Oh Yeah, I Forgot

Advancement Theory cofounder Britt Bergman reminded me the other day to pay attention to how amazing Lou Reed's "Transformer" is. And it truly is amazing. Sometimes it's easy to focus on the Advanced stages because they are fun to talk about, but it's important (as far as the theory goes) to remember that just because some older musician does a bunch of ridiculous stuff it doesn't mean he or she is Advanced. It's easy to forget that the reason that the theory came into existence in the first place was to Britt's and my effort to understand why these musicians, and Lou Reed specifically, who had done so much overtly good stuff would make seemingly bad choices all the sudden. We arrived at the conclusion that Lou Reed deserves the benefit of the doubt because he wrote maybe ten (fiteeen? twenty?) songs that would have to be considered among the best rock songs written in the last fifty years. So the next time you think to yourself that Lou Reed is no good, just think about "Perfect Day," "Take a Walk on the Wild Side" and "Satellite of Love." It would be pretty good to have written those three songs in a career, and he did it on one album. It just seems logical to me that he must know what he's doing. That's all.