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- <text id=92TT0320>
- <title>
- Feb. 10, 1992: View Points:Music
- </title>
- <history>
- TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1992
- Feb. 10, 1992 Japan
- </history>
- <article>
- <source>Time Magazine</source>
- <hdr>
- VIEW POINTS, Page 76
- MUSIC
- Wrestling with Truth
- </hdr><body>
- <p> This devastating chronicle reminds you that no one in all of
- rock hangs tougher than Lou Reed. There are all those
- metalheads and strutters, but they're poseurs up against the
- rage and uncertainty that infuse Reed's new MAGIC AND LOSS
- (Sire/Warner Bros.). None of them have the dark courage to take
- on the themes Reed wrestles with here: waste, cancer, death. One
- of rock's most unyieldingly personal writers, Reed has taken to
- setting down, in music, what amounts to speculative
- autobiography. This record has the brutal immediacy of a diary
- kept by someone who cannot look away from the truth. Magic and
- Loss, largely inspired by the death last year of Reed's friend,
- the superb songwriter Doc Pomus, uses spare instrumentation and
- simple language ("The same power that burned Hiroshima/ causing
- three-legged babies and death/ Shrunk to the size of a nickel/
- to help him regain his breath") to stare down mortality and peek
- into the abyss. The title says it best. The subject is loss, but
- the music, dark and pitiless, is still magic.
- </p>
- <p>By Jay Cocks.
- </p>
-
- </body></article>
- </text>
-
-