“In the 19th century, with the invention of the machine, Noise was born. Today, Noise triumphs and reigns supreme over the sensibility of men.”
Luigi Russolo, “The Art of Noises” (1913)

“It’s extraordinary, because all those years ago it was considered a career ender. And it almost was, believe you me.”
Lou Reed, on Metal Machine Music

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You shouldn’t be reading this. And that’s not an admonition, by the way. You go ahead and read whatever you want. It’s just that, by all rights, the subject of this discourse should have been relegated to a footnote in the history of Lou Reed and of rock ‘n’ roll, in general.

At this point, nothing more should need to be said about Lou Reed’s cacophonous 1975 double album, Metal Machine Music. It should have sunk without a trace, relegated to the dusty corners of the Great Pop Music Archive, where it would butt up against the works of such obscurities as the Godz, Gentle Giant, Human Beinz, and Bubble Puppy.

But a funny thing happened on the way to obscurity. Like a bad rash—probably one of the few scornful comparisons that hasn’t actually been bestowed upon it—Metal Machine Music lingers on, more than three decades after it’s initial release. And what a release it was.

Nowadays, Reed has morphed into something like an elder statesman of rock ‘n’ roll. But in 1975, he was only about five years into the somewhat turbulent solo career he’d embarked upon after leaving the Velvet Underground. In terms of commercial success, it was a spotty half-decade.

Among the lowlights (commercially, though not necessarily critically), Reed’s eponymous first album, the much reviled (or is it just me?) Music to Slash Your Wrists and Guzzle Drain Cleaner To, aka Berlin, and Lou Reed Live, the second of a pair of concert albums that mostly took old Velvet tunes and gave them a snazzy faux-metal finish.

On the plus side, Rock N Roll Animal, by far the better and more successful of those two live albums; Transformer, arguably Reed’s most successful album, thanks to the classic rock warhorse, “Walk on the Wild Side”; and Sally Can’t Dance, an erratic but reasonably successful release and the immediate studio-recorded predecessor to Metal Machine Music.

Over the years, there’s been no shortage of speculation on Reed’s motives for recording and releasing Metal Machine Music. Was it drug-addled lunacy, a decidedly unsubtle ploy to weasel out of his record contract, or a combination of both factors? Or was it a serious avant-garde expression that was way ahead of its time?

It might be revisionist history on Reed’s part, but through it all he’s mostly stuck to the notion that Metal Machine Music is a serious work of art. In a pair of 2007 interviews, he expressed surprise that “it’s still around” and dismissed the idea that it was a contract-breaker as a myth, albeit one that was “sort of better than the truth.”

But what was all the fuss about, anyway? What caused record buyers to return the album in droves in 1975 and RCA, Reed’s record company, to yank it from store shelves—as the story goes—after only three weeks?

After all, some would say (present company included), that the god-awful mopefest known as Berlin was infinitely more grating—though for different reasons—than Metal Machine Music. But these things are subjective after all. A great deal of ink has been squandered churning out astoundingly purple prose that attempts to describe exactly what Metal Machine Music sounds like, but forget about all that (or see the handy sidebar, if you must).

Metal Machine Music is a bunch of noise (that’s fact, not value judgment), mostly derived from guitar feedback. I could try to pin it down more precisely, but that sort of thing has been done to death and, besides, describing music is kind of like eating a menu. Let’s just call Metal Machine Music the musical equivalent to Dustin Hoffman’s visit to the dentist in Marathon Man and leave it at that. Or, as the late Lester Bangs put it, “If you ever thought feedback was the best thing that ever happened to the guitar, well, Lou just got rid of the guitars.”

It would be quite a stretch to call Metal Machine Music pop music. But even though he’s veered on a few occasions, Reed has always been firmly grounded in pop. That field was seeing an increased use of noise, dissonance, feedback and the like, prior to 1975, but there had never been anything like Metal Machine Music.

There were scant few precedents for this sort of thing and they were comparatively mild. They included the Beatles‘ trippy collage, “Revolution 9”, Hendrix’s infamous rendition/deconstruction of “Wild Thing” at the Monterey Pop festival, and some of Reed’s own squalling work with the Velvets, most notably the sludgy 17-minute opus known as “Sister Ray.” But when it came to sheer tooth-grinding intensity, none of those could hold a candle to Metal Machine Music.

Prior to 1975, works that weren’t necessarily designed to piss people off but which did an admirable job nonetheless tended to originate in the field of avant-garde, experimental, or “serious” music—or whatever you want to call it.

As the 20th century unfolded, Western music increasingly found composers keen to push the boundaries of dissonance, with listeners and the musical establishment often pushing back. One notable example of the latter tendency was the debut of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, considered so scandalous when it premiered in Paris on May 29, 1913 that a riot broke out in the concert hall.

By 1940, listeners were more conditioned to cacophony and Stravinsky’s work was used in Disney’s animated film, Fantasia, apparently without inciting riots in movie theaters. The same year that saw the Rite of Spring riot also saw publication of an essay called “The Art of Noises” by Luigi Russolo. One of a gang of Italian Futurists who raised hell with the conventions of art, music, film, and literature in the years leading up to World War I, Russolo called for “a new musical reality, with a generous distribution of resonant slaps in the face, discarding violins, pianos, double-basses, and plaintive organs.”

Russolo declared that “the infinite variety of ‘noise-sound’ [must be] conquered.” To this end, he and his cohorts set about creating various noise-making instruments called intonarumori. When introduced into concert halls, these stirred up at least one memorable riot.

Among the many who took up Russolo’s cause of merging noise with more conventional music was George Antheil, who was renowned for brandishing a pistol at his often tumultuous concerts, events in which instrumentation included sirens, bells, and airplane engines and propellers.

Other early experimenters with noise and unconventional instrumentation included the likes of Edgard Varèse, numerous practitioners of musique concrète, and John Cage, though the latter was probably best known for a four-minute and 33-second “composition” in which no music is played.