[If] you can hear [Lou Reed's best songs] at all, it's through bone conduction, like your own voice. Not even the Velvets' unique pulsating beat and highly danceable rhythms could make such intimacy into mass entertainment. The ordinary rock star stances of dominance and doper cool are easy enough to swallow, but Lou based his self-assertion on the hidden undersides of those attitudes: passivity, melancholia and the dubious ecstasies of self-destruction…. Nobody wants to identify with that kind of bad news….

Shock was never the only resource in the Reed repertoire: There's a great street voice, poetic complexities in simple lines, enchanting melodies and screaming energy, and terse guitar electronics which perfectly express the tension in real human fingers….

Lou's solo emergence under the wing of Dave Bowie relied more on personality than his music, evoking an explicit gay posture and animalistic bad taste…. [Walk on the Wild...