Rock & Roll

There's a moment in "Rock & Roll" where everything the Velvet Underground did becomes clear in about eight bars: Sterling Morrison and Lou Reed playing guitars against each other with disciplined aggression, Mo Tucker's drums hitting with the force of someone who learned from no one and therefore invented her own language, and Reed's vocal suddenly lifting out of his characteristic drawl into something approaching genuine exhilaration. The lyric is autobiography compressed to myth — a girl saved from suburban numbness by hearing music on the radio, the most American story in rock — but the Velvets treat it with their characteristic refusal to sentimentalize. The production is deliberately unpolished, the mix slightly confrontational. It belongs at the beginning of a lineage that runs through punk, indie, and everything that decided minimalism was a virtue rather than a limitation. Best played as the moment a night comes alive.