One of the best albums of the 1960s, the best indie-rock album of all time (it invented the whole category pretty much), and really the iconoclastic bible for anyone interested in how to break the mold in popular music. To the newcomer it can seem like the band are doing this for shock value. I mean this is 1967 and they are writing about S&M sex, injecting heroin and scoring drugs in back alleys. But after innumerable listens, I don't think they are. Lou Reed is just writing about the world he knows about. What really makes this valuable and beautiful are the songs themselves. A song like Heroin works on so many levels. It is emotionally much more complex than it looks (is it a lament or an ode?). The whole thing is so full of interesting sounds and textures, and then there is the urgency of the drumming, and the deadpan expressiveness of the vocal. Yet whilst songs like this veer towards chaos and the abyss, Sunday Morning is rapt and joyous. And while their might be a song out there somewhere with a better arrangement than All Tomorrow's Parties, thinking of what it might be sounds like too much hard work.