Lou Reed, who certainly learned a thing or two about how to relentlessly sell his brand from his Pop Artist mentor Andy Warhol, could be mean and full of shit. But he was a great artist. Occasionally an awful one, but often great. From his Economist obituary, a passage about how difficult he made categorization:

“The man could be just as perplexing, and played it up. Was he really a badass city boy? In fact he came from the New York suburbs, and for two years—between leaving the Velvet Underground in 1970 and making his first solo albums, helped by David Bowie, in 1972—he worked as a typist in his father’s accountancy firm. Did he really take so many drugs? No, he didn’t take them at all (he blurrily told a circle of reporters at Sydney airport in 1974), but he thought everyone else should, because they were ‘better than Monopoly.’ Was he homosexual? He had a very public transvestite love affair once; in the mid-1970s he adopted leather jackets and short blonde curls; later he wore nail varnish and mascara. But there were heterosexual marriages too, paired with romantic songs.”