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Review Of Lou Reed's Song 'Walk On The Wild Side'

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Always intertwined with current events and signs of the times, music has long been a telling relation with the society from which it is created. At any point in history, one can usually look to the music of that time to reflect what is going on in the world. This holds especially true for the Civil Rights era in the United States. In Lou Reed’s song “Walk on the Wild Side,” he sings the following at the chorus:
“Said, hey babe, take a walk on the wild side
And the colored girls go
Doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo
Doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo” (Lou Reed, 1972, Side A).
These are the lyrics can be heard in Morgan Neville’s documentary “20 Feet from Stardom” (Leight, 2013). This sets the tone for the rest of the documentary– an exploration …show more content…
O. Scott stated, “Some singers who came up in the highly disciplined rhythm-and-blues milieu of the 1960s felt liberated when white rock acts like the Rolling Stones came along and encouraged them to be, as more than one pointedly puts it, ‘blacker’” (Scott, 2013). While this seemed to be a step in the right direction between the popular, usually white, rock stars and black backup singers, even rock stars like Bruce Springsteen and Mick Jagger acknowledged that for all the praise they gave the backup singers, their voices were but a stepping stone for their own road to fame, while the backup singers had to continue living with the reality of being a black person in ‘60s and ‘70s …show more content…
She found the meaning of the song to be “more than a little alienating” (Scott, 2013). Clayton’s approach to singing on a wildly successful song that had nods to racism was secretly a personal protest that she saw as a matter of her own choice, one that she would sing with as sarcastically as possible, stating,
“We got your sweet home Alabama. But we gonna sing you anyway, and we're gonna sing the crap out of you. If given the opportunity, we will demonstrate our value beyond any reasonable doubt, so much so that going forward, when you start to define singing, it's going to be based on this transformative sound coming out of these backup singers' mouths. My way of being an activist in our struggle as a black people was to do the music” (Friesen & Neville,

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