I need to do an assignment on a period/particular artist in history and discuss an ideology/philosophy that they share a relationship with. I'm doing mine on the Velvet Underground/Andy Warhol, and right now i'm stuck/unmotivated. Soooo...what general ideology/philosophy did the Velvet Underground mostly influence? I thought you guys, as knowledgeable as you are about such things, could help a poor lil highschooler like me out. Any help would be just dandy and much appreesh'd.

Heroin and drug abuse. That's pretty much all there is.

Yeah, the VU didn't really share an ideology with each other, let alone Warhol. Andy's involvement with them basically amounted to motivation and projecting crappy movies on them while they played.

what billz said.

shoot heroin, make art.

precursor of 'outsider art'?

VU has some imagery and sound with an urban context albeit in
a desperate way. They were sort of the minstrels of Warhol's scene.

As a cultural element they exeisted side by side as a movement, but
I honestly don't know enough about either to understand what philosophy/ideology was behind them. I am sure a little research could enlighten that.

I am sure knots could be tied to write a thesis. I have found in the past that sometimes my theses end up being wrong, off slightly, or open ended with questions(especially in a comparative thesis); which usually I'll admit to in the conlusion so long as enough material is cited/researched to prove the efforts.

[quote="a mighty good leader" Soooo...what general ideology/philosophy did the Velvet Underground mostly influence?[/quote]


do you mean this?


[quote="a mighty good leader" Soooo...what general ideology/philosophy mostly influence the Velvet Underground ?[/quote]

or

[quote="a mighty good leader" Soooo...what general ideology/philosophy did the Velvet Underground project?[/quote]

That's the sort of vacant phrasing that should get you a solid F in a decent school.

You might want to approach the VU (and/or Warhol) as a reaction - or a remedy - to the flower child peace-and-love movement that had been simplified and codified by the media and the masses. Of course, it wasn't really a reaction to that - it was more an inevitable progression in subversive art from Burroughs, Kerouac, and the Beats, slightly warped by the new decade's swirl of trash culture. But for a high school paper, you might want to pretend that such movements spring up out of nowhere and go along with a more easily defined hypothesis - like the usual story about Warhol and the VU being the dirty, urban NYC reaction to the west coast's hippy optimism.

Or a topic I find to be more interesting and you may be able to incorporate VU into it is the whole 70s underground movement which seems to get a lot less professional and popular press than the 60s and other periods. And when it does get press, it is the later, punk-as-fashion stereotype.

(As Radcliffe suggests because I think its similar at the very least)

You can either focus on the WHAT (compare the 70s with the 60s 'counter-cultures' (yes I will define it as a dichotomy)) and see what influenced them ideologically....


Or discuss WHY the 70s counter-culture was given less press until it could be summed up in a rather easier way into the whole mohawk punk image that survives today.


Maybe begin with something on Richard Hell's Blank Generation

hmmm yes I think use song lyrics to construct an ideology of some genre perhaps.. but that may take work and not satisfy your teacher, as anal and close-minded as most high school teachers are.

Still doesn't get you out of Heroin and drug abuse. Not sure how well that'll play out in a high school paper. The mohawk/fashion/vulgarity aspect was a godsend for the press because they could finally write about the "culture" and ignore the drug aspect.

The hippy/flower children scene gets a pass, I think, on drugs because we can focus on weed or acid, which are relatively inocuous compared to heroin or other "hard" drugs. Detroit and NYC, the two "scenes" that, IMO, define the U.S. underground in the '70's were much more "hard core" in the music and the drugs.

Read the first half of Legs McNeil's Please Kill Me. There's a springboard for you in there somewhere.

There's the hippie vs velvets things mentioned. You can also go into the relationship of pop art with bringing a more avant garde musical sensibility to what at least had some aspirations of being a mainstream band. Lyrically, you can talk about bringing a bit of a literary point of view to some songs as well as an abrubt movement away from songs about love and happiness.

Actually, in grad school I did a paper that had a basic theme that you could incorporate. Mine was more literary based, focusing on writers of non-fiction novels from both the 60s and later punks from the 70s. It was called "this time its personal"...it focused on a fairly commen movement away from the 60s group political conciousness into a punk rock ethos that, especially when books came out by figures in the scene, such as Lydia Lunch for one good example, the writing was much less focused on external events experienced by a generation as a whole and more focused on individual, personal experiences.

That'd fit pretty well with some of the velvets stuff; the contrast would be between hippie music of the revolutionary political variety and the velvet underground's gritty personal narratives.

thanks guys, this has been really helpful.

Can we assume your bibliography will include something like:

Billzebub, F4DF, Nobody, Radcliffe. "Modern History Assignment on the Velvet Underground." 23 Oct. 2005 <http://www.obner.org/bb/viewtopic.php?t=12499>.

yes indeedy.

Or perhaps i'll mention y'all in the 'Acknowledgements' section.

i totally wrote a ten page paper on andy warhol and the VU my freshman year of college, and i have no idea what it was about.

I'm a big VU fan but I have nothing for you. For me writing a simple record review is hellishly hard nevermind something like this.

Music, in my humble opinion, is something primal and emotional and it's very, very difficult to successful analysis it in an intellectual way (and probably contradictory to the intention of the music, I doubt even the most 'intelligent' music works on a different level from simple percussion or a beat) but perhaps I'm just saying that as an excuse for my own retardedness.

Having said that I don't have a problem writing about literature or politics.

or baked goods

LOL.