Lou Reed / New York / 1989
Romeo Had Juliette
grimy, elegiac, darkly comic
Lou Reed transplants Shakespeare's doomed lovers onto a late-1980s Manhattan street corner, where Romeo is a leather-clad Latino youth and Juliette a girl he's gotten into trouble. The song interleaves their brief, tender collision with a surrounding backdrop of gang menace, police violence, and a city physically and morally decaying.
urban decay doomed love violence and desensitization class and ethnicity in New York mythic recycling / modern Shakespeare
Who's speaking
A third-person narrator who moves fluidly between omniscient storyteller and overheard street voices (Joey Diaz, the unnamed boasting hood), giving the song a documentary, overheard quality rather than a single reliable narrator.
What happens
The song opens with a cosmic-historical frame -- Columbus's faulty map leading to New York -- before zooming into a single encounter between Romeo and Juliette on a city street. Their romance is sketched in a few quick, physical details, then the song cuts away to the surrounding neighborhood: crack dealers, a boasting young tough, a cop's murder witnessed with chilling nonchalance. The chorus restates the lovers' mutual desire, then later their mutual possession, as if intimacy briefly interrupts the surrounding carnage. The final verses zoom back out to the city itself, now explicitly compared to a sinking, rotting empire, before ending on a fading sensory flash of the romance.
How it's built
Verse-chorus structure with the chorus functioning as a refrain that shifts almost imperceptibly in verb tense and possession ('wanted' becomes 'had'), marking the arc from longing to consummation. Verses alternate between close-up scenes of the couple and wider shots of neighborhood violence, so the song's architecture mimics a camera panning between intimate and civic scale. The ending returns to the lovers but strips away narrative certainty, closing on dissolution rather than resolution.
Section by section
Opening verses
The Columbus reference frames New York itself as the product of error and misdirection, setting a tone of accidental, compromised origins that will echo through the song's vision of the city as a corrupted discovery rather than a promised land.
First chorus
The simple call-and-response of mutual wanting introduces the lovers' symmetry, a brief moment of equilibrium before the chaos of the surrounding verses destabilizes it.
Joey Diaz verse
“hit that light with my one good arm”
The bravado of the boasting youth, rendered in a single quoted boast, works as comic deflation and menace simultaneously -- small-time machismo set against a backdrop where guns and violence are treated as banal.
Cop's death verse
“dancing when I saw his brains run out”
This is the song's darkest turn, delivered with unsettling casualness. The narrator's or bystander's indifference to a brutal killing suggests a community anesthetized by repeated exposure to violence, and it reframes the romance plot as happening inside, not apart from, this desensitized environment.
Second chorus
The shift from wanting to having marks a narrative and emotional turn -- the lovers have moved from longing to consummation, but the surrounding violence has not abated, undercutting any sense of triumph.
Closing verses
“Manhattan's sinking like a rock”
The zoom-out to the whole city sinking into its river, compared explicitly to the fall of Rome, universalizes the couple's local story into civic decline, suggesting their romance is a flicker inside a larger historical collapse.
Final lines
“something flickered for a minute”
The ending refuses closure -- the romance briefly reasserts itself sensorially through perfume and touch, then simply vanishes, leaving the fate of the lovers and the city equally unresolved.
Craft
- allusion
- The Romeo and Juliet frame, plus the Columbus reference and the comparison to ancient Rome, stack historical and literary myth onto a contemporary street scene, suggesting cyclical patterns of discovery, empire, and doomed romance.
- juxtaposition
- Tender physical details about the lovers are placed directly against reports of drug dealing and police killing, flattening the emotional register so love and violence read as equally unremarkable features of the same world.
- synecdoche/detail-as-character
- Reed characterizes Romeo almost entirely through objects -- a crucifix earring, a hidden mop, a ponytail -- letting small physical props stand in for interior psychology.
- refrain with variation
- The repeated chorus shifts from 'wanted' to 'had,' a minimal lexical change that quietly narrates the couple's arc from desire to physical union without further exposition.
- tonal flattening/deadpan irony
- The line about dancing while watching a man's death is delivered with the same casual rhythm as the romantic material, producing a numbed, horrified comedy characteristic of Reed's narrative voice.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats this as Reed using the Romeo and Juliet myth not for tragic grandeur but for scale -- measuring a small, specific, interracial street romance against the much larger backdrop of urban decline, violence, and historical cycles of empire. The lovers aren't really doomed by family feud as in Shakespeare; they're doomed by context, by a city that treats both love and death as equally disposable. An alternative reading could see the song as less about the lovers' tragedy and more as a found-footage style portrait of a neighborhood, with Romeo and Juliette functioning as a recurring visual motif that gives the sprawl of imagery a loose narrative spine rather than being the song's true emotional center.
Context
The song appears on New York (1989), an album explicitly conceived as a song-cycle about the city's social and moral condition in the late 1980s, touching on AIDS, crime, politics, and urban rot. Reed has spoken in interviews (though I can't cite a precise quote with confidence) about wanting the album to function almost like a novel or film about the city, and this track's cinematic cross-cutting between intimate and public violence fits that aim.
Listen for
- The shift in the chorus from 'wanted' to 'had,' which quietly narrates the couple's arc
- The deadpan delivery of the line about witnessing a killing, which withholds expected emotional weight
- Small physical details used to characterize Romeo instead of direct psychological description
- The Columbus and ancient Rome references bookending the song, framing New York's story as historical and cyclical
- The sudden zoom from intimate romance to citywide decay in the closing verses
About Lou Reed
Lewis Allan Reed was an American musician, songwriter, and poet. He was the guitarist, lead singer, and principal songwriter for the rock band the Velvet Underground and had a solo career that spanned five decades.
1942 - 2013 / United States
Full biography and catalogue