But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:

—T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

The history of the Velvet Underground is so incidental that it almost doesn’t matter. That is the first clue to the band’s immortality, the very idea that their story is so offhand that it cannot eclipse the total impact of their music. The second clue is this: the very inadvertency of their actions is the best definition of the band’s meaning. It’s as if the Velvets’ lack of foresight had, in some way, to be compensated for by an abundance of critical hindsight.

There is no tribute to the Velvet Underground that hasn’t already been written, no praise that has not already been sung. Yet, as with the Beatles and Elvis Presley, the Velvets approach so close to the borders of myth that their story remains amorphous, adrift on the time of retelling. To write about the Velvets is to discover the frustration of Borges’ Book of Sand, a nightmarish text that never ends.