WOULD YOU LIKE SOME FEEDBACK?

"Most of you won’t like this, and I don’t blame you at all"

- Lou Reed, cover notes to Metal Machine Music, released July 1975

"An appalling rip-off"

- Critic William Howard in the Boston Globe, 1975

"Worst album by a human being"

- Rolling Stone 1975 end-of-year poll

"Anybody who got off on The Exorcist should like this record"

- Lester Bangs, Creem Magazine, March 1976

"A vast industrial howl"

- Magnet: Real Music Alternatives

"Confronting Metal Machine Music from front to back in one sitting is an experience both brutal and numbing"

- Allmusic Guide

"An exhilarating listen"

- Pitchfork, December 2017

*

One of the most polarising and misunderstood albums in rock history just turned 50, prompting a stylish re-issue for RSD 2025.

Comprising four sixteen-minute sides of distortion, feedback and noise without a trace of a human voice, Metal Machine Music was a late-night solo experiment undertaken by Lou Reed in his New York apartment. Using guitars, guitar amplifiers, microphones and a four-track tape recorder, Reed set up the instruments with different tunings and propped them against the amplifiers. The noise known as feedback began… and continued. The neighbours must have loved it.

Reed was, of course, familiar with feedback.

"I had always loved that sound. I did tons of shows with the Velvet Underground where we would leave our guitars against the amps and walk away. The guitars would feedback forever, like they were alive. Metal Machine Music was just me doing that—lots of it." *

Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth is a big fan, and freely acknowledges the influence of MMM on his own guitar sound. Moore contributed quality liner notes to the swanky 50th Anniversary re-issue. He insists MMM is "utterly listenable" when positioned, in musical terms, within the context of "Experimental, Drone, Noise, Musique-Concrète, Aleatoric, Anti-Music recordings." This neatly explains how Lou’s art project bemused and enraged fans of "Walk on the wild side". MMM almost cost me my first record shop job after I insisted a customer requesting "Lou Reed’s latest" actually hear a sample on the shop stereo. After he left, silent and ashen-faced, the owner was distraught. "That was probably our only chance to sell a copy!" he wailed. And indeed, MMM had one of the highest return rates in recorded music history.

So here I am—at my own request— presenting MMM once again.

The executive summary is this:

Metal Machine Music is a guided meditation for a fucked-up, increasingly dystopian world. Like the evening news, social media, attack drones and AI it is simultaneously terrifying and exciting.

Lou Reed never backed away from his feedback magnum opus. He knew it had a lasting impact on avant-garde and noise music and that for a select group of intrepid musical adventurers^~ it would continue to blow minds for generations.

For everyone else, it’s the record to put on when you want all the guests to leave your party.

**

* David Fricke. Notes to the 2000 CD re-release of Metal Machine Music (Buddha Record, BMG, RCA).

^~ In 2002, Berlin-based experimental ensemble Zeitkratzer transcribed and performed MMM. In 2014 they released a comprehensive acoustic interpretation of Metal Machine Music. This version—utilising woodwinds, brass, strings and percussion— encompassed all four parts of the original album. It is amazing.

***

© Bruce Jenkins—June 2025