'Anyone who ever had a heart': Remembering rock icon Lou Reed.

• Position: Living

To be perfectly honest, Lou Reed was one of those musicians I kind of avoided when I was a teenager in the '80s. It was one of those situations where everyone was telling me I had to listen to him -- friends who listened to punk rock, friends who listened to classic rock. Nothing makes me want to avoid something more than everybody telling me I'll love it, and I was far worse about that then than I am now. Although even then, I liked the song "Walk on the Wild Side,'' with its grungy and vivid vignettes of people adrift in a world of sex and drugs. But I kept that to myself for reasons I can't even fathom now.

I have no idea why I was so stubborn on the subject, only that I was. So, naturally, when I finally gave in and listened to Reed's early work with The Velvet Underground, particularly "Loaded,'' I fell madly in love. And as I listened to the opening song, the lovely and oddly melancholy "Who Loves the Sun,'' I realized I was loving the music for a lot of the opposite reasons that I loved "Walk on the Wild Side.'' I quickly grasped Reed's brilliance for finding beauty and dignity in subjects which could, in other hands, seem tawdry, and for finding an agonizing sliver of pain in the beautiful. As I was young and immersing myself in punk, this aesthetic was something I found viscerally attractive. And nowhere did I find this odd dichotomy in his music more appealing than in The Velvet Underground's "Sweet Jane'':

Some people, they like to go out dancing

And other peoples, they have to work ...

And there's even some evil mothers

Well they're gonna tell you that everything is just dirt

Y'know that, women, never really faint

And that villains always blink their eyes ...

And that, y'know, children are the only ones who blush

And that life is just to die ...

It was a song I kind of knew -- the popular cover by the Cowboy Junkies was out at about that time, and admittedly, it was driving my capitulation to what I'd deemed the Cult of Lou Reed. But as lovely as the song was, it had nothing on the original, with its gritted-teeth defiance, its complete contempt for a soul-sucking, nihilistic world. A world without magic.

And Reed saw that magic everywhere. Where other people looked at the junkies and prostitutes who littered Reed's songs and saw mere debauchery, Reed saw a beautiful struggle, people fighting to survive in the face of poverty and despair. It's that empathy I most responded to. Indeed, it's at the core of nearly every idea I've...