The Saddest Song Ever Written: "The Bed," by Lou Reed

No, it's not the "Hungarian Suicide Song." In 1973, Lou Reed was riding high. He had scored a reasonably popular single in the last year off of the LP "Transformer," produced by glam rockers David Bowie & Mick Ronson . That song was "Walk on the Wild Side," and it charted at #16 in the U.S. and #10 in the U.K. What would Lou Reed follow-up his commercially successful glam rock LP?

As Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore so aptly put it, Lou Reed followed-up "Transformer" with the most depressing album ever made. I would add that it also included the saddest song ever written on it: Berlin. The album tanked.

Making the album was so depressing that producer Bob Ezrin, who produced Pink Floyd, Alice Cooper, and a gaggle of others, told Reed to "put the tapes in a drawer and forget about it." Everyone plays on Berlin: Steve Winwood, Jack Bruce, the Brecker brothers, Aynsley Dunbar (fresh from Frank Zappa), Steve Hunter, and even Tony Levin! Almost all of them hated the album and the experience.

Before this album, rock just didn't deal much with truly adult themes, and its time had come. After Berlin, things would never be the same. It reflected the horrible disillusion of 1973. Watergate was everywhere, and the war in Vietnam was ending in a very ugly way. Heroin was everywhere. Cynicism was rampant. I don't know how you write a song like "The Bed" at the age of 30-31. You have to lose a lot of people before you even begin to understand what loss means, but it's a testament to Reed's sensitivity to understand the themes in "The Bed."

I never would have started if I'd known

That its end this way But funny thing, I'm not at all sad
That it stopped this way
This is the place where she lay her head
When she went to bed at night
And this is the place our children were conceived
Candles lit the room brightly at night
And this is the place where she cut her wrists
That odd and fateful night
And I said, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, what a feeling
And I said, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, what a feeling
("The Bed," Lou Reed, 1973)

In all of American songwriting--at least--I cannot think of a sadder song. Sure, there are a few uplifting moments on Berlin, but they're hard-won. That's just like life, and it's OK to recognize this in our culture. Just two-years-later Reed would foist "Metal Machine Music" on the world, once again rejecting superstardom. Yet, he was just doing what he had with the Velvet Underground--his own thing. Maybe Lou's burned-out nowadays, but he's always going to be the voice of the Velvet Underground and the man who wrote "The Bed."

MISS BIG FAKE BOOBIES, SREBRENICA, IRAQ, AND OJ

"The bombing of Yugoslavia in the spring of 1999 allegedly to stop ethnic cleansing and prevent the Balkans from becoming once again the powder keg of Europe has backfired. Kosovo has become exclusively an Albanian province with the exception of a few stalwart Serbians in the Mitrovica area who live surrounded by barbed wire and are threatened daily with murder and mayhem by their Albanian neighbours. The Balkans, since the end of the bombing, have been in constant turmoil caused by the KLA terrorist activities." --James Bissett, former Canadian ambassador to Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Albania, 1990-1992.

“It's very expensive to be me. It's terrible the things I have to do to be me.” --Anna Nicole Smith


Our Apologist Mainstream Media--Remember the O.J. trial? I do, and I want that memory erased for good. Give me some of that Total Recall erasing, like it was never there. It's good that her tits are big enough to hide the rapidly disintegrating wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but what about "the Juice"?

That moron was used to hide most of the facts of the Balkans war that the Clinton administration was waging, done primarily to dismantle Yugoslavia as a third-path economy, rather than a "humanitarian-invasion." There is no such thing, it's a fiction.

Where was the media coverage of the invasion of Rwanda during that same period? There wasn't much, because the place wasn't seen as strategically important or valuable at that time. But at least we rewarded Osama Bin Laden with a precinct and gave him a Bosnian passport during the Balkans conflict.

Correct, you're a sucker if thought there was really a systematic ethnic-cleansing in the Balkans. Ours--and other NATO forces, along with mercenaries--murdered more human-beings than the Serbs could ever muster. But, our crimes don't exist, only other countries do that. The one thing

Ironically, we can thank George W. Bush for stripping-away this delusion forever, with his openly-criminal usage of illegal rendition, torture, murder--he's given the game away, and there's no more denying that these tactics are common features of our foreign policy. More revelations are coming.

Look at Dafur: has anyone invaded them to stop a real genocide? War crimes are a part of war, but the atrocities in Srebrenica--all Bosniak Muslims--amounted to the murders of 8,000 people. Sorry, but as bad as this sounds, that's nothing compared to the death tolls in Iraq, and that's just one example of American war crimes. All "ethnic-cleansing" did was to provide a pretext to invade, which NATO knew would occur when Croatia and Slovenia notified them through Germany that they wanted to split from Yugoslavia: "Germany granted recognition to Slovenia and Croatia on 18 December 1991, while other European community members and the US followed suit," states the Nations Encyclopedia.

This is also from www.nationsencyclopedia.com, and is followed by what is the standard line on NATO involvement with this sentence: "The international community stood firmly in support of the preservation of Yugoslavia."

Strange, since everything they did in the run-up to the Balkans war made this an impossibility.

At the same time, though, where are the leaders of the international community who also helped to bring events in the Balkans about? Have we ever heard one word of apology or acknowledgement of failure or responsibility from anyone in leadership positions of Unprofor, the United Nations or the major governments that they got it wrong? ...We are rightly looking for full accountability from the parties in the region. I am sorry that we are not doing the same for ourselves. (William D. Montgomery was special representative of the U.S. president and secretary of state for Bosnian Peace Implementation in 1996-97, U.S. ambassador to Croatia from 1998 to 2000 and ambassador to Serbia and Montenegro from 2000 to 2004.) (IHT, 07.12.2005)

NATO charter members at that time knew full-well that the atrocities were coming, and merely allowed a force of 375 UN peacekeepers to defend the village and its inhabitants. But the Serbs suffered greater-losses at the hands of NATO:

If what happened to Kosovo Albanians and Bosnian Moslems was genocide, what of the treatment of Orthodox Serbs? After NATO's air war, 200,000 were driven from Kosovo. Most who remain cower behind barbed-wire barricades in Mitrovica. Altogether, 2 million Serbs were expelled from Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo, and 240 of their churches were destroyed. When this happens to anyone else, it's called ethnic cleansing and cultural genocide. The tragedy has its roots in the early 1990s, when the West decided Bosnians and Croatians were entitled to their own states. (Free Republic, 12.03.2001)

Yeah, but what does this have to do with Anna Nicole Smith and OJ? They provide media "white-outs", a distraction. Yes, you take a the disastrous lives of worthless celebrities who are on-hand at that particular historical moment, and you make them a SHIBBOLETH. Anyone like these vermin will do, just so long as they're vulnerable due to their own behaviors and their infliction on others. Feel inflicted? Manipulated? I do. If O.J.'s head exploded, or he was run-over by a truck, I wouldn't care.

Anna Nicole Smith? Her life was worthless compared to someone who's being put-upon by our troops in Iraq, or anywhere our foreign policy has dominion. That's right: American foreign policy needs people like this to function nowadays, pathetic. And why do think Hillary Clinton won't apologize for her vote on authorizing the use of force in Iraq?

Has her husband ever apologized for the murdering of 500,000 Iraqi children during the 1990s? Taken together, Clinton's and Bush's policies towards Iraq amount to attempts at genocide, yet nobody bats-an-eye. America gets the world it deserves. They get Joe Lieberman (who called Muslim extremists fighting Serbs "freedom fighters") and George W. Bush.

Revised 08.31.2008

Free Republic on Bosnia/Croatian war:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/582809/posts

International Herald Tribune on Srebnecia's 10th Anniversary:
http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/07/11/opinion/edmont.php

Former Canadian Diplomat James Bisset's Take on the KLA:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/BIS111A.html

Nationsencycolpedia.com on Croatia:
http://www.nationsencyclopedia.com/Europe/Croatia-HISTORY.html

A Serbian Take on Osama Bin Laden and the War on Terrorism (From 2001):
http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/News/Trifkovic/NewsST091901.htm