1967Released
2:39

Did You Know?

Interesting facts and trivia about Femme Fatale. By Songfacts®.

A "femme fatale" is a very seductive woman who will leave a man worse off than she found him. The inspiration for this song was actress Edie Sedgwick, who was a member of Andy Warhol's "Factory" crowd. Warhol was the manager of the Velvet Underground for a time, and good friends with Velvet Underground leader Lou Reed. He asked for this song to be written for Edie, playing up her image as a heartbreaker.

According to the book The Velvet Underground: An Illustrated History of a Walk on the Wild Side, during Exploding Plastic Inevitable shows, Warhol's right-hand man, Gerard Malanga, would get onstage in a leather outfit and crack a whip during this number. S&M was a common theme in 1960s culture, especially around Warhol's New York, and of course it was a large influence on early Velvet Underground songs. The band's name itself came from journalist Michael Leigh's 1963 paperback The Velvet Underground, an exposé of the sexual revolution going on in the USA at the time. The book included hyperbole-laden examinations of S&m, polyamory, homosexuality, and other practices then seen as "deviant." Tony Conrad, a filmmaker friend of the band, accidentally dropped the book for Lou Reed to find, who pounced on it and adopted the title; he liked it less for the S&m aspect and more for the word "underground" which would associate them with the underground film and music scene. Lou Reed himself in a 1969 interview with Open City would later call the book "the funniest dirty book I've ever read."

The subject of this song, Edith Minturn "Edie" Sedgwick, was an actress, socialite, model, and heiress. Her fame extended well beyond the (Warholian) proverbial 15 minutes - her great-great-great grandfather, William Ellery, was a signatory of the United States Declaration of Independence, and her family history blooms out from there touching almost every corner of United States history from the Massachusetts Bay Colony to the founding of New York's Central Park. In spite of this impressive family tree, Sedgwick was to find only limited success outside of Andy Warhol's flock, struggle with substance abuse, and die from overdose of alcohol and barbiturate at the age of 28. Perhaps this is a good point to mention that Velvet Underground's producer and mentor, Andy Warhol, had the nickname of "Drella" - a name derived from a contraction of Dracula and Cinderella. The reference was to how Andy could make you famous, but at the price of sucking some of that fame away for himself. This brought Lou Reed and John Cale, long since split from The Velvet Underground, to name their 1990 collaborative album Songs For Drella, in tribute to Warhol, who died in 1987.

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Song Analysis

Key, BPM (tempo) and time signature of Femme Fatale.
CKey
MajorMode
4/4Time Signature
104BPM

Album

The album Femme Fatale is released on.

Released By

The record label that has released Femme Fatale.
Polydor
© 2012 Universal Records, a Division of UMG Recordings, Inc.
This Compilation ℗ 2012 Universal Records, a Division of UMG Recordings, Inc.

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