The Velvet Underground is a Jonathan Richman song

Abstract

“How in the world were they making that sound?”. Jonathan Richman asked himself in “Velvet Underground”, still fascinated, how just four people could be creating that. In his fan song, he tries to explain it using different methods. He first places them into a tradition (“A mystery band in a New York way / Rock and roll but not like the rest”), he describes their music (“Both guitars got the fuzz tone on / The drummer's standing upright pounding along”), he makes up his own similes and, at some point, he just shows it: he says “like this” and starts playing the first verse of “Sister Ray”.

When Richman starts singing that lines, he is at the same time becoming the Velvets and becoming just the opposite by, as Ernie Brooks put it, “playing into the light as opposed to the darkness”. Thus, “Velvet Underground”, the song, not only tells a lot about the Velvet Underground as one of the most intriguing examples of pop music. It also tells a lot about Jonathan Richman as a Velvet fan-become-artist: his relation with the group has a lot of archetypal elements of fandom, such as the emotional involvement after the initial discovery, the public display of the fan's identity or the pilgrimage, but also evolved to a different kind of closeness after Richman's artistic development. In this essay, we study the Velvet-Richman relation by confronting fan studies and Harold Bloom's anxiety of influence, explaining the concept of fan song (giving special attention to other Velvet fan songs) and trying to understand the role of fandom as a creative element in popular music.