to the music or the life lived up to that point. Michael Jackson needed the surgical anesthetic propofol to fall asleep but when it snuffed him out, the overdose was simply a grim terminus to a tortured life. Prince’s fentanyl O.D. likewise feels jarringly unconnected to the life-affirming energies of his music.
But what happens when the rockstar who flirts hard with death remains inexplicably unrequited? The obvious example here is the leathery longevity of Lou Reed. He really gave it his best shot: not content with writing “Heroin” and “Waiting for My Man,” Reed composed the nihilistic noisescape of Metal Machine Music, literally a speed-freak symphony. The cacophonous double album’s subtitle is “The Amine β Ring,” a reference to the molecular structure of methamphetamine, and the loony sleeve note sees Reed mocking drug dilettantes and positioning himself as one of the hardcore few “for whom the needle is no more than a toothbrush. Professionals, no sniffers please…” But then Reed cleaned up completely. By the end of the 80s, he’d discovered a hitherto unsuspected social conscience with the album New York, a worthy record with perhaps a hundredth of “Heroin”’s aesthetic intensity. In the 90s, he took up arms against death on behalf of terminally ill friends with the luminous Magic and Loss; his final decades brought happy marriage, Buddhism, and a New Age album.
As for Richard Hell, the evangelist for non-existence who scrawled “Please Kill Me” on a T-shirt and once declared “I have one feeling—the desire to get out of here” … well, he’s still here: living in the same East Village apartment, sporadically publishing poetry and memoir. There are so many of these unlikely survivors. Nick Cave, who once hymned self-destruction in Birthday Party songs like “Junkyard,” is now an agony uncle to his fans, dispensing nuggets of life wisdom. Pete Doherty swapped “the brown” for the yellow: the cheeses and rich butters of his adopted French home. Cholesterol may yet take him out where smack and crack did not.
“For better or worse, an early exit can lend an appalling authenticity to the artist’s work”
My new book Still in a Dream takes a trip back to the late 80s and early 90s, when the underground rock of the era—Spacemen 3, The Jesus and Mary Chain, Loop, My Bloody Valentine—sought oblivion and obliteration through overwhelming noise. Rooted above all in the Velvets and the Stooges, this music broke with postpunk because lyrics were drastically demoted in the scheme of things. Rather than meaningful songs you related to, this noise was more like a drug you administered to yourself. You saw it at the gigs, in the way that the audience instinctively responded: swaying side to side, eyes shut or rolling back in the head, bodies flopping forward in a woozy motion closer to nodding out than headbanging.
I don’t have a clear sense of just how prevalent drug-taking was among the fans or the musicians themselves. I suspect for quite a few of these neo-psychedelic groups, the swoony music was inspired more by drug-fueled records from rock’s past than their own ingestion of Class As. But for the artists and critics like myself, druggy imagery was inevitable, de rigueur even. A druggy image, too: in their videos, the pale, spotty, blank-eyed Jesus and Mary Chain resembled the strung-out kids in the “Heroin Screws You Up” adverts.
One band who definitely walked it like they played it was Spacemen 3. Paralleling songs with titles like “OD Catastrophe” and “Suicide” and the mission-statement slogan “taking drugs to make music to take drugs to,” some members explored the full pharmacopeia—including the anesthetic chloroform! For their Melody Maker cover story, Sonic Boom, one of the group’s two singer-guitarists, took the journalist with him to the chemists to pick up his methadone.
Medical imagery runs through the discography of Spacemen 3 and its offshoot Spiritualized, from the early album The Perfect Prescription to the pharmaceutical packaging of Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space. In the Spacemen 3 cosmology, what is really high-risk behavior is presented as self-medication: healing protection against the harms of being alive. (One of Hell’s songs, “Who Says (It’s Good To Be Alive)?” similarly inverts conventional thinking: life is the habit you can’t kick, because “Once born you’re addicted / And so you depict it / As good.”) The English band’s 1989 masterpiece Playing With Fire featured a bunch of key words on the cover, among them “Revolution,” “Suicide,” and “Purity.” The latter serves double purpose here, referring both to the quality of the drugs and the sanctification of the soul.
For idealists who find reality—with all its compromises, hassles, and disappointments—to be unbearable, chemical oblivion offers a kind of Third Way: an alternative route to transcendence than religious faith or revolutionary politics. Inaugurated by “Heroin,” this is a mystical creed of Narcotic Nothingness. It’s also a sublime dereliction of duty (one of the things Reed says he can ignore when high is the jabber of politicians). The addict refuses the world as-is, but also refuses the disciplined ways of changing the world through political activism. In that sense, hard drugs are literally counter-revolutionary: to cop is to cop out.
These alternative options are a well-trod path: you only have to look at the way John Lennon lurched from drugs-as-the-answer (LSD first, then heroin) to Eastern spirituality to fist-in-the-air, black-beret-clad political militancy, before settling on the most conventional (but also achievable) solution: making matrimony into a belief-system, making a goddess out of his missus. Another 60s survivor, Marianne Faithfull, once said, perhaps fancifully, that “drugs kept me from being a terrorist… There came a point where I think I felt that either I was going to explode out into something, into actual acts of violence in some way, or I was going to have to implode to contain it.”
In “Heroin,” Reeds sings “I’m going to try for the kingdom”—meaning Heaven-on-Earth. The needle is what utopian dreamers turn to when they don’t believe in the next world and have given up on this one.
If you’re struggling with addiction, you can visit the official website of SAMHSA’s National Helpline for treatment information.
Simon Reynolds is the author of Energy Flash, Rip It Up and Start Again, and Retromania. His new book Still in a Dream: Shoegaze, Slackers and the Reinvention of Rock, 1984-1994 is available now through White Rabbit Books.
This essay is from THE SELF-DESTRUCTION ISSUE of VICE magazine. Find it in a store near you, or get 4 issues each year sent straight to your door, by subscribing.
The post Simon Reynolds on ‘Heroin’, Rock’s Most Evil Song appeared first on VICE.
