Lou Reed Major Accomplishments

Lou Reed was many things, a visionary, a musician, a revolutionary, and a beacon of hope to outcasts everywhere, but much of this was masked in an image that he created for fans of a hardcore, off-the-rails rocker. He was the first to make the image of an urban New Yorker cool. The creation of this image came from a culmination of bits and pieces of every place he went and every person he met. Much this inspiration was drawn from where he grew up in Brooklyn, Syracuse University, Andy Warhol, and New York City. His long battle with drug and alcohol abuse also affected his behavior and music.
Lou Reed, born Lewis Reed, grew up in a Jewish household just outside of Brooklyn New York (Bio.com). He was born on March 2nd 1942, if one were to hold stock in astrology, this would make him a pices, a person guided by their feelings and emotions rather than facts. As a preteen and teenager he began to develop mood swings going from one extreme of the spectrum to the other(Bockris, 1). He also began to show feminine characteristics and proclaimed to his family and friends that he was
The town of Freeport was considered “suburban utopia” (Bockris, 7). If you can imagine the young, budding rocker growing up within the confines of this area, not being able to escape the squeaky clean image of it all, you can begin to see why he would rebel so extremely against it. The town began to stand for the establishment he hated. It was almost disturbing to him that he had been forced to grow up with his shy and boring father in a stereotypically middle class fashion(Bockris, 8). Although his dad was shy and without much of a personality, he did have a dry and biting sense of Yiddish humor, “A Yiddish compliment is a smack, a backhand. It’s always got a little touch of mean” (Bockris, 9). This didn’t come off as humor to Lou so much as personal attacks and began to turn his emotions inward as he developed a vivid interior world (Bockris,