This song is 11 minutes long and divided into three sections: Waltzing Matilda Street Hassle Slip Away The first part is joyful, with a string quartet playing as Lou Reed tells of two people who meet for a sexual encounter. The tone changes in the second section, which begins with somebody (a landlord, perhaps) discovering the girl dead and telling the guy he needs to get rid of her. His advice: dump her on the street, where it will look like a hit and run. In the third part, he ruminates on what just happened and tries, unsuccessfully, to make sense of it.
About nine minutes in, Bruce Springsteen does a spoken word part where he includes the line, "There're tramps like us who were born to pay," which is a reference to the lyrics of his song "Born To Run."
This dark tale is one of the more descriptive and mordant songs ever recorded, but Reed didn't think it was all that unusual in the context of art as a whole. "If this was a novel or a movie, this stuff would be no big deal," he told the Los Angeles Times in 1978. "But in rock and roll, the parameters you're allowed to work in are so horrifyingly narrow. If you do anything other than pure, surface optimism, you seem to come off as intrigued with the dark, murky, kinky, down side of existence. It's just a little realism. I think it's fine and dandy that people enjoy themselves and they're happy and everything, but to constantly paint that picture leads to a general dullness on the part of the listener. He's just shocked when he finally gets to the reality of it all and finds out that he's been lied to."
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