“The dead don’t die.” – Jeff Tweedy
Whoever believes that a 58-year-old man can’t rock out any more hasn’t heard (or has heard and hasn’t understood) Jeff Tweedy’s new song “Lou Reed Was My Babysitter” from his 2025 triple album Twilight Override.
The symbolic title of this song alone is worth volumes as it encapsulates an American way of life, for good and ill, in five words.
Anything with Lou in it has to be great, or near-great, to justify the use of his name and this song is.
Tweedy is a Chicago artist and rock and roll, no matter what else anyone says, was born in Chicago, and Chicago alone.
That fact is a fact because of two Chicago men who were rock and roll artists before such a thing existed.
Their stage names were Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf.
(Both of these men came out of the same general part of the US South originally so in that sense one can say that rock and roll was/is a child of the South. But it was in Chicago that they both perfected and disseminated their art.)
Rock and roll is, first and foremost, about THE ATTITUDE. It must combine raw (not overproduced), artful, art-filled, and rebellious in one package. Or disguise.
See the pictures of Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and Bob Dylan for examples of The Attitude at its best.
Or Lou Reed. (Or The Band or Zeppelin or The Clash or Nirvana or Lana Del Rey…)
ART is NOT about one artist copying another artist. All that kind of behavior ever amounts to is sad, and bad (in the bad way), art.
The artist must take bits and pieces from all kinds of different arts and artists (and other sources), and then she or he must combine and synthesize all those myriad different bits into something that is recognizable and brand new (unrecognizable) at the same time.
The best disguise wins when it becomes no longer a disguise.
Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf invented rock and roll before there was such a thing.
Everyone else you can name, from Bill Haley to Little Richard to Chuck Berry to Jerry Lee Lewis to Elvis Presley, or anyone, came afterward.
Muddy and Howlin’ were rock and roll artists before there was such a thing.
In that sense and many another, these two are artists on the scale of Dali and Picasso. And, given rock and roll’s worldwide impact, maybe greater than D and P (almost). Given the effect they had on the world at large, they can also be mentioned in the same breath with Beethoven. Their work is likely to last as long as poets like Robert Burns, John Donne and John Keats.
Jeffy Tweedy’s new song “Lou Reed Was My Babysitter” lives up to that legacy, and does it justice, as does his whole new triple album, Twilight Override. (Not every single song on the album, on its own, does, but the whole thing as a whole thing most certainly does.)
The dead don’t die, indeed.
PLAY IT LOUD!
PS: Hank Williams was also a rock and roll artist before there was such a thing; that’s why Leonard Cohen said Hank is “a hundred floors above me in the tower of song.”
literally stories 
Dale
This connects the then to the now. I fear that the good music will go underground because there is nothing but processed junk like Velveeta at the top. Rock is now “classic”–even punk and hip hop have been homogenized. No more street poetry. Just complaining to the populist ear.
This hows there is hope. Although the real underground has much fewer idiots making noise!
Leila
LikeLike