Lou Reed's Street Hassle: "I don't have to choose, so I won't"

February 1, 2018 11:39 AM

Writer Damien Love marks the 40th anniversary of Lou Reed's Street Hassle LP and its 11-minute masterpiece of a title track with an excellent essay, a shorter version of which was published in Uncut magazine in October 2016.

"At the heart of it all lies “Street Hassle,” an 11-minute, two-chord anti-symphony of lust and love, of bad drugs and sudden death, of male hookers, life on the margins, corpses in the street, fleeting transcendence, aching loss and the eternal pulse of the uncaring, sheltering city. It is a recording about which the fact that a spectral Bruce Springsteen shows up without credit halfway through is the least remarkable thing. Simultaneously brutal and tender, emanating from New York’s darkest gutters then drifting heavenward, it is, above all, a song that only the Lou Reed of that 1970s moment could write. Arguably the greatest song he ever recorded outside of the Velvet Underground, “Street Hassle” doesn’t take a walk on the wild side. It lives there."

posted by porn in the woods (8 comments total)

Masterpiece indeed, Street Hassle blew my mind like few songs have ever done when I first heard it all those years ago.
posted by e1c at 12:52 PM on February 1, 2018 [1 favorite]

30 years ago I was quoted part of "I Wanna Be Black" by a friend. In 2017 I finally found out it was from a Lou Reed song and bought a copy of Street Hassle. My friend's delivery didn't have the same cadence as the album version.
posted by Radiophonic Oddity at 12:57 PM on February 1, 2018 [1 favorite]

I love this song and equally love the (much lighter) Simple Minds cover of it.
posted by lumpenprole at 2:46 PM on February 1, 2018 [1 favorite]

To muster the courage to leave my house every morning and truck up to the bus I need to listen to the same playlist. It's a little Lou heavy, yeah, but right smack in the middle of all my power songs (There is No Time, etc.) I drop in Street Hassle for the most sublime transition to the populated part of town. And then I space out for 11 minutes waiting for the crosswalk to change and usually miss my bus by 2 minutes because I swear every single day I get sucked into a different layer of this song.

Thanks for the chance for me to celebrate one of my favorite storytellers.
posted by ezust at 4:57 PM on February 1, 2018 [2 favorites]

I love this song and equally love the (much lighter) Simple Minds cover of it.

Hmm, I thought that taking the original storyline, about a drag queen and a male hustler, and changing it (in the Simple Minds version) to a story about a straight male customer with a female prostitute rather diluted the subversiveness of the original, to say the least.
posted by Umami Dearest at 8:16 PM on February 1, 2018 [2 favorites]

,,,a shorter version of which was published in Uncut magazine

Sublime oxymoron.
posted by aqsakal at 10:11 PM on February 1, 2018 [2 favorites]

Spacemen 3's "Ode to Street Hassle" is my favorite Lou tribute.
posted by porn in the woods at 10:00 AM on February 2, 2018 [2 favorites]

Thanks for posting. Always loved the sound of Street Hassle (the album), like a sludgier, murkier NYC companion to Exile on Main St.; and I always wondered what the hell a 'binaural recording' was, so glad to get that cleared up.

The lyrics to Street Hassle are among the best Lou ever did, I think, and these lines are positively dangerous in their truthiness:

You know, some people got no choice
And they can never find a voice
To talk with that they can even call their own
So the first thing that they see
That allows them the right to be
Why they follow it, you know, it's called bad luck

It felt, for a long time, that a lot of people had never heard of this album (and its 'end of the 70s' companion, The Bells), and I never quite understood why -- though I suspect Arista didn't release them on CD for the longest time, maybe depriving a new generation of Lou fans two of his best (or at the very least, most interesting) albums.
posted by Bron at 7:33 AM on February 3, 2018 [3 favorites]