The Velvet Underground, Heroin and New York City

Here is something I found on that Velvet song - Heroin

"Heroin" is the most controversial and most often misunderstood song in the Velvet Underground catalog. Far from glorifying the use of drugs, "Heroin" is the internal monologue of a junky, exploring the psychology of personal destruction and drug abuse. In Lou Reed's horrifying vision, using heroin is really an attempt at a kind of perverse salvation, a relief or escape through death. "I have made a big decision", sings Reed over a slow, elegiac guitar and viola line, "I'm gonna try to nullify my life". Over a thumping, driving beat paralleling the pounding heart of a junky on his heroin high, Reed conceives the nullification of his life in terms of escaping from the city, singing:

Away from the big city
Where a man cannot be free
Of all the evils of this town
And of himself and those around
And I guess that I just don't know
And I guess that I just don't know

The narrator erroneously believes that drugs will liberate him from the strict confines of the city and the hordes of people surrounding him. As the song builds, the droning, electric viola becomes more harsh and dissonant as the beat gets louder and louder and Reed's visions of New York become more and more nightmarish:

Because when the smack begins to flow
I really don't care any more
About all the Jim-Jims in this town
And all the politicians making crazy sounds
And everybody putting everybody else down
And all the dead bodies piled up in mounds

The vital point about "Heroin", however, is that the song is not about drugs but rather about the natural desire to escape from all the pain and uncertainty of life. The site for this trial, this grand test of endurance and fortitude, is the street, is New York City. More importantly, Reed, the song's lyricist, paradoxically sings a long, elaborate, eloquent song about how much he doesn't care. The quest in "Heroin" may be literally away from the city, but in spirit is more towards a full sense of self and identity. Lou Reed never left New York City -- the grand spiritual quest must be played out on its streets, not on some imaginary "great big clipper ship" or in some fanciful, nonexistent land. In Lou Reed's imagination, New York City is the place -- the stakes are high and only the tough can make it. In the words of Frank Sinatra, "If you can make it there...."

The Velvet Underground's entire first album brims with images of the city, positing it as a rough, unforgiving place, as a site of experimentation and perseverance. "Run Run Run", a chugging, rumbling guitar track, operates in much the same way as "Sister Ray" -- it presents a cast of New York characters trying to make it on the streets. The key difference, however, is that "Run Run Run" steeps the degenerate street life in religious imagery of sin and salvation:

Teenage Mary said to Uncle Dave
I sold my soul, must be saved
Gonna take a walk down Union Square
You never know who you gonna find there

While a Guliani-era New Yorker may find it hard to believe, in Reed's time, walking down to Union Square was a dangerous, and hence exhilarating, activity. The sense of the unknown, the mysterious, the unpredictable, factors into Reed's conception of the city as the place where things happen, where Teenage Mary's soul can be saved. "Run, Run, Run" tells the tale of another salvation seeker as well, Beardless Harry:

Beardless Harry, what a waste
Couldn't even get a small-town taste
Rode the trolleys, down to Forty-Seven
Figured if he was good, he'd get himself to heaven

Again, New York, and not the "small-town", is where the down and out can strike it big. Whether or not this is true in reality is of no importance -- in his creative imagination, Reed envisioned the streets of the city of the place where such redemption is at least possible.