![]() Warhol’s multifaceted output challenged the traditional hierarchy between artistic disciplines, presciently incorporating the mainstream into high art and vice-versa-a strategy practiced routinely in today’s culture. He explored the realms of film, photography, video, and television, as well as publishing his own books and Interview magazine. Most widely recognized for his 1960s Pop, silkscreened images of objects lifted from quotidian American life and those of Hollywood icons appropriated from the media, Warhol also made benchmark contributions in a multitude of other areas. Perhaps the best-known artist of the twentieth century, Andy Warhol delved into every means of cultural production, leaving behind a colossal artistic legacy. Continue reading from Encyclopedia Britannica ![]() ![]() At a time when the San Francisco scene represented the euphoric apex of 1960s counterculture, the Velvets’ harsh dose of New York City-framed reality was scorned by the music industry and ignored by mainstream audiences. It also presented frank examinations of drug use, sadomasochism, and numbing despair. Recorded in 1966 but not released until the following year, The Velvet Underground and Nico was one of rock’s most important debuts, a pioneering work that applied the disruptive aesthetics of avant-garde music and free jazz (drones, distortion, atonal feedback) to rock guitar. After seeing the group play in a Greenwich Village club, pop artist Andy Warhol became the Velvet Underground’s manager and patron-introducing them to the exotic German actress, model, and chanteuse Nico putting the group on tour with his performance art discotheque, the Exploding Plastic Inevitable and financing and producing the Velvets’ first album. The band performed live soundtracks for experimental films before making their formal debut, with new drummer Tucker, at a high school dance in December 1965. In 1965, while working as Brill Building-style staff songwriter for Pickwick Music, Reed formed a group, the Primitives (including Cale), for live performances of a single he had recorded called “The Ostrich.” He also had written songs, such as “Heroin” and “Venus in Furs,” that reflected his interest in the graphic, narrative realism of novelists Raymond Chandler and Hubert Selby, Jr. With guitarist Morrison (a Syracuse classmate of Reed’s) and percussionist MacLise, Reed on guitar and vocals and Cale on piano, viola, and bass formed a more permanent band to play these songs, ultimately settling on the name the Velvet Underground, taken from the title of a paperback book about deviant sex. Trained as a classical musician in London, Welshman Cale came to the United States in 1963 on a Leonard Bernstein scholarship to study composition but soon joined the Dream Syndicate, a pioneering minimalist ensemble founded in New York City by La Monte Young. Lou Reed, who was the son of an accountant, made his first recording as a teenager (as a member of the Shades) and studied literature at Syracuse (New York) University, where he came under the influence of poet Delmore Schwartz.
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