"
Lou Reed was unusually hard to pin down in the 1980s. After the gay-rights-rallying cry of
Transformer in 1972, he spent a decade mating queerness with rockn’roll and flirting with his own homosexuality in public statements, an identity that seemed to culminate in 1979, when he came out to
Creem Magazine. Hardly a year later, he was celebrating married love on
Growing Up in Public and, by 1982, heterosexuality in more general terms on the nonetheless excellent
The Blue Mask. Reed’s subject matter changed because his life did—he got married in 1980—yet his newfound pop persona as a successful heterosexual capitalist coincided with the rise of Ronald Reagan, who was murdering gay people with his refusal to acknowledge the AIDS epidemic while helping to make greed and white-collar success culturally ubiquitous. Reed never supported Reagan’s policies, but he gave the impression of a star wearing the garb of his own era, scrawling an ode to his New Jersey country home as easily as he once caked on glam rock make-up. And then he made
New York, a record of unmistakable conviction, one so direct and literary, erudite and rageful that it resembles no protest music written before or since. ..."
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