The Velvet Underground - White Light/White Heat

Verve

January 30th, 1968.

The Velvet Underground's second release 'White Light/White Heat' whirls in irreverence and taps tunes in malevolent cadence. Warhol's forward thinking and forward seeking angels pushed the boundaries of what was regarded to be 'music'. Adding notches of influence in the lineage of the music tree, The Velvet Underground unknowingly payed forward for decades to come.

The Gift with it's ominous bassline and seemingly sweet story groovingly lull the listener into a false sense of security - 'It's a love story, how beautiful'. In regular VU fashion things take a inevitable twist. WL/WH would become a major influence on acts further on down the pipeline. The likes of Sonic Youth would take a page out of the book of Sister Ray with it's progressively entropic soundscapes which spiral down into madness. The aesthetically jarring journey that it falls down is both demented and magical. Things move forward on the back of 'crazy'. The influence of said crazy things aren't usually felt in real-time - these things work their way into the collective psyche through incremental shifts. Maybe the subject matter of a particular song breaks from the realm of taboo and becomes a household feature - it happens in many ways.

Far more chaotic than the first release, a release which had it's hand in chaotic spurts itself - take 'The Black Angel's Death Song' from VU & Nico and apply it to a consistent ethos across a record. Scrips-and-scrapes linger along the journey of WL/WH. Distortion and bouts of feedback line the halls. What you constitute its purpose to ultimately comes down to you, the listener. Is it necessary at all? Or is it an integral part of the soundscapes which the VU camp insist on getting in at each and every angle? It's hard to tell where to draw the line.

White Light/White Heat had, and has, its fingers in many modern pies. As time goes on, said pies seem to compound and multiply ad infinitum.

January 30th, 1968.