WALK ON THE WILD SIDE – Story of the Month (from March 2013)
For those in the know, Lou Reed's remarkable hit "Walk on the Wild Side" – which peaked at #16 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1976 – is a sleazy romp through the world of artist Andy Warhol. As a member of the Velvet Underground – the house band of Warhol's legendary studio The Factory – Lou Reed was certainly a familiar denizen of the Andy Warhol milieu. However, this background was primarily in-jokes that most listeners knew nothing about, nor did they need to: The song's under-stated musical arrangement provides an ideal setting for Lou Reed's deadpan delivery of lyrics about an entire litany of taboo subjects – transsexuality, drugs, male prostitution, and oral sex. And that's not to mention the chorus line – "And the colored girls go doo dah doo, dah doo, doo dah doo, doo dah doo . . . " – and the use of gay slang like "backroom" and "soul food" (the latter in the line ". . . looking for soul food and a place to eat").
Speaking of under-appreciation, don't listen to the film critics who slammed the third entry in the Men in Black franchise, Men in Black 3. This one has all of the cleverness that was largely missing from the second film (though I have come to enjoy that one as well after the fourth or fifth viewing) and features time travel back to 1969, where Andy Warhol is portrayed as an undercover "man in black". I thoroughly enjoyed MIB 3 myself.
(June 2015)
