Good evening, beloved —
For many years now I've been haunted by the documented existence of a so-called “fifth Velvet Underground album”: a curious offering called Squeeze that I'd heard whispers of, but had no ready way of getting my hands on.
Now let's be clear from the outset that Squeeze in no way constitutes the flawed but essentially honorable coda of a once-mighty crew reduced by time and wear to its sinewy core. This isn't “Ripley, last survivor of the Nostromo, signing off,” and carrying on for a bit in the act of doing so. In picking up Squeeze, what you hold in your hands is a collection of unremarkable songs authored by rump Velvet Doug Yule, and performed by a session band that includes him and Deep Purple drummer Ian Paice (!), after the departure or expulsion of every last original member of the band.
It is, of course, an act of highest temerity to call this artifact something which it manifestly was not and could not be, which is a Velvet Underground record. Nevertheless, you want to believe. You want, in particular, to believe that a tranche of all-but-undiscovered songs bearing that name, however disingenuously they may carry it, would produce at least one or two moments of certified glory — a single killer riff, even. (You'd expect that much, at least, to have been acquired by Yule during his years of service alongside Lou Reed, Sterling Morrison and Moe Tucker, if for no reason other than osmosis.) And in our era of streaming music, where rather than tracking down and then shelling out for a low-quality bootleg I have abundant reason to believe will wind up being mortifying, I can simply cue it up on Spotify and sit through it, a single killer riff strikes me as being ROI enough.
Reader, I took one for the team. I put on my best pair of headphones and I listened to Squeeze in a single, unbroken session. My verdict is: travesty. Squeeze apes the lope of Loaded-era Velvets, without absorbing a single one of the things that made even that latter, less-glorious iteration of the band special. Twenty seconds after the last notes of the album's final track faded from the air, I'd forgotten it entirely — the album, that is, not the song.
Yule’s vocals are not the issue. But then, they never were; we might fairly regard his Loaded-era output, subbing for a bored, jaded and 220%-over-it Lou Reed, as the nasal drone that launched a thousand Galaxie 500 songs. No: it’s his complete inability to produce anything memorable, at either the melodic or the lyrical levels, that sandbags Squeeze from its very first moments. It’s not as elementally hostile to the act of listening as, say, the unspeakably dreadful Lulu. It’s just a not-very-good record, all trace of which would have evaporated even more completely than it has were it not for its highly contingent association with one of the most enduringly beloved and influential acts of all time.
In life, Lou Reed often faced the rap that as a lyricist he didn’t add up to much, and despite decades of Louvian bluster (“my bullshit is worth more than other people’s diamonds”), there's more than a little justice to the claim. So there’s no shame in copping to it, whatever ambivalent love you may retain for the man. It’s true: he’s nowhere near the poet of the streets he pretended and possibly believed himself to be. Where Lou shines, though, is in capturing affect, whether it’s the wide-eyed jitter of a downtown kid going uptown to buy drugs, the longing one might feel for a bandmate as deeply damaged as she is drop-dead gorgeous, or the melancholy wonder that comes upon you when you find yourself overtaken by the dawn.
Doug Yule, by contrast, cannot and does not render any of these emotions, or anything like them. He’s a docklands bystander shanghai’d aboard a ship captained by a legend — shouldering the same cargos as his shipmates perhaps, ostensibly bound for the same destinations, but permanently out of his depth from the moment he stumbles aboard. Squeeze is bad enough considered on its own merits, but its fundamental weakness really stands forth most clearly when you compare it against what a consultant would call its “competitive set.”
Mid-’73, right? So as far as fair standards for comparison go, we’re talking Raw Power (February 1973). We’re talking The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (June 1972). And yes: we’re talking Transformer (November 1972). Given the sheer range of these efforts, never mind their collectively redefinitional impact, it’s unforgivable for an album that would dare to show up to the party in this particular drag to be anything less than motherfuckingly splendid.
The one thing Squeeze has going for it, in fact, is its cover, which is just exactly what you would expect that of a great lost post-Loaded Velvets album to look like. In looking at it, you can even squintwise imagine the two or three alternate-universe VU albums that followed it — a selection of familiar New York City icons rendered for the Peter Max era, leaked into our reality from the pages of an equally transreal Jack Womack novel. But that timeline, I’m afraid, is not the one we happen to occupy.
The lesson appears to be this: If Squeeze had in fact contained diamonds dear for you, they surely would have surfaced before now, streaming media or no streaming media. To imagine otherwise is quite possibly to indulge a lust for comfort far better satisfied by undertaking the risk of searching out the new. But the notion that a stash of high-grade VU songs could somehow, through all these years, have evaded the scrutiny of the planet's obsessive musicologists, only to turn up NOS in these much-reduced times? Naw. As an ex-Catholic ex-girlfriend of mine would have put it, “God doesn't love me that much.”
§ It may not be entirely coincidental that I raise the matter of Doug Yule. What I really want to write about today is mediocrity, and specifically about having the courage to embrace one’s own.
By “mediocrity” here, I do not at all mean settling for a half-assed performance when you know you are capable of more and better. The mediocrity I’m interested in is that which results when you’re flat out doing your best, you measure your work against whatever set of standards you intend to uphold, and you can see that it falls short.
Maybe you recognize this state of affairs, maybe you don’t. But it’s something I’m increasingly having to reckon with as I pull into my late forties, having accumulated a body of work I can no longer quite get away with dismissing as juvenilia. The shape of what we might call “the mature oeuvre” becomes clearer with every published work, at least in its basic contours. And if that oeuvre remains notably untroubled by anything resembling actual inspiration — well, then, that’s just how it is. You keep working toward the sparkling masterwork, because you cannot help it. But you also begin to accept that you just may not have it in you.
I imagine that coming to terms with these facts of life is difficult enough for any creative, reasonably ambitious person. It may be especially hard, though, for those of us who are cursed with the discernment to recognize qualities like style, grace and perspicacity when we encounter them, but lack the ability to reproduce them. I mean, presumably Doug Yule didn't set out to loose a turd upon the world with Squeeze; very likely it represented something close to the best he was capable of, given all the tools and powers at his disposal.
Here’s what keeps me up nights: What if I’m Doug Yule? And worse yet, when I read the work of rough contemporaries who really do feel like they’re firing on all cylinders after having shipped yet another article or blogpost that's neither as clear nor as persuasive nor as well-thought-out nor yet as well-crafted as I would have liked it to be: Is this what it felt like to release Squeeze, after having worked alongside the guy who wrote “Sweet Jane” and “Heroin” and “All Tomorrow’s Parties”?
Again, I don’t know if these are concerns that resonate with you. I hesitate to generalize from my own experience, let alone to ascribe less-than-superlative performance to anyone else. It’s not my place. But speaking only for myself, just as poor Doug Yule was not Lou Reed, and could not therefore write songs with a tenth the beauty and resonance of Lou Reed’s, I'm up against my limits; my only question now is what to do about it. And just on the off chance that you have felt the same way from time to time, when your stillest hour falls upon you, maybe you'll find some value in the answers I’ve provisionally arrived at.
Those of us who feel hemmed in by the limits of our talent can surely strive to push those limits a little further out, through study and practice and the development of craft. That’s always worth trying, and who knows what may come of it. Maybe that longed-for breakthrough will come after all, our dogged effort sparking a singularity in which the all-too-familiar furniture of our mind reorders itself in some grandly autocatalytic cascade.
Until that happens, though, maybe mediocrity is something we can learn to live with. It isn’t given to everybody to be touched with brilliance, after all. On a simple statistical level, almost by definition, I would imagine that most of us get through our lives without ever knowing what it feels like to produce a work of creative genius. And maybe that’s OK.
Maybe it’s more important to be useful. And here, perhaps, is the solace of working in a field where collective insight ultimately outweighs the contribution of any individual, however brilliant. It seems to me that a song or a painting or a film is more or less forced to stand or fall on its own. Sui generis and self-justifying, creations of this sort aren’t (or for godsake certainly shouldn’t be) evaluated for their relative utility. If your field of endeavor is anything like mine, though, all your work really needs to do is help someone else down the road achieve the purchase on a problem that had hitherto eluded them. The great work of understanding the world proceeds by increments, and while it can never truly be done, it is nevertheless able to make use of every scrap and fragment that helps it integrate further knowledge. Our contribution to that work can therefore be as simple as laying one idea alongside another, however artlessly this is accomplished, just so long as the juxtaposition strikes a chord in someone else. It can even be as simple as a single word.
And that opens up a generous space of possibility for those of us who dream of leaving the world a better place than we found it, but might not be able to contribute at the level we aspire to. What I tell myself is that there’s a place for mediocrity, for the workmanlike, for the merely competent, and a perfectly honorable one at that. All that matters is that I work in good faith, that the things I publish are as finely crafted as I know how to make them, and that I do my level best to be useful. That helps me summon the courage to keep working, in full recognition of the fact that whatever it is I come up with simply won’t ever be as good as I’d like it to be.
More deeply still, we can be grateful that the world is as complex and endlessly ramified as it is, with an eternal surfeit of work that needs to be done. It makes the odds that someone somewhere will be able to make use of the things any one of us has to offer relatively good. And that thought, in turn, is enough to keep me going through those times I feel most irremediably and intolerably insufficient. May it comfort you as well, should you ever find yourself dealing with similar thoughts or feelings.
Until next Sunday, please be kind to yourself. And do take care of the ones around you.
ag
ldn
This is Dispatch from London No. 44 of Sunday, 30 August 2015, offered to you under the terms of a Peer Production License. You are free to reuse this content, but must acknowledge Adam Greenfield as its author.