by Peter Moore

Number Fourteen – The Velvet Underground: Who Loves the Sun

In the absence of finding a good version of Sunday Morning by the Velvet Underground to put up today, I’ve decided to do a last minute swerve to a less known song, entitled, Who Loves the Sun.

Who Loves the Sun is a whispish nod to the flower power generation that by 1970 were already well on their way out with the sudden death of Jimi Hendrix. It’s a departure from the Velvet’s familiar art rock formula and songs such as Waiting For the Man and Beginning to See the Light; and with all the La La La-ing going on, we can see Lou Reed, the band’s creative dynamo, dragging his sharp eye away from the grimy underworld of New York City and having a brief existentialist moment. You can almost imagine him wagging his finger at some drug dealer or other.

There a good deal of bar room chat going on at the moment about how the baby boom generation have fouled everything up for us all. We’ve world debt up to our neck, the Eastern World is eyeing The West from behind the barrel of a gun, there’s far too many people on the planet and the news is getting increasingly alarming – with intelligent scientists such as Dr James Lovelock, suggesting that if there was a tipping point a moment when global warming could be halted or reversed, then it passed a long time ago.

He argues that instead of indulging in the rather futile gesture of reducing our carbon footprint, we should be busying ourselves adapting to live in a global ecosystem which is going to be very different to the one that we are currently experiencing. One which will support far less than the six billion people that are around today, and something closer to one billion.

Not the best of news, I’m sure you’ll all agree. So, perhaps it’s time to pull our heads out of the sand and hope that Who Loves the Sun isn’t going to become an ironic anthem for us all as we watch the world fry itself up over the next century.

(Anyone who is interested in watching a lecture from James Lovelock to the Royal Academy in London, can find an excellent online one here)