‘Hip-hop is the new avant garde’: John Cale on Lou Reed, anger and continual reinvention

He made rock history with the Velvet Underground, produced landmark albums for the likes of Patti Smith and collaborated with John Cage. At 82, Cale’s 18th solo outing proves he’s still making music at the bleeding edgehas a certain presence. It’s not just the still resonant Welsh lilt of his speaking voice or the way he takes his time to settle on the right words, more his tangential way of thinking – about music, songwriting, the world in general.

That “romantic aggression” takes many forms, from the brooding Company Commander, in which he has a pop at “rightwingers burning their libraries down”, to the almost self-explanatory I’m Angry, where the darkly hallucinatory lyrics may – or may not – be about mortality and even express a trace of regret. As ever, he’s not saying. “My songs have an interior logic, but I also think people want to discover things for themselves when they listen to them, just as they would when they read a poem.

That chance meeting with Reed in 1964 led to the formation of the Velvet Underground, whose viral influence would shape the course of rock music for generations to come. The group managed to fuse Cale’s often bracing experimentalism – his use of the viola as a viscerally unnerving component of the group’s signature – with Reed’s songwriting style, which ranged from the raw reportage of songs such as.

Has he ever been tempted to write a song about Reed, who died in 2013, and with whom Cale had a famously tempestuous creative partnership? “I think I have already, however vague they may seem,” he replies, leaving us to do the guessing., on which his experimental approach is most evident. His reluctant departure caused a fracture with Reed that reputedly lasted until 1987, when they spoke again for the first time at Warhol’s funeral.

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