Thursday, November 09, 2006

Lou Reed: Advanced Irrritant 2.0

This is awesome:

"The special guest at tonight's Web 2.0 Summit was none other than Lou Reed, and you couldn't have picked an artist less inclined to tolerate the nerdy audience's rude chatter and blogging throughout his show.

"Reed took the stage with bassists Rob Wasserman and Fernando Saunders and within minutes it became apparent that the crowd was not going to let the music stop their conversation. After his first two songs, 'What's Good" and 'Gassed and Stoked,' Reed declared: 'You got 20 minutes. You wanna talk through it, you can talk through it.'

"'I can turn the sound louder and really hurt you,' he added. 'Frank, turn it up.' The sound got louder and people looked uncomfortable.

"[Reed said] 'I was on St. Mark's Place and I thought, someday there'll be a cyberspace, and an Internet, and I'll be introduced by my Kung Fu brother [AOL Chairman and CEO] Jon Miller.'

"He...finished with a song that he said no one had heard, nor could they buy; it's for an upcoming movie produced by AOL."

That is some classic Advancement right there: embracing technology, making fans uncomfortable, hanging out with CEOs, martial arts, and selling out. Also, after he treated the fans that way, they tried for ten minutes to get him to do an encore. He refused.

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