According to my Spotify data, I listened to The Velvet Underground & Nico, first time ever, on 20th October 2012. That was near the beginning of a period in time when I was really trying to check out what was considered to be history’s classic albums, using besteveralbums.com as a guide. Rate Your Music must have been around. I’m not sure Album of the Year was a thing. Best Ever Albums came to me in a Google search, and it’s been serving me well since then. TVU&N was pretty highly ranked in that best ever albums chart at the time, from what I can remember. And again from the data, it seemed I liked the album a lot, because I went through it once more in December 2012, listened to it in patches through 2013 and ’14 too. I gained my favourite tracks from the record through those listens. I’ve previously written about ‘Sunday Morning’ and ‘There She Goes Again’, but ‘Femme Fatale’ and ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’ gets double thumbs from me too. Gained more of an appreciation for those two along the way. But to round off the TVU&N coverage and The Velvet Underground as a band on the blog is the album’s fourth track – today’s subject – ‘Venus in Furs’, which I’m sure I got into on the second listen at most.

Every song on TVU&N had a Wikipedia article back in those days. They still do now. And I like to do my research about any music I end up listening to. So I clicked on the link for ‘Venus in Furs’. The page mentioned how the lyrics contain themes concerning BDSM, and lo and behold, while going through the song, I found that to be very true. Lou Reed sings about the dark mistress figure dressed in “shiny, shiny leather” who tends to their subject’s sadistic pleasures with their whip and belt. And I’m thinking, in 1967, surely no one else had even dared to write a song like it. That was the year which saw the Summer of Love. But with TVU&N, The Velvet Underground showed the dark, seedy side of society that was still lurking in the shadows while everyone was caught up in peace and free love. ‘Venus in Furs’, to me, sounded like a bit of a statement in that regard. I’ve always had a scene in my mind of the sadist crawling through a desert towards the mistress described in the song, who just happens to be giant in size. A bit like the lady in the ‘Go with the Flow’ video by Queens of the Stone Age. It’s all in slow motion too. I don’t know. To me, this song has always sounded like dry heat. I see someone sweating, looking for water when I hear this song. And I guess here, the sadist is very thirsty in their own unique way.

“Boom, chk, boom boom, chk, boom boom, chk,” and so on and so forth. That was meant to be an onomatopoeic rendition of the song’s rhythm. I like it. Very simplistic and tribal-like, very appropriate for the song’s subject matter. Makes the scene described within sound like a ritual of some kind. With Lou Reed on guitar, other guitarist Sterling Morrison handles the bass and plays following Mo Tucker’s simple drum pattern. Puts an emphasis on those bass drum strikes. Reed’s guitar has strings that are all tuned to one note, a style of tuning known as ‘Ostrich tuning’. Reed came up with the name. It sounds cool, for sure. I think the instrument in the song that steals the show is the electric viola, played throughout, by John Cale. The loudest instrument in the mix, it drones during the verses, occasionally swooping upwards sharply – Is that a glissando? I don’t know my theory. Cale will play a little solo of some sorts in the small instrumental breaks that occur. The viola feels really effective though, when the song changes key when it gets to the choruses. The viola’s droning on that one note during the verses, which are slowgoing enough as it is, that when Cale shifts to another note for the first time a minute-and-a-half in, it feels like a massive shift has happened in the song’s proceedings. It’s awesome. There should be more Velvet Underground songs on this site. What are there, six? Too little. In another universe, it’s much different.