I've always had the feeling that there is considerably less to Lou Reed's work than meets the ear. Members of the "thinking" pop press—often down in the depths of the ninetieth floor, at least in regard to their own social consciences after one lavish publicity lunch too many—immediately took to Reed from his earliest days with the Velvet Underground, and they seemed to fall all over each other in proclaiming him some new kind of 33-rpm François Villon, alternating their tsk-tsks with a goggle-eared attention to his every new grunt. This must have been because his songs often dealt with drugs or homosexuality or the bitterly desperate street life of teen-age burnt-out cases. That the songs often had what seemed to be autobiographical tidbits strewn through them served only to add to the titillation, and consequently Reed has been the reigning in-house decadent for some...