The Totally Awesome 80s Pop Music Trivia Book (Totally Awesome Eighties Trivia)

February 13, 2008 | By Doug In Pop Music |

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The Velvet Underground (Icons of Pop Music) Customer Review: Are the Velvets as serious as this book? Yes.
I’ve collected all the Velvets literature that I know exists and yet I found this book to be a fresh take on the band that made New York cool. There are so many angles to consider that you begin to wonder how such a complex group like the Velvets could produce something so simple as Sister Ray. This book explains it. I had to check out some things but I found them to be right, and there are pages of footnotes that are really fascinating in themselves. There’s some annoying stuff – was Nico really so witty? – and I don’t get the ending, which is too smart for the likes of me, but on the whole it’s a great ride, like Lou Reed’s ‘Heroin’.
Customer Review: The Velvets. A serious Witts-ism
It must be a near impossible brief to write something aimed at both music undergrads and the `general reader’, which this book claims to do but I think Richard Witts pretty much manages to pull it off. `The Velvet Underground’ is the first in a series of books on pop icons, (Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell and others are to follow) which not only examines the musical, social and cultural influences on `The Velvets’ but which proves to be at one and the same time a downright enjoyable read.

Although set against the background of Manhattan’s down town drug culture, this is no seedy romp through the under belly of the 1960s New York music scene. This is a serious book in which just about every aspect of the band’s genesis, demise and subsequent influence on punk, post punk and rock music is covered. Each Velvet in turn is subjected to detailed scrutiny in terms of background, his/her gravitation to New York City, musical interests and experiences, influences felt, and contribution to the band and its radical sound-world.

Cale’s Experimentalism and his association with the avant-gardist La Monte Young and The Theatre of Eternal Youth, probably receives the most overtly academic analysis, but Reed, Morrison, Tucker, Nico, Warhol and Morrissey are also fully scrutinized in a clear, cogent and well argued challenge to much of the myth and hyperbole which has grown up around this `confluence of misfits’ (Witts).

Serious it might be, but anecdotes a-plenty and some sharp comments stop it slipping into too-dry academic commentary. (There’s a very funny Witts-ism following a Nico quote which I won’t reveal. You can read it for yourself.) So, as long as the general reader who picks up this book has a somewhat serious interest in music or The Velvets, I doubt he will be disappointed. And if the undergrads ever get around to opening the cover, even they might come away having learned something pertinent