Okay, look. I’ll be honest: saying that Lou Reed and Metallica’s Lulu is better than Kanye West and Jay-Z’s Watch the Throne is a pretty tough sell. One made millions of dollars and contained “Niggas in Paris”, and the other didn’t. One is catchy, the other is willfully insolent in its abrasiveness. One features two men at the absolute top of their game doing what they do best, and the other features a sixty-nine-year-old Lou Reed screaming about how he’s a table. So yeah. Tough sell.
Hit the skip to continue reading.We’re talking “I was taking a wide stance” levels of tough sell here. But here’s the thing: In a year stuffed to the brim with collaborative albums, nothing managed to be as daring, uncompromising and completely fucking alienating as Lulu. Years from now, many will look upon the album as an abject failure1. And for the absolute enmity that it garnered, Lulu should be celebrated.
In a weird way, Lulu is exactly what you’d expect from the Lou Reed of 2011. He is, at this point, completely batshit crazy—see his 2004 album The Raven or his recent outburst in a Starbucks that involved him using an iPad, spilling a scone, yelling at no one in particular and then storming out of the door, as documented in a sublime series of tweets by Tom Scharpling. Lou Reed has had a pocket full of fucks since about 1968, and he hasn’t given one out yet. It also makes complete sense that in 2011, Metallica would participate in an album such as Lulu. They literally have nothing to lose. The worst that was going to happen is their fans, who have hated them since the late eighties, were going to continue to hate them.
If you haven’t heard the album, well, you’re in for a treat. It’s more or less eighty minutes of Lou Reed kicking some Based Freestyles over Metallica doing their best guess of what improvisatory music means in 2011, and the results are surprisingly fantastic. It’s an album that warrants—nay, demands—a close listening, even if you’re only trying to figure out exactly what the fuck is going on with the thing. It rocks hard in parts—try the second half of the krauty “Cheat on Me” on for size if you don’t believe me. It drones operatically, as it does in closer “Junior Dad”, which I’d stack up against any experimental track this year. At other points, it’s completely fucking hilarious.
Now, a lot of people will deride Lulu for its unintentional comedy. The idea of Lou screeching out, “I’m a small-town girl!” over and over again on opener “Brandenberg Gate” is a masterwork in high comedy (James Hetfield enthusiastically echoing him in the background doesn’t doesn’t do anything to assuage this, either); however, Lou Reed is probably the greatest songwriter of the twentieth century, so you just kind of have to trust him on this one. If that doesn’t work, just read some Barthes2 quietly to yourself as you giggle your way through “The View”.
Watch the Throne, meanwhile, is safe, a controlled exercise in flaunting material wealth. There’s no experimentation, beyond them inviting Frank Ocean to stop by for a couple of guest spots, no reaching out of their comfort zones. It’s all flash, with nothing behind the bulb—it’s as if Kanye and Jay decided that they were going to show you a room full of really nice, expensive things, but they didn’t exactly understand why all of the things in the room were so important, or why they necessarily should be grouped together. Watch the Throne represents such gross capitalistic excess that even the beats themselves become bling—do you have any idea how much that Otis Redding sample must have cost to make “Otis?” Kanye and Jay-Z certainly did, and that’s why they just looped that fucker over and over again while they rapped about having seventeen different Benzos and smoking cigars with a probably-dead Fidel Castro. It’s one-percent rap3 in an era where that sort of thing should be tarred and feathered.
At the end of the day, what ultimately separates Watch the Throne from Loutallica is that with Yeezy and Jigga-man, critics deemed the thing abjectly awesome. With Lulu, it was more like a race to the bottom. That makes sense. Kanye and Jay-Z designed an album that appeals to everyone, even people who don’t like rap.4 Meanwhile, Lulu isn’t even made for people who like Metallica. It’s essentially a Lou Reed album where Metallica is his backing band. Only after understanding this fact can you be truly free.
At the end of the day, Loutallica is not music for people who only listen to fun music. That’s not saying it’s boring, per se (though for many, the album will likely be just that). It’s challenging. You’re going to have to listen to some drones, maybe some orchestral wankery. Accept it. Love it. Music isn’t supposed to give you what you want, all of the time. Watch the Throne is founded upon this idea. Loutallica is not. And if you’re more interested in being pleased all the time, then I hope you enjoy your musical Victory Gin, plebes.
1 – It was actually named the worst album of the year by Metacritic, and if there’s one way to gauge the quality of music, it’s definitely through math (not really).
2 – Barthes coined the phrase, “Death of the Author,” which more or less—oh, just go to Wikipedia.
3 – Of course, the very idea of “Music by the one-percent” is a problematic one, as you can look at Lulu as an even more egregious example of this than Watch the Throne— Lou Reed and Metallica are both extraordinarily rich individuals, and the very act of making an album that they fully understood would appeal to a small number of people is the kind of move only afforded by the fact that they can afford to lose money on such passion projects. It’s kind of like when Damien Hirst spent $10 million essentially Bedazzling a human skull and called it “For the Love of God,” except way less literal.
4 – Some, including The Kid Mero, might argue it was designed especially to appeal to those who don’t really like rap.