Metal Machine Music isn’t just an album. It’s a curse, a prayer, a middle finger, a mirror, and a message from the abyss. It’s Lou Reed saying: “Let the machines speak.” And they scream, they moan, they howl in layered, untamed distortion—this isn't background music, it's background radiation. Released in 1975, that most unravelled of years, MMM lands like a transmission from another dimension. Not ahead of its time. Outside of it.
This is part fuck you—to RCA, to the audience, to what “rock music” had become. But it’s not just a prank. It’s a serious, high-minded, obsessive composition, driven by occult fascinations, musique concrète, early minimalism, and a kind of mystic belief in sound as pure force. Think La Monte Young by way of a trashed amp. Think John Cage in a leather jacket with a speed problem. Think Lou Reed sitting alone, sculpting waves of guitar feedback into towering, static-drenched forms like some junkyard Beethoven.
There’s something ferociously honest about it. Lou didn’t just plug in and piss off—he carefully layered reel-to-reel tape loops, tuned feedback frequencies like a deranged organist, and built a kind of machine orchestra: all distortion and decay and industrial howl. It’s the Velvets’ Sister Ray stripped of all sex and groove, just left with the power surge.
And remember: Lou Reed was a bisexual man growing up in the 1950s in a Jewish family in Long Island—queer, angry, brilliant, and forced into electroshock therapy to "correct" his orientation. That rage and defiance and shame is in the static. The same mind that devoured doo-wop and first-wave rock & roll—the melodramatic stuff, the pleading stuff, the teenage tragedy songs and Brill Building ghosts—also fell in love with Burroughs, Delmore Schwartz, Poe, and the sacred American lowlife. Literature as high-art confession. Sound as exorcism.
In that way, Metal Machine Music is Lou Reed laid bare. No persona. No sunglasses. Just the buzzing skeleton underneath the rock star dream. He said later he loved it because it was pure. He said it was classical music.
And yeah, it kind of is. You can trace a line from MMM through industrial, noise, drone, ambient, the avant-garde underground—all the way to modern sound art. Throbbing Gristle heard it and knew. Glenn Branca heard it and understood. Sonic Youth, Merzbow, Tim Hecker, fuck—even Radiohead’s most fractured moments—you can feel Lou’s shadow in the circuitry.
It’s part death trip, part holy noise. A document of 1975’s spiritual exhaustion. A machine speaking back to its maker. No lyrics, no melody, no mercy.
Only metal.
Only machine.
Only music.
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