the pop charts, slightly older, artistically trained but jagged musicians were writing poetry and singing about urban decay. This artistic expression was not the first, this sort of idea far artistic expression had been at the root of several literary, artistic, and musical styles in the twentieth century, including the dadaist movement and the Beat movement (Charlton, Rock Music, 204).
             The dadaists, a group of artists from Switzerland, expressed their views of madness and chaos exemplified by World War I. The dadaists saw this kind of devastation and destruction of human life that took place during the War, and expressed their views by fashioning artwork out of trash or other material put together in a chaotic form. The same fear of the potential human animal had for violence, along with the awesome power of modern-day weapons, influenced many later artists to share the concerns and emulate the work of the dadaists (Charlton, Rock Music, 204). The Beat poets and writers of the fifties directed their feelings of anger towards society in their poetry and writings. The manner in which the Beats openly confronted the problems that most people ignored, as well as the dada, influenced desire to produce an anti-art to express the belief that society had lost all sense of value was at the philosophical root of the punk movement, which eventually spawned a style of music (Charlton, Rock music, 204).
             The grandest example of a risky, aggressive, cynical yet ambitious sensibility worming it way into the rock world was the man many called a godfather of punk: Lou Reed (Ward, Stokes, Tucker, Rock of Ages, 547). Lou Reed stands as crucial figure in 1970s rock. Reed wrote poetry about street life, prostitution, and drugs in New York. He was Classically trained to play the piano, but felt he could not express what he had to say about society playing Mozart (Charlton, Rock Music, 204). Reed combined controversial common places with a profound cy...