Rock ’n’ roll is full of con men and sleight-of-hand tricks. Deception is wrapped up in the genre’s DNA, running much deeper than rip-off record labels and greedy managers. It begins with the artists themselves, who spend a lifetime on stages and in recording booths, pouring their hearts out to anyone who’ll listen, but then, perversely, dying before you truly get to know them. The only thing that makes it bearable is that they leave behind their music. They stab you, but you get to keep the knife.
The king of this particular form of enchantment was Lou Reed. Until his death, 10 years ago, Reed practiced a sort of bewitching vagueness—Patti Smith described him as “elegantly restrained”—that makes the trove of songs he left behind (a copy of his collected lyrics clocks in at 679 pages) feel more like a decades-long koan than an answer to who Lou Reed was, biographically speaking.
