Random Pick of the Week: The Velvet Underground – Lady Godiva’s Operation

‘Random Pick of the Week’ is just pure randomness – or not. Its songs that I really can’t figure out where to place and are posted up anyways because – well, just because'

The Velvet’s ‘Lady Godiva’s Operation’, is one of the many songs that stands out in their vast collection. The track is definitely one of my favorite VU songs till I really listened to the lyrics, and now it just creeps me out; the story revolves around the life of a transgender named Lady Godiva, who presumably went under a sex reassignment surgery turned lobotomy.

|mp3| The Velvet Underground – Lady Godiva’s Operation

The surgery told in the tune is a sex-change operation but was deliberately made to sound like a lobotomy gone fatally wrong, which could be clearly heard in the lines, The ether tube's leaking says someone who's sloppy/the patient it seems is not so well sleeping. Nothing scares the hell out of me more than the goriness of a situation where you’re burying someone who’s still alive, and cutting someone’s head when he’s still breathing *shudders*. Some may like it, but I’m not that ‘some’.

The music is droning and dream-like, with pulsating guitar and bass parts, and a psychedelic electric viola part that is constantly panning from left to right and back, resulting in a dizzying, disorienting feeling. In the second half of the song, Cale and guitarist Sterling Morrison does vocal impersonations of various surgical instruments, including a drill and an iron lung. John Cale delivered the vocals part throughout the song, but there are certain moments where Lou Reed would interfere with his loud, half-sung words hence completely ruining the song’s mood – which you will find kind of amusing. Almost this whole paragraph is ripped off from Wikipedia, except the last bit.

I mean, creativity is good, but plagiarism is great!

I KID! I KID!

Photo by thezephyrsong_tzs