So, you’ve probably heard. Metallica and Lou Reed ran into one another in a dark alley of Hell and made a Doctor-Moreau-level abomination called Lulu that’s pretty much equally embarrassing for everyone involved – the players and the listener alike. Brandon tries to figure out if the wretchedness of this album may have been intentional. Could this be a subversive attempt at Camp? To figure it out, he dusts off his copy of Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp” and uses it to guide his way through an album that probably never should have been made in the first place.
Lou Reed and Metallica Promo (OMG! OMG!)
From: Brandon Hall
To: Jenn Lao
Let me set the scene. It’s Thanksgiving. You’re at your grandparents’ place with your whole family. Grandpa’s already a couple scotch and sodas in. Your dad’s already gotten into shouting matches with Grandpa and Uncle Tony, who, at 48, still has not really, in the really real sense, moved out of his parents’ basement. So, yeah, he’s still in his underwear. After everyone’s eaten, Grandma tries to break the discomfiting silence by mentioning that Grandpa, a self-avowed alcoholic misanthrope, has started writing poetry. “Oh shit,” you think to yourself, before Uncle Tony chimes in with his “rad idea” to have “the boys” come over and play some music in the background while “Pops” recites some verses. And that’s how you find yourself in the garage on a fold out lawnchair as Uncle Tony and his band, The Hell Crushers, pound out some generic sludgy metal while Grandpa on a microphone, reading through his trifocals, says horrible things such as, “Like a colored man’s dick, blood spurting from me.” And you, sitting there in horror, thinking “Please, Jesus, make it stop. Make it stop.”
That’s about the best description of Lulu I’ve been able to come up with.
I wanted to talk about this album because I have a lot of questions, none of which have to do with whether or not the album is any good. It is not. However, you can’t very well define something with a negative. I want to know what it is. And why it is. More specifically, I’ve been trying to determine whether or not it qualifies as Camp. What else could this Doctor-Moreau-level abomination be? How else to interpret an album whose lead vocalist sounds like Grandpa Simpson repeating lines like, “All I do is fall over” (“Frustration”)?
In Susan Sontag’s seminal, genre-defining essay, “Notes on Camp,” she lays out myriad factors that constitute what Camp is and what it is not, whence it is derived, and how it is experienced. She points out that “to name a sensibility, to draw its contours and to recount its history, requires a deep sympathy modified by revulsion.”
Jenn, considering how revolted we both are by this album, we should be perfectly suited to analyze just what and why it is! I combed through “Notes on Camp” and am going to use it as a guide to try to understand Lulu.
One of my main questions is the issue of intent. Did Metallica and Reed intend to make a piece of Camp? The distinction between naïve and deliberate Camp is an important one. “Pure Camp is always naïve,” Sontag writes. “Camp which knows itself to be Camp is usually less satisfying.” Perhaps this was their intention. Maybe Camp was the purpose. The players, here, are certainly no strangers to Camp sensibilities. When Sontag relates Camp to Pop Art and the androgyne she’s pointing right at a young Lou Reed, mainstay at Andy Warhol’s Factory and architect of this image:
As for Metallica, all heavy metal seems derived from the “artifice and exaggeration” that defines Camp. Furthermore, how can any artist who’s spent a majority of his or her life as a public figure trying to make and sell art, manage to do anything not totally contrived or detached from reality? An unknown can make something new and fresh and exciting because they haven’t been compromised by the forces of celebrity, of constant observation. They come from the “real world” and can respond to it. Neither Metallica nor Lou Reed have lived in any world that can conceivably be called “real” by the majority of their fans for many many years. Long ago, they all morphed into artifices of Camp.
It is specifically because they have become these unwittingly detached artifices that I have trouble believing Lulu is anything but a wholly serious, if utterly misguided effort. I would actually have more respect for everyone involved if it seemed they were trying to Rocky Horror Picture Show us, but I get the impression they all take themselves far too seriously. This, then, would make for the perfect ingredient if we were to declare Lulu a piece of pure Camp. “The pure examples of Camp are unintentional; they are dead serious. The Art Nouveau craftsman who makes a lamp with a snake coiled around it is not kidding, nor is he trying to be charming. He is saying, in all earnestness: Voila! the Orient!”
And Loutallica is saying “Voila! …dog shit?” I don’t know.
So, then, can we call this Camp? After all, “the Camp sensibility is the difference between the thing as meaning something, anything, and the thing as pure artifice.” This album is certainly devoid of meaning, but shouldn’t Camp also be a little enjoyable? A vacation destination for excess and hedonism? Overabundance of poor taste and frivolous gravitas? Camp is supposed to be so bad it’s good, right? I mean, it’s supposed to be enjoyable, and Lulu is practically unlistenable. I listened to it twice. That was one and a half times too many.
Help me, Susan.
“The reason [some things] are bad to the point of being laughable, but not bad to the point of being enjoyable, is that they are too dogged and pretentious.” A-ha! What better way to describe everything Lou Reed and Metallica have done for at least the past 20 years?
Yes, Susan? You have more?
“When something is just bad (rather than Camp), it’s often because it is too mediocre in its ambition. The artist hasn’t attempted to do anything really outlandish.”
See? There’s the question. There’s the real heart of the matter. I think, when setting out on this voyage together, Loutallica really did believe they were going to do something outlandish. I’m sure Lou Reed still thinks now, as he did 30 years ago, that talking about a “colored man’s dick” (“Pumping Blood”) and saying “I’m a woman who likes men” (“Mistress Dread”) is wild and taboo, or maybe they thought that just making an album together was outrageous, that all they would have to do was get together in the studio and people’s heads would explode. Even though their intentions may have been in the right place – they sure as shit didn’t do this for money – all they ended up accomplishing was adding a little more pavement to that Hell-bound expressway. If Camp finds “success in certain passionate failures,” then I think what we have here is, ultimately, a passionless mess, mediocre in its execution and utterly awful in its mediocrity.
Something Divine wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole.
And she ate dog poop.
“I want you as my wife. Spermless like a girl.”
Brandon
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