New York

Reed's liner notes tell the listener to hear the album in one sitting, as though it were a book or a movie. The band was Reed and Mike Rathke on guitars, Rob Wasserman on electric upright bass and Fred Maher on drums, with Moe Tucker of the Velvet Underground playing percussion on two tracks and Dion DiMucci singing backing vocals on Dirty Blvd.. The lyrics name public figures of the day, among them Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump, Jesse Jackson and the Pope.

Anthony DeCurtis in Rolling Stone called the songs fierce, poetic journalism and compared the album to Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities. NME and The Village Voice's Pazz and Jop poll both placed it third among the albums of 1989, and Rolling Stone ranked it 19th among the albums of the 1980s. It passed 500,000 sales in 1997 and became Reed's second gold-certified record. A deluxe box set in September 2020 added live versions from his 1989 tour and demos. Pitchfork said then that it resembled no protest music written before or since.