If you’re a young American celebrity rumored to have a serious heroin addiction, it may not be the best idea in the world to start a Velvet Underground cover band. That, however, is apparently what actor Macaulay Culkin has done. Gathering together a number of musicians from the New York anti-folk scene, the actor has formed a band to cover influential Velvet Underground songs like Heroin, I’m Waiting for the Man, and Venus in Furs. Earlier this morning, the band released the following video.
And, yeah, I should have mentioned it earlier, but Culkin and company, who refer to themselves as the Pizza Underground, have rewritten all of the Velvet Underground songs to be, not about sadism and drugs, but about pizza. (My favorites are Papa John Says and I’m Waiting for Delivery Man.)
It may just be ironic hipsterism as play, but I’d like to think that scrubbing clean the lyrics of the Velvet Underground, replacing all references to drugs with references to pizza, was a conscious move on the part of Culkin, who, as I mentioned above, has been the subject of a great deal of speculation since having his heart broken by long-time girlfriend Mila Kunis a few years ago. (The National Enquirer, as you may recall, gave him just six months to live in 2012.) Not knowing all the facts, I hesitate to use the word brilliant, but I’m cautiously optimistic, waiting to see how things develop… Personally, I think it would be awesome if he’d now reemerge from seclusion weighing in at a healthy 350 pounds, and announcing the purchase of a pizzeria in Queens. That, I think, would qualify as brilliant.
[Accompanying Culkin on the tracks above are Phoebe Kreutz (glockenspiel/vocals), Deenah Vollmer (pizza box/vocals), and Austin Kilham (tambourine/vocals). Culkin, for the most part, plays kazoo.]