Lou Reed & Metallica – Lulu (Warner Bros)
Two of my favorite foods in the world are chocolate and artichokes, but I don't think that there was ever a point in my life where I was dumb enough to think that they would be any good as a combination. Similarly, Lou Reed and Metallica have each, at some distant point in the past, made good music. Transformer rules. So does Ride The Lightning. But I do not – cannot – understand how anybody would think that a collaboration between the two would yield anything but a towering fountain of bullshit, spewing its putrescence unceasingly towards the stratosphere. Lulu can't even really be summed up in any manner of bad versus good, primarily because “bad” fails to come close to the level of atrociousness the album displays. It's the type of thing that, were I a religious man, would have me questioning the existence of God.
It's dizzying how terrible Lulu is; exhilarating, in a perverse way. Anybody who reviews music deals with hundreds of albums and, bad or good, few make much of an impression. But this is a different story. I hate it enough that I almost love it for the degree of revulsion that it inspires in me – a sensation for which there's probably a German word with no literal translation. Werner Herzog could make a series of films based on the emotions evoked by this album. It's like a sledgehammer to the back of the head and a broken bottle in the abdomen, and not in the positive sense in which those images might normally be used in a metal band's album review.
On top of being thoroughly abysmal, the musicians are so wholly dedicated to the ideas at hand that the songs' component elements are presented with little variation, single ideas repeating over and fucking over again, at times going on nearly twenty minutes at a stretch, and only occasionally dropping away into what sounds like the band forgetting how to use musical instruments altogether. It basically sounds like all the material that wasn't good enough to make it onto Metallica's worst albums (if St. Anger was a bottle of champagne, Lulu is a frothy mixture of white bread and grape juice that a prisoner has fermented behind their cell's toilet) strung together and topped off with Lou Reed intoning (because that's the only way to describe the gray area between speaking and off-key singing that he does for the album's entirety) such profundities as “I will swallow your sharpest cutter / Like a colored man's dick / Blood spurting from me” and “You can't put a butterfly in a jar / If violence mars your final hour / If you make others feel like jam / Poured on a piece of charbroiled lamb.”
Is this the single most cynical cash-grab in the history of the music industry? Is it a testament to the degree to which money and influence can render dissolute even the last vestiges of an ability to discern between good and bad ideas? Is it some sort of Samuel Beckett-style absurdist parody on the extent to which the public will tolerate asinine bullshit from those whom they venerate? Because if this is some crazy performance art piece, somewhere out there Andy Kaufman's ghost is jealous as hell.
Generally, when reviewing a terrible album I will advise readers to stay away, but I can't even do that in this case, for the same reason that all monuments to mankind's cruelty, idiocy, and excess must remain standing: we need these reminders of how low we can sink. For all the good we can do as human beings, we are equally capable of dragging each other to regions more depraved than we might ever want to consider. I won't even say that Lulu is a bad album – it transcends my standards of judgment so wholly that, though I could refer to it as the worst album in the history of recorded music (and if you believe nothing else you read today, believe that I have called it this), it doesn't even matter. Humanity has reached one of its nadirs with the release of this album. Look upon Lulu and despair. Examine it and consider how mankind's pride is but folly. But don't stare too long, lest it stare back through you.
P.S. - I know musical taste is a subjective judgment call unique to each individual, but if you like this album, fuck you. You are a bad person and should feel terrible about yourself.