Music: Wrestling with Truth

By JAY COCKS

This devastating chronicle reminds you that no one in all of rock hangs tougher than LOU REED. There are all those metalheads and strutters, but they're poseurs up against the rage and uncertainty that infuse Reed's new MAGIC AND LOSS (Sire/Warner Bros.). None of them have the dark courage to take on the themes Reed wrestles with here: waste, cancer, death. One of rock's most unyieldingly personal writers, Reed has taken to setting down, in music, what amounts to speculative autobiography. This record has the brutal immediacy of a diary kept by someone who cannot look away from the truth. Magic and Loss, largely inspired by the death last year of Reed's friend, the superb songwriter Doc Pomus, uses spare instrumentation and simple language ("The same power that burned Hiroshima/ causing three-legged babies and death/ Shrunk to the size of a nickel/ to help him regain his breath") to stare down mortality and peek into the abyss. The title says it best. The subject is loss, but the music, dark and pitiless, is still magic. J.C.