The image of The Velvet Underground & Nico is a yellow Banana with a peel tab that if peeled would show a pink banana. Andy Warhol created the album cover design. Lou Reed served as one of the writers for Velvet Underground. The book states that “ Lou acquired a fascination with the power of words and phrases, he studied their economic yet bold use of language, a technique he used in his lyrics, the result would be songs just as evocative as the books of written by Nelson Algren and Raymond Chandler.” Lou successfully brought literary sensitivity to rock and roll lyrics. John Cale was a driving force on the bands visual image and sound. He was responsible for all of the bands sound and instrumentation. The velvet Underground & Nico were promoted and produced by Andy Warhol. Andy Warhol also played a major part in the bands originality, he encouraged The Velvet Underground not to change based on the suggestions by others. A characteristic that I noticed almost instantly when listening to this album is the likeability of the lead singer’s voice. Other bands like The Beach Boys and The Beatles had a lead singer who’s singing voice was very likable to the listener. However, The Velvet Underground’s lead singer sounds very emotionless and unpleasant. The singer’s imperfections actually showed the true power or Lou Reed’s lyrics because even with a very bad lead singer the listener still received the messages that he was trying to get across. Also another characteristic that I noticed was the heavy reverb on the vocals and also the lack of background vocals and harmonies. A majority of the albums songs sounded very empty because of their lack of background vocals and vocal layers, kind of the total opposite of The Beatles and The Beach Boys. I believe that this album represents the power of Rock and Roll in its simplest form.
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