Street Hassle is one of Lou Reed's most ambitious and underrated albums. Recorded partly with binaural techniques — microphones placed in the engineer's ears to capture 360-degree sound — the record mixes rock, blues, and poetry in an exploration of 1970s New York urban marginality.
The title track is the masterpiece: eleven minutes divided into three movements narrating the descent from an overdose, a street encounter, and a final meditation on pain and redemption. Bruce Springsteen appears in a brief spoken interlude, and the complete piece is an exercise in musical narrative of a power rarely seen in rock.
Street Hassle received enthusiastic reviews but modest sales. Time has confirmed its stature, however: it is the album where Reed proved he could create works of true conceptual magnitude without the large production budgets of Berlin. A fundamental document of the New York avant-garde.