“I mean they were just painfully stupid and pretentious.”

Imagine: Lou Reed of Velvet Underground calling someone else pretentious. He did! In a 1987 interview with Joe Smith that is just now seeing the light of day due to PBS's Blank On Blank series, wherein old interviews are animated and made new again.

Getty Images Hannelore Foerster

The latest edition features Reed talking about bad press, wielding a shotgun on unsuspecting visitors to his New Jersey home, and -- almost as an aside -- this (somewhat unsurprising) gem: He never liked The Beatles.

Reed was, of course, always cantankerous and unafraid to speak his mind. And in the interview he goes full-Kanye (quite a feat, considering the rapper was just nine or 10 at the time of this interview) about his band's abilities and purpose.

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As far as he was concerned, his contemporaries -- The Beatles, The Doors -- "couldn’t come up to our ankles, not up to my kneecap, not up to my ankles, the level we were on, compared to everyone else."

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Because...

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