Hanif Abdurraqib at Bookforum:
BEYOND AN OLDER SIBLING’S headphones wringing the sweet, distorted fuzz of the Velvet Underground out and into my ears, my second most notable encounter with Lou Reed was in the pages of the Lester Bangs anthology Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, which has a whole section dedicated to Bangs and his relentless sparring with Reed. A book within a book, almost. There are two interviews that would, today, seem alarming in both their approach and the nature of their candidness, with Bangs demeaning Reed’s pal David Bowie, Reed taking the bait, Bangs shouting that Reed is full of shit. The interviews go on like this, Bangs and Reed clashing, arguing loudly, or with an on-page ferocity that occasionally veered into affection. Reed clamors on about the drugs he consumes to survive, Bangs takes Reed to task for his songwriting’s increasing laziness. Ultimately, in the essays Bangs wrote about Reed, without Reed in the room, we find that these clashes, brutal and invasive as they might have seemed in the interview form, were born out of a writer being present with a subject he admired deeply, growing frustrated that the mythology he’d made of the subject wasn’t being manifested in the person he had been so fascinated by. This frustration inspired some terribly cruel writing that eventually led to a permanent falling-out between the two.
more here.