As Kathleen Geier wrote about eloquently yesterday, Lou Reed died from presumably natural causes at the age of 71. He was one of my favorites, too, and my immediate reaction was to tweet: “There goes the musician of the ever-recurring Weimar Era.”

Here’s an appropriate song from probably his most influential post-Velvets album, Berlin: “Sad Song.”

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Ed Kilgore is a political columnist for New York and managing editor at the Democratic Strategist website. He was a contributing writer at the Washington Monthly from January 2012 until November 2015, and was the principal contributor to the Political Animal blog.