lou reed and the killers

Love the Killers, love em...now that I've outed my bias I can get on with my rant about their latest compilation. There's some bizarre take on hero worship going in at least two bands I'm quite fond of, and those who are idolized are tied together by a 35 yr old collaboration.

Basically Lou Reed and David Bowie seem to have gotten themselves entrenched into the careers of the Killers and the Arcade Fire respectively. But this link goes back longer than this decade.

Way back in '72 Lou Reed's second solo album, Transformer, which was also his first solo commercial sucess, was produced by David Bowie who was recording Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. I love both these albums, they're fantastic, but they're catchy pop at the same time. They are what they are. I've read a few things about this period of collaboration and it sounds like it was a big self-love fest with Bowie (who was just getting his career started) in awe of Reed due to his work with the Velvet Underground and Reed was similarly smitten by Bowie, the next artist pushing those boundaries (arguably in the same vein (no pun inteneded) as the Velvet Underground).

So fast forward 35 years to 2007 and Bowie has been instrumental in helping our favorite band from Montreal get signed on a label (around '04) and has been appearing in concert with them intermittently. And now the Killers have collaborated with Lou Reed on their latest product. The video for this song is unbelievably idolatrous. Brandon Flowers, the front man for the Killers, spends the video looking for Reed in an empty house. While Reed periodically appears in a messianic motif, mouthing words of the chorus as they are sung by Flowers. Is it 72 all over again?

So what does this mean? I'm not sure it means a whole lot, other than I wouldn't expect an artist forth his salt to let his career fall to the wayside like Bowie and Reed seem to have, in favor of pushing younger acts. Though, to be fair, Bowie and Reed aren't exactly known for producing consistantly excellent albums. They're not exactly of the Dylan, Neil Young, or Lightfoot calibre. Perhaps it's not so much about them letting their careers falter as dragging down two of pop music's brightest lights. The killers may not be the most original band but there's a lot of passion there, and they really do remind me of Queen (in all the right ways), and the Arcade Fire are so talented and so unique compared to everything else out there.