LOU REED IS DEAD

 

Lou Reed, the principal singer in the Velvet Underground, a band that had profound impact on the high-I.Q., low-virtuosity stratum of alternative and underground rock around the world, has died, his literary agent, Andrew Wylie, said on Sunday. He was 71.

Mr. Reed died on Long Island, Mr. Wylie said. He is survived by his wife, Laurie Anderson, a songwriter and a performance artist. “He was as great an artist as it’s possible to be in my opinion,” Mr. Wylie said.

Mr. Wylie said he believed that Mr. Reed’s death was related to a liver transplant he had earlier this year.

Mr. Reed played the sport of alienating listeners, defending the right to contradict himself in hostile interviews, to contradict his transgressive image by idealizing sweet or old-fashioned values in word or sound, or to present intuition as blunt logic.

“I’ve always believed that there’s an amazing number of things you can do through a rock ‘n’ roll song,” he once told the journalist Kristine McKenna, “and that you can do serious writing in a rock song if you can somehow do it without losing the beat. The things I’ve written about wouldn’t be considered a big deal if they appeared in a book or movie.”

Sober since the 1980s and a practitioner of Tai Chi, Mr. Reed had a liver transplant in May in Cleveland. “I am a triumph of modern medicine, physics and chemistry,” he wrote in a public statement upon his release. “I am bigger and stronger than ever.”

“I have never thought of music as a challenge — you always figure the audience is at least as smart as you are,” he wrote. “You do this because you like it, you think what you’re making is beautiful. And if you think it’s beautiful, maybe they think it’s beautiful.”

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