I’ll Be Your Mixtape: Lou Reed, Andy Warhol, and the Queer Intimacies of Cassettes

On Thursday 28 March the next edition of the Utrecht Colloquia in the Musicologies 2018-19 will take place, titled ‘I’ll Be Your Mixtape: Lou Reed, Andy Warhol, and the Queer Intimacies of Cassettes’. Judith Peraino (Cornell University) will speak.

This presentation tells the story of a cassette tape housed in the Andy Warhol Museum Archive, a set of never-released (and rarely heard) songs by Lou Reed, and the tape’s intended audience: Andy Warhol. Warhol and Reed are giant figures in the history of twentieth-century Pop Art and popular music, and their collaboration in 1966-1967 resulted in the acclaimed album The Velvet Underground and Nico. Reed and Warhol continued to look to each other throughout the 1970s as sources for ideas, as the contents of this tape reveals.