LOU REED’S NEPHEW (1)
By:
February 1, 2026
We are delighted to present LOU REED’S NEPHEW, a 10-part series featuring collages created by HILOBROW friend Jim Hanas as illustrations for his “wickedly smart, highly entertaining” 2023 email serial of the same title.
“Lou Reed’s nephew,” the phrase, has been with me since at least 2012. I was introduced to Diderot’s satirical dialogue Rameau’s Nephew twenty years before that, via its brief appearance in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, where it is used to illustrate “disrupted consciousness,” which produces “clever and witty” talk, “a rigamarole of wisdom and folly.” I’m not sure how long I thought about it before I realized whose nephew this would have to be today, but you see what I decided. As I later discovered, I am not even the first person to use the phrase as a metonym for a certain … deflation. Describing The Strokes on a messageboard in 2001, user “Omar” wrote: “On the voice: the guy sounds like Lou Reed’s nephew, which comes down to being a fake of a fake. Mmm, now they sound interesting again :)”
CURATED SERIES at HILOBROW: LINOCUT 2022 by Lawry Hutcheson | PULP WAVE by Charles Leech | DRAWING TABLE WORLD by Theo Ellsworth | PARAMAX by Max Glenn | YUKO ODA by Yuko Oda | PLAGUE YEAR by Rick Pinchera | NOOSFERA by Charles Glaubitz | A SILENT HALLUCINATION by Alex Gerasev | BUNNY CITY by Gary Panter | HOP UP by Lucy Sante | HERE BE MONSTERS by Mister Reusch | DOWNTOWNE by Bradley Peterson | OUTBOUND TO MONTEVIDEO by Mimi Lipson | STERANKOISMS by Douglas Wolk | COOLING OFF THE COMMOTION by Chenjerai Kumanyika | UNFLOWN by Jacob Covey | ADEQUATED by Franklin Bruno | PINAKOTHEK by Lucy Sante | BIGFOOT ISLAND by Michael Lewy | DAILY DRUMPF by Rick Pinchera | WINDS OF MAGIC by James Parker | MUSEUM OF FEMORIBILIA by Lynn Peril | ROBOTS + MONSTERS by Joe Alterio | ANNOTATED GIF by Kerry Callen | NOMADBROW by Erik Davis | & many others.