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 it’s very different. I used to be into what they called ambient music in the late 70’s. I especially dug Fripp and Eno’s No Pussyfooting album. That album’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 doesn’t really succeed because it still has some of the atonal aggressiveness characteristic of Eno’s work with Roxy Music and Fripp’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.

It’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 it’s too noisy you might have to move to another space or wait for the noise to die down. But it’s usually not necessary to try and cover it up or shut it out. In Japan my teacher’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 isn’t a valid way to appreciate it as art. That’s a whole different thing. I wouldn’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 I’m feeling perverse, I wouldn’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.

I’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 thrashin’ 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.