Velvet Underground – White Light/White Heat (45th Anniversary Super Deluxe Edition)

You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star - Nietzsche...
Velvet Underground : White Light/White Heat (45th Anniversary Super Deluxe Edition)
6.4 Polydor
2013 

Velvet Underground : White Light/White Heat (45th Anniversary Super Deluxe Edition)You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star
-Nietzsche

The above quote is the most concise and relevant summary imaginable to a near half a century old piece of artistic imperfection.

The act of creating the dancing star in this instance was not as structured and pre-planned as is usually necessary to achieve the required end point.  The protagonists usually turn inwards shutting off and expunging all outside input, which allows the communal mind to blossom.  However the opposite stance was assumed, turning away and shunning the chance of allowing the correct group dynamic to be achieved, resulting in all the singularities of vanity, jealousy and even hatred to dominate.  The four souls decided to turn what was supposed to be a step forward in their art into a sonic assault on their three cohorts and with no master of ceremonies to oversee this war, all the chaos available was allowed to have free reign.  This lack of enforced discipline created the necessary environment for the music to be explosive enough to nudge the musical cosmos, causing ripples in space and sound that are still being detected today.  This was also the end of the faction in this particular guise, with the loss of the idiosyncratic string player, whose love of the avant-garde and noise-as-art would prevent the group from ever venturing into this territory again.  Many of the subsequent disciples of this aural supernovae claim to have been influenced and guided by its everlasting white light but subsequent comparisons reveals that the followers are more likely to be guided by the sounds created before and after which were less volatile incarnations.  This pre and post masterwork music contained the same reference points of chemical overload, sexual deviance and narcissistic tendencies, but accompanied by less sonic vandalism was easier to appreciate and more likely to be used as a reference point.  The quartet known as Joy Division replicated one of the pieces in a live recording, which was substantially shorter and contained the discipline that the original ultimately lacked.  This clique of four young men were also overseen by a dictatorial anti-chaos theory producer who wished to create not the communal mind but complete isolation of the transmissions created.  The track in question, “Sister Ray” dominates proceedings to such an extent that apart from the two minutes of “Here She Comes Now” and the tedious “The Gift”, the other songs could be taken apart and incorporated in to create one long glorious cacophony.

So there it is, the ripples are still radiating out in their concentricity’s, touching more and yet more as time elapses.  What is the point in trying to turn back time and somehow say that what was created all those years ago was not the real spark and that today’s bastardised incarnation is?  Would it not be more virtuous to allow the ripples to eventually dissipate unblemished?

Velvet Underground – Sister Ray

Categories
Album Reviews
Album of the Week