Why Lou Reed Is INTJ

Few musicians of the last century can amass the same quiet influence that Reed and his group The Velvet Underground have had on the music world. Reed’s silent revolution of street-wise poetics coupled with his fellow bandmate John Cale’s avant-garde sensibilities went largely unnoticed in the 60s, but over time became one of the most cited groups in popular music history. They are considered by many to be one of the first examples of a true breakaway from rock music as pop to something more alternative, and subsequently have influenced genres such as punk, new wave, shoegaze, metal and the garage rock revival just to name a few. Though the music is now well known, its creator is still an elusive figure to this day. Typing Reed himself is a contentious issue due to the fact that there are few interviews where he is sincere. That being said, this article will argue for the case that Lou Reed is an INTJ, and is to serve as a companion piece to his main page on the wiki.

What is perhaps most apparent about Reed’s personality is his abrasiveness. Throughout his entire life, he was regarded as a notoriously cantankerous interviewee who would make up outrageous stories about his life and regularly try to gain a nasty offensive with his interviewers. This, simply put, is not the activity of a Fe user, not even a repressed one. IXTPs when hostile to Fe sensibilities go about their resentment a different way, namely keeping an apathetic attitude towards the situation. They usually are never outright combative. Repressed functions present an initial hostility towards them, yet an ultimate succumbing to its inclinations. For instance a repressed Fe user may become annoyed with the “everyone getting along” mentality that strong Fe usually entails, yet when faced with a situation between feeling pressured to actually adopt this attitude or combatively going one’s own way, a repressed Fe user will most definitely pick the former, and`will do in an awkward and underdeveloped way due to their own confusion on how to handle it. Reed chooses the latter path in almost every context he is in. His interview behavior is strikingly similar to that of Harlan Ellison’s, (who is typed as ENTJ,) who was perhaps even more combative than even Reed, most likely due to a preference of Te over Ni.

Speaking of repressed functions, a common theme throughout Reed’s songwriting is the horrors of street life and drug addiction. He presents these scenarios with such brutally raw detail that through their sheer brutality, it supplies the subtext with an unsettling lesson about this lifestyle. This process of showing the sensory world as-is is Se, but the unhealthy relationship towards these perceptions suggest that the function is low in Reed’s stack. Much evidence is also pointed to the opposite, in Reed’s solid grasp of Ni. In interviews where Reed was actually cooperative, it becomes clear that he had a creative ideal of what the Velvet Underground was going to accomplish before the band ever took off. He consciously set out to create a band that would be representative of the streets. He once quipped, “I wanted to write the great american novel, but I also loved rock n’ roll.” Something also worth noting is that more dominant Se types are better at improvisation, and while writing will think of the sensory elements first before putting any meaning behind them. Jeff Tweedy for example (ISFP), would mouth random syllables to his music, filling in for the melody before he used them to write lyrics. In essence the message usually comes second to the sound. With Reed this is the opposite, he was a notoriously bad improviser as heard in live performances and jam sessions and would get nervous many times while on stage. Also the message or overall theme of the song would be given the greatest attention as Reed was more interested in storytelling than just playing music for its own sake. One unique quirk that is noticeable in strong Ni users is their interest in concept albums. Examples of this include Roger Waters of Pink Floyd (INTJ) almost single-handedly writing The Wall or Sufjan Stevens’ (INFJ) now defunct plan to write an album for each US state. Reed has experimented with this as well, releasing his narrative based Berlin in 1973, then 30 years later writing a rock opera based on Edgar Allen Poe stories named The Raven.

All in all, Reed was an experimenter, innovator and trailblazer with music, and all very conscious of this fact. He knew his own worth as an artist and didn’t have much patience for people who couldn’t speak on his level about his work. But this stringence for the art is what made his music so innovative to begin with, and without it we wouldn't have half the music we listen to today.