For Lou Reed, 'Lulu' and 'Metal Machine Music' proved vision was pure

The music world is in mourning over the death of Lou Reed, the indescribably influential singer, composer and bandleader. He was one of the first to marry rock insouciance with high-art ideas: reducing the form of a guitar band to its absolute minimum, while sounding unprecedented and scary and occasionally even lovely.  He put raw drones and white noise into the rock-instrument canon, and wrote about smack addiction and transvestism 40 years before "Molly" and rappers in Givenchy kilts seemed ...

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