I'm Waiting for the Man

The energy here is almost violent in its momentum — a chugging, hammering rhythm that sounds like the city itself, the subway rattling beneath streets. The guitar playing has a raw, trebly urgency, and the drums push everything forward with no interest in finesse. Reed's vocal is nasal, adenoidal, utterly unbeautiful in the most deliberate way possible, and that's the whole point: he's singing about waiting on a corner in Harlem to score, and glamorizing it through conventional vocal technique would be a lie. The song captures a very specific New York of the late 1960s — a city of hustle and transaction, where the distance between the downtown art world and the street was smaller than anyone in either world liked to admit. There's a tension in the waiting that the music embodies physically: the relentless repetition creates actual anticipation, and the release never quite comes in any satisfying way. It is proto-punk before punk had a name — the primacy of attitude over technical proficiency, of specificity over polish. The Velvet Underground were not the first band to sing about drugs, but they were among the first to sing about the mundane mechanics of addiction rather than its mythology. This is a song for walking fast through a city, jaw set, with somewhere specific and slightly questionable to be.