Before/After

Listening to New York, the Lou Reed album that got me back into listening to music "seriously" when I found it in a mall in, um, Abilene back in '89, and specifically "Halloween Parade," a song about the cost of the AIDS pandemic in which Uncle Lou never once utters the name of the Illness That Dare Not Speak Its Name. Thinking back to '72, when I got Lou's Transformer album and was annoyed unto death by "New York Telephone Conversation," a song chock full of oh-so-precious Lance Loud Noo Yawk City gay culture references and how, if I were to hear the two songs played back-to-back today, the contrast between the innocence of the earlier song and the knowledge of what it cost on the later one would probably break my heart. It's funny how time can recontextualize stuff for you like that.