Love Quote by Lou Reed

Lou Reed’s little burst of devotion reads like a map of his real musical politics: he’s siding, loudly, with the beautifully unruly. Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry weren’t just jazz musicians; they were lightning rods for the idea that “wrong” notes could be a higher kind of truth. When Reed says he loves “the way those guys play,” he’s not praising polish or virtuoso obedience. He’s praising a method of risk: tone that frays, harmony that refuses to behave, melodies that seem to argue with the song while still revealing its nerve.

The repetition matters. “I love… I love… I love…” is fan talk, not liner-note talk, and that’s the point. Reed is stripping away the usual rock-star posture of influence-as-branding and returning to something almost adolescent: obsession. It also functions as a quiet credential. By naming Coleman and Cherry, Reed signals that his own work with feedback, drones, and lyrical grit isn’t just rock provocation; it’s in conversation with a Black avant-garde tradition that treated freedom as a formal principle, not a vibe.

Contextually, this is Reed locating the Velvet Underground lineage where it actually belongs: closer to the Five Spot than the pop charts. Free jazz offered a model for how to build intensity without conventional songcraft, how to make texture carry emotion, how to let interplay and abrasion tell the story. Reed’s admiration is also self-defense. If the music sounds harsh, alien, or “unmusical,” he’s implying, good: that’s the sound of people refusing the safe version of beauty.