“One must be absolutely modern” – Rimbaud
Today we need to talk about The Velvet Underground’s third studio album, a self-titled 1969 meditation on love, longing, and ‘the sorrows of the contemporary world’. The gratuitously hip album cover photograph was taken by legendary Warhol Factory archivist and photographer Billy Name. Let’s discuss.
Seen here: The Velvet Underground as the scions of the bohemian aristocracy, borrowing strands from their cultural forebears in the beat movement and infusing their mien with a distinctly modern, brazen, sensibility. They are participants in the formation of their own mythology, shamelessly inserting themselves into a legacy of pseudo-intellectual expression.
Latent with a bourgeoisie atmosphere, we can imagine our quartet sipping on aged whisky and getting high on discussions about deliciously upmarket topics, using keywords like commodification, nihilism, and methodology for effect. Revelling in their cultural affluence and Kerouac-ian street cred, they feel equally at home at an abandoned warehouse or on a flea-ridden motel room couch. These are the types who feel peculiarly comfortable plagiarizing the theories of obscure mystics and long-passed philosophers, utilizing a bizarre intellectual alchemy to produce new strands of meaning.
Is it pretentious? Yes. Is it delightful? Yes.
And what to make of their intellectual bearings? In their role as producers and transmitters of culture and ideas, The Velvet Underground certainly fits into the realm of the intellectual class as defined by Kurzman and Owens in their seminal paper ‘The Sociology of Intellectuals’.
In his influential 1927 paper ‘The Treason of the Intellectuals’ Julien Benda defined his subjects as those whose ‘activity essentially is not in the pursuit of practical aims’. We can certainly draw a parallel between Benda’s speculative definition of the intellectual and the Velvet Underground’s own cerebral self indulgence.
And if a streak of self indulgence is fundamental to intellectual self-representation then the Underground are on board and drinking the intellectual Kool-Aid! Pictured here, their studied insouciance is paired with a meticulous degree of aloof disregard for the peasantry of the mass culture. Reveling in their squalid grandeur, they appear alluringly distanced from the world of pedestrian concerns. Casting sideways glances at the rest of us, the Underground lounge precociously, dreaming up ways to reconcile aesthetic theory with the institutional theory of art. Yawn. They’re reaching for a cognac or an espresso ristretto while the rest of us pause for a beer.
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Selected Tracks
Candy Says What Goes On Pale Blue Eyes Jesus Beginning to See the Light I’m Set Free After Hours
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