It's a different kind of love.

On the surface, Perfect is just like a normal love song. Cale shows himself to be not only a mighty Welsh colossus and living legend, but also a modern Mr Darcy: “You’re not perfect, but you’re perfect for me!” he declares. Oh Cale, I wish you would come riding in on your white horse, fight Hugh Grant and carry me off into the sunset. But enough of that.

Though the lyrics offer some food for lolz (“IN PYJAMAS, YOU’RE PERFECT FOR ME!”), to really understand the song, it is the video we must look to.

It consists of Cale, being all white-prince like in… white, in a white room, with bare feet because obviously that will trick us all into thinking he’s all vulnerable and honest. But this is spliced with shots of a guitar plug that has a life of its own, burrowing through a host of things and by penetrating them, spreading a stain of corruption that, when the plug meets the guitar, eventually reaches Cale and leaves him all muddy and soiled and disintegrating the set.

So, obviously this means the song is about two things:

- Cale being penetrated
- STDs

And in Cale’s case, the two are connected. Let’s take a look at what he has to say about it in his autobio. This paragraph is about the time just after he’d met Lou, and his ~*~first time~*~. First time doing heroine, that is.

“You got a much stronger effect if you injected heroin, particularly if you shot it into a vein, but I was squeamish about needles. Lou took care of that by shooting me up for the first time. It was an intimate experience (….) This was magic for two guys as uptight and distanced from their surroundings as Lou and I. It opened a channel between us and created the conspiratorial us-against-them attitude which would become a hallmark of our band. At first we called ourselves The Falling Spikes. We also got hepatitis.” (What’s Welsh For Zen, p. 73)

His attitude to this particular kind of penetration, like everything else he ever says about Lou, has a wonderful undercurrent of sexuality and destruction, which expresses itself in their music. It’s probably no coincidence “Dear penis” (a famous comic song about impotence) is the number 1 record he would play on the last day on earth (as he said in his The Wire Death Row interview) . Lou’s attitude towards sex these days makes the same connection between music, penetration and disease- “I’m a musician, I haven’t had it up in 17 years.” (Transformer: The Lou Reed Story by Victor Bockris)

Perfect is probably not about Lou, but it certainly has a lot to do with him. “It’s a different kind of love”, indeed.