100 favourite songs: #4: "Venus In Furs" - The Velvet Underground

I love “Venus In Furs” for its crazedly hypnotic effect, sounds and textures diffracting in all directions; it’s like some weird ever-unspooling dream or vision, reflected and scattered by sharp-edged shards of broken glass, its vivid opalescent glamour shimmering with all the different colours of the spectrum. The song’s cacophonous clatter and jangle — that sound — is shot through with the clarity which underlies all of the Velvets’ music, but there’s something else about “Venus In Furs”, something singular — some further aspect which gives the song a murky but distinct air of poetic disclosedness and, I don’t know, some non-representational and still mostly inaccessible (ie, musical) but very real truth, maybe.