New iPhone app from Lou Reed!?


If it wasn’t weird enough that the man who pioneered art-rock freakiness’ latest musical contribution has a guest vocal slot on the new Gorillaz album, now it comes out that the punk scene stalwart has a new addition to the telecommunications world—an iPhone app.

Introduced via a disturbingly Warholian YouTube commercial, LouZoom turns any regular iPhone into a grandparent-friendly big-button phone by making contact names stretch across the entire width of the phone’s screen. Contact info becomes so big that the app creates scrollable pages for each person in your phone, apparently perfect for Reed, who in the video struggles to select his phone’s tiny letters with the point of a Japanese sword.

We all know that 60s musicians are heading down the geriatric highway, but the app’s existence brings to light an overlooked aspect of that fact. As our rock stars age, they also join the population of senior citizens attempting to grapple with our generation’s new technologies and though they may be staging reunion tours and premiering self-scored documentaries about 100 year-old cousins, they seem to be just as hard-to-convert as the rest of the AARP members.

No word on whether the 68 year-old musician actually programmed the iPhone app himself, but he does get credit for not buying a Jitterbug and skipping over the obvious “LouRead” app-naming opportunity.

For video, click here.