Going Electric

by Sydney Mayfield Pollack

This essay appears in Issue 4 of the Mars Review of Books. Visit the MRB store here.

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Lou Reed: The King of New York

by Will Hermes

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 560pp., $31.50

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“We are the true children of Frankenstein we were raised on electricity,” Patti Smith wrote, in her 1974 Creem Magazine review of the Velvet Underground’s 1969 live album. She was talking about feedback, about drums that vibrate your chest, about frequencies that echo into your physiology. And she was talking about Lou Reed, as though he were electricity personified—white light, white heat. “Anything electric is worth it,” Smith wrote.

This was not the attitude held by Mary Shelley’s original “child” of Frankenstein. In her novel, Dr. Frankenstein’s monster, his Creature, was animated when Dr. Frankenstein ran electric volts through a corpse assembled of limbs from various cadavers. By the end of the book the Creature, after killing his creator, succumbs to the guilt and alienation that characterized his unnatural existence and floats out into the Arctic sea on an iceberg, vowing to kill himself.