The Power of the Heart

I’ve been a fan of Lou Reed’s music ever since I found that strange-sounding LP titled Transformer in the prime section of my father’s vinyl collection when I was a kid. I was fascinated by that record, from the artwork to the stories behind the songs. And if I wasn’t able to understand much — if anything — of what sounded like fragments of cryptic words as I grew up in the French part of Montreal city, it’s Lou’s poignant voice that truly guided me through, like a light shining in its own right. While I felt his fearless and defying tone and the freedom and integrity of his creative universe, it’s somehow the emotional undertone transcending his music that captured me. There was an invisible element brightly glowing within his sonic expression that I found utterly moving when I first heard him, something indescribable, almost impossible to define, like some sort of a shadowing sorrow that wasn’t dominated by any overpowering darkness. And I grew to also discover The Velvet Underground and his extensive body of work… New York, Warhol, Basquiat, Branca, Patti Smith, Sonic Youth, Swans, and everything else that would shape and form the imageries and visions of the child I was, stretching the boundaries of the otherwise impoverished and underprivileged reality I evolved in.

If his Metal Machine Music album had a profound impact on my conception of writing and the aesthetic obsession I attach to it, it’s when I heard the utmost purity and fabulous let go of his song The Power of the Heart that I set my conceptual structure free from my elusive need of control. It is then that I was able to foresee the transformative difference between the nature of welcoming sensations, as unfettered as they are, rather than try to commune through the reasoning parameters of my outbound invitation for others to conform into. 

It was as if the most talented and enduring of all illusionists was suddenly stepping into bright lights, revealing himself after a lifelong trick in which he had managed to evolve through the smoke and mirrors of the mysteries he let everybody else believe. And for the first time, there he was, as himself, stripped from the uniform he wore to keep his treasures from the unquenchable human obsession for what can’t be defined, what can’t be owned, what can’t be understood, what can’t be comprehended. True beauty had been there all along but had been kept from our devouring eyes in order to lay it down at someone’s brazen feet, a person that saw him from the very beginning, unafraid of his grim or his luminescence, unbaffled by his well-crafted aura. That someone enlightened a path of her own, a reflective spirit that saw his lifetime sufferings find a journey leading home… At least that’s how I like to see that song.

It took me years, streaming into the bleakest turbulences of my own inner voyage, to envision the prospect of making a monument of sincerity such as The Power of the Heart mine. Self-acceptance in an age of make-believes is what allows someone to find themselves, and it’s once emancipated from self-preservative escapism that one can navigate amongst the vestiges of their existence, which in turn leads one to simply be, as an individual and originator. Being liberated from the anguish of being seen for who I am is the reason why I didn’t feel the pressure to mimic Reed’s incarnation of the song nor was I constrained by the burden of having to emulate his intimate intent. If my initial appropriation of the song stood as a homage to Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson’s love and respective creative expression, it would grow beyond its conceptualized embodiment as I began to enfranchise myself through it. It is in that moment that it wasn’t a revision process anymore but the result of a total abandonment designed by my own instinctive drift and surrendering. Noises became sounds, and musical arrangements evolved into some sort of spiritual uplift for me, turning it all into a celebration of what can’t be owned, measured, or defined, a boundless and infinite transformative ascension that can only be experienced once shared and given away. That is for me the true everlasting nature that is the power of the heart.

Liberating in its contemplation. Compassionate in its acceptance. Transformative in its incarnation.