Deja Lou

It’s déjà vu all over again in New York City. 1988: The bankrupt Fear City NYC of the 1970s had given way to the go-go ’80s, with many missing the fruits of the Wall Street boom. AIDS ravaged the city, unabated, and a rash of violence and crime fueled by the crack-cocaine epidemic made for a grim underbelly of urban blight and neglect.

- TOM FINE

2020: A global pandemic runs rampant, killing thousands of New Yorkers, accompanied by an economic collapse (except on Wall Street) and social unrest. The crime rate spikes. People are fleeing the city, and there’s a strong sense of sliding backward into chaos.

In 1988, the late, great Lou Reed surveyed the scene, retreated to his New Jersey country house, and turned out a masterpiece of an album, New York. Reed’s songs were minidramas of urban decay: biting, sardonic, empathetic, and sensitive to the problems of average people trying to live in a seething cauldron of disease and violence. The album resonated with the 1989 rock-radio audience. It went gold. “Dirty Blvd.” was an MTV hit. Reed toured the album through Europe and North America. His career was set on a successful new trajectory that would last, on and off, for the rest of his life.

Many of the conditions described in New York are with us in 2020 NYC. Perhaps sensing the album’s newfound relevance, Rhino Records has issued a deluxe remaster including two live renditions of the album (one of them a video recording) and a disc of outtakes, rough mixes, and singles. Also in the package is a 2LP vinyl reissue, expanding the original one-LP, nearly hour-long album onto 4 sides. If you buy the package from Rhino, you get a “special bonus” cassette version.

New York was produced by Reed and drummer Fred Maher, taking a sharp left turn from his Brit-pop band Scritti Politti. Made in the legendary New York studio Media Sound, it was recorded mostly live-to-tape in Studio B, a medium-sized space located in the basement of a former Baptist church.