Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music is the Mt. Everest of industrial noise records. Other records may be more violent, more atonal, maybe even more noisy, but nothing comes close to the power of MMM’s unstoppable racket and hallucinatory paranoia. Naturally, it’s one of the most polarizing works of art in the world. Genius? Shit? You be the judge.
Naturally, MMM was the subject of many a high school dare for us – how much of it can you listen to before you either smash the record, smash your head, or both? The mere mortals among us dropped out immediately, but a couple of us could last past the initial clatter and settle in to some sort of addled haze through the rest of sides 1 and 2. My stopping point was a couple of minutes into side 3 when some high-frequency combination comes on that makes my head feel like it had been invaded by aphids. We actually did find the legendary 8-track tape version of MMM at a Barstow, California truckstop in 1983, but I don’t know what happened to it.
Remarkably, a German avant-garde group called Zeitkratzer accomplished the impossible by transcribing MMM and scoring it for strings, winds, piano and accordion. Sort of like Bang On A Can‘s take on Music For Airports and In C. Anyway, Zeitkratzer is performing it this weekend with Reed. I wish I was there.