NEWS: Brad Warner's Hardcore Zen: Lou ReedÂ’s Hudson River Wind Meditations

CULTURE: Brad Warner's Hardcore Zen: Lou Reed’s Hudson River Wind Meditations

When I heard Lou Reed was doing music for meditation, I had to check it out. I got into Lou Reed’s stuff fairly late in the game. When I was a teenager someone played me the Velvet Underground’s "Heroin" and I thought Lou sounded like a low-rent Dylan rip-off. And he's singing about heroin. How decadent and cool, maaaan. Whatever. Heroin chic never did anything for me. It wasn’t till I was in my mid-twenties when I heard "Venus In Furs" — which is only three songs later on the very same record — that I became a convert. If only I’d let the whole album play through way back then. I’ve been a fan ever since, though you gotta admit that when Lou Reed is good he’s great but when he’s bad, ugh!

His new CD, Hudson River Wind Meditations, is not one of his bad ones. But itÂ’s very different. I used to be into what they called ambient music in the late 70Â’s. I especially dug Fripp and EnoÂ’s No Pussyfooting album. That albumÂ’s worth getting just for the cover alone if you can find it on LP (good luck). Sadly, my copy is long gone. No Pussyfooting set off the trend for music that was supposed to be interesting enough that you could pay attention if you wanted, but bland enough to blend into the background if you just wanted to have a pleasant sound playing while you did something else. No Pussyfooting doesnÂ’t really succeed because it still has some of the atonal aggressiveness characteristic of EnoÂ’s work with Roxy Music and FrippÂ’s King Crimson. Later ambient musicians smoothed this out and are less interesting to me because of it. Later on the New Age Music movement further blandized everything and I lost interest completely.

The new Lou Reed record comes after a few decades of ambient albums — possibly including Reed’s own Metal Machine Music. So it’s a far smoother affair than those early pioneers could have accomplished. And obviously way smoother than Metal Machine Music. But it’s still a Lou Reed record, so the attempt to make something that’ll totally blend into the background isn’t wholly successful. The tracks are generally fairly mellow, but the booming bass and some atonal elements add a nice touch of what the Brits call astringency to the sound.

But the thing that really held my interest in those early ambient records was that they usually used repeating tape loops on which the sound tends to degrade in beautifully ugly ways. I liked listening to how the sounds changed with every pass. Unlike Metal Machine Music, whose liner notes detail every piece of equipment used on the record, there are no specific indications on Lou Reed’s new CD as to how the sounds were produced. But I’ll take a wild guess and say that he manipulated sound samples on his computer like everybody else does. Unlike tape loops, computer sound loops repeat in precisely the same way every time. Boooring. But I guess the idea is to be as boring as possible, so I can’t really complain. Well, I can complain, but most folks will probably find this an improvement — the way most folks today think drum machines, beat quantization and electronic pitch correction improve music. They don’t. They make everything sound like it was played by machines and sung by animatronic robots. But that's another day's rant.

Anyway, this is supposed to be meditation music. One of the questions I always get at my talks about Zazen is, “Can I do Zazen meditation to music?” I remember once someone asked my first teacher that and his answer was an uncharacteristic flat “No.” Tim used to discuss most questions and give detailed explanations. But that time the answer was just “No,” which always stuck with me.

See, cuz before I started doing Zazen I used to use those old ambient records to kinda sorta meditate to. It was totally half-assed meditation, really. Mainly I just laid on my back with the speakers on either side of my head and dozed off while the records played. But I thought I was meditating. At the time I wondered why Tim was so down on musical meditation. It took me a while to work it out. So let me try and explain.

When meditation is done to music, the music inevitably dictates the content of the meditation. I don’t like music during Zazen for the same reason I don’t like so-called “guided meditation” or even the practice in some Zen centers of giving “dharma talks” while people are sitting Zazen. These kinds of practices can be pleasant enough. But when your meditation is guided by someone else, your experience ends up being molded and shaped by that person’s thoughts and ideas, even when expressed through music or other sounds.

According to the sticker on the front of the CD, Lou’s new record is intended to help “explore inner spaces” while doing Tai Chi or meditating. But if you use music to do this the “inner spaces” you explore are not your own, but inner spaces set out for you by somebody else. In Zazen we’re going for something altogether different. We want to observe ourselves exactly as we are, not move in a direction guided by someone else — even (maybe especially) if that someone is supposedly “Enlightened” or whatever.

I don’t know a whole lot about Tai Chi, or whatever kind of meditation Lou does, but Zazen might be something different from what most people think of as “meditation.” You really can’t do Zazen to music. I mean there’s certainly no law against throwing on a CD while you sit in your lotus posture. But that’s not Zazen. I’m not even fond of those “natural sounds” CDs some people use for their practice. Zazen should be done without any such distractions.

The places most of us live these days are fairly noisy. The busy street in West Hollywood I live on is a corridor between an area filled with lots of young people and an area filled with lots of bars — a recipe for noise if ever there was one. But I still wouldn’t put on Lou Reed’s CD or even a Fripp and Eno record while I did my practice.

ItÂ’s best to do Zazen in as quiet a space as you can find. But if you have to put up with noise, observe how you react to that noise. Of course, if itÂ’s too noisy you might have to move to another space or wait for the noise to die down. But itÂ’s usually not necessary to try and cover it up or shut it out. In Japan my teacherÂ’s dojo was next to a playground and our day-long Zazen retreats were on Sunday afternoons. On summer days with the windows all open the squeals could be deafening. But we still sat through it and the practice was better because of that.

All of this is not to say that sitting in lotus posture listening to boring ambient music isnÂ’t a valid way to appreciate it as art. ThatÂ’s a whole different thing. I wouldnÂ’t really call that meditation, though. For my part, while I might put on Hudson River Wind Meditations while cleaning house or even for general listening pleasure if IÂ’m feeling perverse, I wouldnÂ’t use it or any other music for meditation.

As ambient music it's not quite as fun as No Pussyfooting or even some of Eno's other ambient records. But it ain't bad. It's certainly better than anything else in the New Age Music section. Still, if you're new to Lou Reed I'd recommend Rock and Roll Animal or Loaded by the Velvet Underground first.

IÂ’m gonna be in San Francisco a whole lot next week. Here are the dates:

Tuesday June 12th at 6PM at the VIRGIN MEGASTORE in San Francisco
Thursday June 14th, 7PM at GATEWAYS in Santa Cruz
Friday June 15th After Dinner Talk at the SAN FRANCISCO ZEN CENTER Zazen at 5:30, Dinner at 6:30, Talk at 7:30
Saturday June 16th 7 PM at COPPERFIELD'S BOOKS 140 Kentucky St., Petaluma, CA 94952
Sunday June 17th at San Quentin Prison (this isn't open to the public, but all inmates reading this are invited!)

AND on Wednesday July 25th, 2007, my movie CLEVELAND'S SCREAMING! will have its world premier at the EGYPTIAN THEATER in Hollywood. So mark your calendars!

Plus, the very first record by my old hardcore band 0DFx (Zero Defex) has just been released by Get Revenge Records. This 7 inch vinyl record contains our 1983 demo tape full of thrashinÂ’ Minor Threat/Negative approach style hardcore with a drop of psychedelia thrown in for good measure. Supplies are dwindling. Get yours today!

Brad Warner is the author of Hardcore Zen and Sit Down and Shut Up!. He maintains a blog about Buddhist stuff. If you're in Southern California and you want to try some Zazen for yourself, he has a group that meets every Saturday in Santa Monica.

i wish i was in Santa Monica on Saturday.

As a side note - the equipment notes on Metal Machine Music are a joke. Reed did the whole record with a 4-track tape recorder and a few guitars. The rediculously overblown gear list on the LP was a parody of the trend to list all the esoteric gear used on audiophile recordings, which MMM is very much not. Awesome fricking record though, the double-CD reissue from a few years back is well worth picking up if you don't have the LP anymore.

While I'm not into any meditation practice, I tend to agree with your point about meditating & music. Apart from the fact that the music is created by someone else, there is the issue that it is a recorded document (even the nature sounds recordings) of what sonically transpired in a different time and space to the one one is in NOW. And meditation is all about keying in to the PRESENT. John Cage used to say that a record or tape isn't music, and he was right in the sense that (at the time he said it, at least) it is a document of performed music (that has changed in the day of multitrack tape recording and processing and editing, beginning even with Musique Concrete).

But what I have been really digging lately is the recordings of Eliane Radigue, a French electronic composer and musician. She has been a practicing Tibetan Buddhist for over thirty years, and gave up music during the early course of her spiritual studies... but the stuff she creates now is about as perfect for meditation as you're likely to find, and probably among the best ambient music out there. It's ultra-minimalist, with faint drones and hisses and whirring sounds, drawn out over a long period (one to three hours or more) which shift very slowly. I love minimalist music, and Radigue's music makes even some of La Monte Young's pieces sound busy by comparison. I highly recommend anyone into ambient music check out her recordings. Her "Jetsun Mila" album just got reissued as a double-CD and it's as good a place to start as any.

Elian Radigue in Wikipedia

Elian Radigue Lovely Music label bio

Hm. I'm under the impression that that could be a horrible experience. (Maybe that could serve to indicate something, hm.)

"You know, some people got no choice
And they can never even find a voice
To talk with that they can even call their own
So the first thing, that they see
That allows them the right to be
Why, they follow it
You know, it's called bad luck"

Listen to Lou Reed's Street Hassle, then meditate.

Must be neat to see things "exactly" as they are...

The interview with Lou Reed in the current issue of LA Yoga Magazine is an interesting read, he discusses the new album and his Tai Chi practice --here is a LINK to the transcript.

As you say, it all comes down to what you call meditation. I hesitate to refer to my zazen as meditation because people always assume that you're gonna be meditating "on" something, which is of course the opposite of what zazen is all about...

But as to Lou Reed, thanks for the link BraveArt. I've been wondering what he was really up to, since the Laurie Anderson thing and all. Incidentally, I always thought Rock and Roll Animal was kind of a sell-out, with all the stadium-rock guitars and such; I really like Street Hassle, Berlin, even Transformer, and of course the Velvets. Then like a lot of artists, he got a lot less interesting when he sobered up (i.e. New York). Hmmm.

But I've always understood that Monster Metal Machine Music was something he knew was garbage when he made it, just to get out of that RCA contract. I read somewhere he claimed he'd never listened to it all the way through. This new one sounds like something he made for himself, so I may want to check it out.

brad, i have a feeling you're not radical enough. which is why i decided that my other sources are better than you. and not to pick apart your opinions.. anyway, i suggest you read some advaita or even better a guy named aziz kristof. supposedly he agrees with dogen 100 percent but then comes back and says that he wasn't "fully" self-realized. not sure his reasoning but he dedicates a capter i beleive in his first book (which i've been waiting for for like 6 monthes to get. damn amazon)... hopefully your mind we'll be able to get past the words he uses such as beloved and grace and heart. but if for anything you can appreciate some very very valid criticism on a man who you rever so much (you know what i mean)

"exactly" "you" "somebody" ???

for anyone looking to move onto bigger and better things...

http://www.nirvikalpa.com/content.php?page=advaita

Why does this read like you work for this dude?

"Groupthink."

I love ambient music, I love eno. I'm sure Reed's new album is pretty cool.

But your right. . . I really am not that big on listening to music during Zazen it defeats the whole purpose. . .and I'm not a fan on guided meditation either, even in Yoga classes, not into it anymore. I think It's because Zazen is the practice for my path, I can do Zazen in a crowded noisy place but the minute its set to music, or some teachers guidance its over not Zazen anymore.

no, brads brashness has just rubbed off on me, that's all