“Romeo Rodriguez squares his shoulders, curses Jesus
runs a comb through his black ponytail.”

That’s one of my favorite lines in a Lou Reed song. It’s from “Romeo had Juliette,” the opening track on Reed’s fifteenth solo album, New York.

While Reed was always preoccupied with and identified with the city, the New York album is a concentrated, focused poetic study of the place that is by turns a heartbroken love letter and a flaying satire: In a song like “Halloween Parade” Reed addresses the AIDS epidemic as effectively as any songwriter ever has, while in “Dirty Boulevard” he rewrites the words on the Statue of Liberty, intoning in a sepulchral mumble:

“Give me your hungry, your tired your poor I’ll piss on ‘em
that’s what the Statue of Bigotry says
Your poor huddled masses, let’s club ‘em to death
and get it over with and just dump ‘em on the boulevard”

Also, Lou Reed’s guitar has never sounded better than it does here.

Lou Reed’s New York is celebrating a 25th birthday this year and it’s one worth remembering. Some folks might say that some of the album’s themes are a bit dated, but, I don’t know — I still hate Rudy Giuliani, don’t you?

Here’s the record in its entirety…

Stay Awake!

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