"The Velvet Underground & Nico", The Velvet Underground, 1967
Dia: 17
Mês: Abril
Ano: 2013
Ano: 2013
Ouvir: http://youtu.be/odroVs2qevg
A importância seminal deste disco fica bem definida nesta afirmação de Brian Eno:
«I was talking to Lou Reed the other day and he said that the first Velvet Underground record sold 30,000 copies in the first five years. The sales have picked up in the past few years, but I mean, that record was such an important record for so many people. I think everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band!»
The Trouser Press Record Guide – Fourth Edition (Collier Books, 1991): The Velvet Underground marked a turning point in rock history. After the release of The Velvet Underground & Nico, knowing the power of which it was capable, the music could never be as innocent, as unselfconscious as before. The band's first album may have come on a bit cute with its Andy Warhol-designed banana cover – indeed, patron Warhol's name (he also "produced") was splashed around like a talisman – but singer/guitarist Lou Reed's tough songs and the band's equally tough playing owed nothing to anybody. In perverse subject matter ("Heroin", "Venus in Furs"), deceptively simple musical forms and anarchic jamming, the Velvets displayed the rebellious traits new wave bands would pick up on ten years later. Singer Nico's four vocals provide textural context and breathing space between Reed's darker visions.
The A to X of Alternative Music (Continuum, 2004): The debut album collected together the Velvets' live favourites and added a few songs written by Reed at Warhol's behest for German model Nico, who had been added to the band to give it visual focus. She sang "Femme Fatale", "I'll Be Your Mirror" and "All Tomorrow's Parties", leaving the more socio-realist tracks like "Waiting For The Man", "Heroin" and "Run Run Run" to Reed. She was supposed to sing "Sunday Morning", the gentle folk nursery rhyme that opens the album, but Reed was too keen on the neat blend of whimsy and paranoia that he had created in the lyrics to give it up that easily. "Venus In Furs" is the standout track, an off-kilter droner that features Reed holding a conversation with an absent demon, building to a sustained one-chord guitar climax, a style that wouldn't really become fashionable until about a decade later. And those lyrics, vividly detailing a scene of seedy sadomasochism, must have produced hitherto unfamiliar mental images in the minds of pre-permissive society listeners. Musically, the whole album is controlled and artful. There are no loose hippy jams, and the sparseness that pervades the album neatly fits the subject matter of songs that are dealing with stark urban realities of drug addiction, specific sex (not universal love) and a general sense of alienation and loss of innocence.
The Rolling Stone Album Guide – Third Edition (Random House, 1992): While San Francisco groups benignly celebrated the Summer of Love, The Velvet Underground & Nico documented the side effects of drug experimentation and sexual freedom on chilling tracks like "Heroin" and "Waiting for the Man". A former student of avant-garde classical music, bassist John Cale tempers the Velvets' dense guitar onslaught with stark, jarring viola cries. Reed and Sterling Morrison had been playing guitar since the early '60s; they took the steady, rhythmic strumming of folk and gradually distorted it into a crude, propulsive electric blur. But Reed also displays a finely honed pop sense on the achingly insightful love songs "Femme Fatale" and "Ill Be Your Mirror". ★★★★★
AllMusic: One would be hard-pressed to name a rock album whose influence has been as broad and pervasive as The Velvet Underground & Nico. While it reportedly took over a decade for the album's sales to crack six figures, glam, punk, new wave, goth, noise, and nearly every other left-of-center rock movement owes an audible debt to this set. ★★★★★
Pitchfork: It's easy to imagine a roomful of people being pummeled by this strange, intimidating noise, and seeking safety in the back of the room, completely unaware that the band they're being assaulted by was at that moment (and for not much longer), the best in the world. [10]
Rolling Stone: As a statement of artistic purpose, indeed rebellion, considering the year it was made (1967), The Velvet Underground & Nico is still a powerful summation of art and fear – rock & roll reduced to its most primitive state to grapple with New York's brutal realism. Some of the record's original savagery and wonder has eroded with time, becoming too familiar through imitation. However, the simple physical impact of the band's conviction remains undiminished. ★★★★★
Rolling Stone – 100 Best Debut Albums of All Time: Much of what we take for granted in rock would not exist without this New York band or its debut, The Velvet Underground and Nico: the androgynous sexuality of glam; punk's raw noir; the blackened-riff howl of grunge and noise rock. (...) Rejected as nihilistic by the love crowd in '67, the Banana Album (so named for its Warhol-designed cover), is the most prophetic rock album ever made.
Uncut: Recorded when Reed was 24, The Velvet Underground & Nico drops us into a Manhattan drug deal (“I’m Waiting For The Man”), ushers us into a dark room where a girl in leather boots is whipping a kneeling man with a belt (“Venus In Furs”), and allows us to watch a syringe entering a human arm in real time (“Heroin”). Condemned in 1967 for breaking every taboo in the book, The Velvet Underground & Nico was a victim of wretched luck – mislaid master tapes, slashed budgets, negligible distribution – but stoically survived its punishing times like Beardless Harry riding the trolleys into Manhattan (“Run Run Run”). Then, like Van Gogh in early 20th century Europe, The Velvet Underground & Nico basked in posthumous recognition. It became a potent influence on David Bowie, Roxy Music, Bromley punks, Manchester post-punks, indie Glaswegians and hundreds – perhaps thousands – of others.
Clash: In 1966, Andy Warhol, pop-art superstar, hooked up with mysterious group The Velvet Underground. Together they created pioneering multimedia art in a series of shows in New York that revolutionised the worlds of music and performance, before their eighteen-month partnership soured with the bungled release of the original art-rock record The Velvet Underground & Nico, leaving the outfit to disappear into a foggy enigma. These multimedia spectacles featured freaks from Warhol’s Factory performing as the Exploding Plastic Inevitable. The artist’s films were projected onto walls over which psychedelic lights flirted, while on stage The Velvet Underground played avant-garde rock.
PopMatters: Released a few months before the Beatles' landmark Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band in early 1967, but recorded close to a year before, The Velvet Underground & Nico, along with Sgt. Pepper, introduced a new form of rock music: the artsy concept album. Sgt. Pepper had its lavish, high-concept album cover, while The Velvet Underground & Nico represented the postmodern side, with Andy Warhol's banana on a white background, with the curious message "Peel Slowly and See" in fine print (when peeled, the listener would be treated to a pink, phallic banana underneath). Musically, the Beatles pulled out all the stops, meticulously recording their album over several months. The Velvet Underground (Guitarist/singer Lou Reed, multi-instrumentalist John Cale, rhythm guitarist/bassist Sterling Morrison, drummer Maureen Tucker, and "chanteuse" Nico), on the other hand, needed just 3000 dollars and one day in the studio.
Rolling Stone – 'The Velvet Underground and Nico': 10 Things You Didn't Know: Released on March 12th, 1967, the Velvet Underground's debut was an album that brought with it an awareness of the new, the possible and the darker edge of humanity. Bolstered by the patronage of Andy Warhol and the exotic vocal contributions of Nico, Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison and Maureen Tucker declared their independence from Top 40 decorum with a gritty, innovative and unapologetically self-possessed work. In many ways, The Velvet Underground & Nico was the first rock album that truly seemed to invite the designation 'alternative'.
Uncut – John Cale on The Velvet Underground & Nico: In this piece from the Uncut archives (August 2006, Take 111, to be exact), ex-Velvets sonic provocateur John Cale talks exclusively about the making of one of the greatest debut albums of all time.
Público – The Velvet Underground & Nico: O “álbum da banana” faz 50 anos: A capa desenhada por Andy Warhol – o produtor que alegadamente não terá tocado num único botão – tornar-se-ia mítica, levando o álbum a ser frequentemente referido como o “álbum da banana”, embrulhando canções que se tornaram marcantes na história do rock, como "Sunday morning", "I’m waiting for the man", ou "Heroin", com letras que abordavam paranóias, heroína, sadomasoquismo, desejo, morte – o lado B dos anos 1960. Sublinhando o impacto da obra, o músico e produtor Brian Eno chegou a afirmar que poucos terão comprado o álbum quando saiu, mas "todos os que compraram uma daquelas 30 mil cópias formaram uma banda".
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