Lou Reed doesn't want to be your friend. You can send him roses, you can buy his records, you can tell him that he's your best friend and that you'll love him for ever and ever and ever. And you know what, I still think that Lou Reed wouldn't give a shit. In fact, Reed has built an entire career on not giving a shit. While everyone else in the world was being cockteases with their sweet, sentimental Paul Anka romantic rock and roll songs, Reed threw our frail sensibilities to the wind and made sex messy.

In fact, while Justin Timberlake is out there singing about "bringing the sexy back" and other such nonsense, I would contend if anyone brought sexy back when hipsters most needed it, it was Reed. Some of Reed's greatest compositions are those that remind all of us sex isn't about putting on that frilly black lingerie, listening to a Prince album, and busting out the camcorder. Sometimes, sex is just sex. High heels, prostitution, ball gags, disjointed sounds, sex. You don't have to be a hot, young teenager to be doing the nasty. Shit, you don't have to be some square either.

But even while breaking the musical space/time continuum with the Velvet Underground, Lou Reed was already spitting in everyone's faces. He went from the cacophony of vast electrical universes of sound (c'mon baby, White Light/White Heat) to the bleak loveliness of The Velvet Underground. And if that wasn't enough of a slap in the face to the original, manic fans of White Light and the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, imagine how they must have felt after picking up Loaded from their local record store.

Jesus. There are more sins of deliberate obtuseness to attribute to good ol' Lou, too, sins that date all the way to today. Who else remembers that infamous performance on Letterman, where he rehashed "Sunday Morning" with a falsetto male back-up singer that sounded eerily as if Mariah Carey was using a taser as a dildo? And what about that string section, huh, Lou? Or if that doesn't jog your memory, remember when he released a concept album about Edgar Allen Poe's "The Raven"? Now I see some righteous anger coming from the crowd.

Here's the thing, though: for every bitch slap, kick in the face, and stab to the ribs Reed dishes out to his audience, he serves up a piece of musical ambrosia which forces people to love, love, love him. Even if Reed had somehow died after Loaded (not out of the question, given his legendary drug consumption), it would have been all right. He had already written "Sunday Morning," "Sister Ray," "Lady Godiva's Operation," "Stephanie Says," "Pale Blue Eyes," "I Found a Reason," "Rock & Roll," "Sweet Jane," and I could probably continue type-testifying to all of you until my hands fell off.