With insights by the band’s former members and friends, this film takes its job seriously – even if it shies away from discordant notes
Maybe no subject more fits the phrase “you had to be there” than the Velvet Underground, the band that emerged as part of a richly interdisciplinary artistic adventure in the American late-1960s. Not so much a rock band, more a way of life.
They were part of a complex social ecosystem of experimental artists in New York, named after a book about the sexual subculture by Michael Leigh. They played … pop music? Rock’n’roll? Proto-punk? Avant garde? An interviewee here in Todd Haynes’s documentary talks about the co-existence of R’n’B and Wagner. The band was fronted by guitarist and lyricist Lou Reed. Or conceivably it was the sometime singer Nico, whose name was presented separately from the rest of the band on a “feat.” basis, without being pre-eminent, unlike Diana Ross and the Supremes or Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.
