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Nightmare Fuel / The Velvet Underground

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In the 1960's there really was no other band like The Velvet Underground. They scared a lot of people away with their music, but also with their haunting stage image: Cool Shades, everybody dressed in black and lighting that made them perform mostly in shadows while weird images from Andy Warhol's films were projected on the screen behind them. But, of course, it all started with their music:

Examples:

The Velvet Underground & Nico

  • "Venus In Furs", the first Obligatory Bondage Song in rock history.
    Now bleeeeeeeeeeeeeeed for me!
  • "Heroin" is a great way to unwillingly raise your heart rate, gain paranoia, become short of breath, feel like a needle was just jabbed into your arm...
  • "Black Angel's Death Song", about Death.
  • The roaring / grinding noise in "European Son".

White Light/White Heat

  • "The Gift" wherein likable hero Waldo mails himself to his long-distance girlfriend out of loneliness and fear that she might be cheating on him (fears which are proven right), when he gets there his girlfriend and her friend can't open the box he is in, so they get the cutter...
  • "Lady Godiva's Operation", about a botched lobotomy of a trans woman.
  • The lengthy noise jam "Sister Ray" can be quite unnerving.
    • The lyrics are famously indecipherable, but appear to involve a botched drug deal and/or orgy and a random sailor getting shot to death.
    • The song's drone was so intense that Lou Reed claims that the engineer walked out and just let the tape keep rolling.
The Velvet Underground
  • "The Murder Mystery": a creepy song where the band members all talk together at the same time. The refrain is sung by Moe Tucker, whose childlike high voice provides an eerie atmosphere to an already unnerving song. What makes the song particularly stand out is the fact that it's the only Avant-Garde Music on this otherwise quite conventional record.

Others

  • When they went into lengthy live improvisations featuring copious amounts of Drone of Dread, this trope was sure to result.

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