BSPH: Lou Reed - No Money Down

Sometimes I feel like there is something missing when it comes to discussing Lou Reed. Don't get me wrong - the man is got a well-rounded conversation on his body of work. However, there are few sorely missing spots. The usual conversation about Lou Reed usually revolves around his early years with Velvet Underground, his solo triumphs of Transformer and Berlin, the epic story of the Metal Machine Machine, his collaboration with John Cale and also his last project with Metallica. Everything else is basically swept under the rug or so it feels.

Case in point - this thing.


This is a music video for a song "No Money Down". It was released in 1986 on an album "Mistrial" also known as "You thought you've heard Lou Reed at his most misguided and pointless? Try this". It is mechanistic assembly line new wave cliche-ridden business-as-usual plastic death march to oblivion with trademark sprechstimme that populated much of Reed's oeuvre of the 1980s. But the video is what makes it really special.

The video depicts an animatronic recreation of Lou Reed's head lip-syncing the song on a black background. The head is actually quite well-designed and its artificially doesn't come into attention until a bit later on (almost immediately, actually, but you don't really think about until the things get weird). The movements are chunky but not really that noticeable. It is off, but not much to annoy. I mean - when you have to lip-sync such song - the head is going to move like that even if you are an actual living breathing creature - it is that kind of a torture.

So - Lou Reed is staring at the viewer from behind his cool and cheap sunglasses. There is an infinite blackness in the background. The look on his face begs for Judge Dredd's helmet because it is an atrocity. He looks tough as in "too tough to dance".

His head moves as if the neck got stiff and also numb. There is feign and shoddiness in the movements. The more he moves his head around - the more "uncanny valley" feeling you get. But there is nothing really going on - so there is also a growing tension of expecting something to happen.

The train of thought watching this is looking like this: "- fighting; the timid tune; soniferous; horrid 'n appallin' words - you speculate upon that feeling - in order to be dragged away to your adapted apparition...".

Right before the boredom gulp shifts from an intention to action, things start to happen. Lou Reed's uncanny valley head takes off the glasses and he does in style. And then, in an unexpected expected turn of events, things go in a slightly "Hellraiser" direction. The hands, which are definitely real human hands, start to tear off the skin from the head. For some reason, it is oddly satisfactory and even displeasedly beautiful.

Here's how this sequence looks like:

• The hands are tearing off the cheeks;
• show off the teeth;
• tear off the skin on the temples;
• tear off the tip of the nose ;
• tear off the hairpiece;
• tear away the rest of the nose ;
• then go the ears ;
• then go the brows;

What you are left to witness is the machinery of the head. Those eldritch eyebulbs and that rube goldberg face construction. It feel weird to look at it, even though there is nothing really appaling.

And then, as a finishing stroke the hands are ripping off the jaw and you now it looks even more like some retroactive Hellraiser tribute.

•  and fade out.