"Street Hassle" is a song recorded by Lou Reed

Lou Reed

Lewis Allan "Lou" Reed is an American rock musician, songwriter, and photographer. He is best known as guitarist, vocalist, and principal songwriter of The Velvet Underground, and for his successful solo career, which has spanned several decades...

 for his 1978 album of the same name

Street Hassle

Street Hassle is the eighth solo album by Lou Reed, originally released by Arista Records. The album is notable as the first commercially released pop album to employ binaural recording technology. Street Hassle combines live concert tapings and studio recordings.The album is also notable for...

. It is 10 minutes and 56 seconds long and divided into three distinct sections: "Waltzing Matilda," "Street Hassle," and "Slipaway." Part one, "Waltzing Matilda," describes a woman picking up and paying a male prostitute. In Part Two, "Street Hassle," a drug dealer speaks at length about the death of a woman (ostensibly "Waltzing Matilda") in his apartment to her companion (presumably the male prostitute from Part One). Part Three, "Slipaway," contains a brief, uncredited, spoken word section by Bruce Springsteen

Bruce Springsteen

Bruce Frederick Joseph Springsteen , nicknamed "The Boss," is an American singer-songwriter who records and tours with the E Street Band...

 (from 9:02 to 9:39) and a dirge

Dirge

A dirge is a somber song expressing mourning or grief, such as would be appropriate for performance at a funeral. A lament. The English word "dirge" is derived from the Latin Dirige, Domine, Deus meus, in conspectu tuo viam meam , the first words of the first antiphon in the Matins of the Office...

 sung by Reed about love and death. It was recorded in E major.

On the live album Animal Serenade

Animal Serenade

Animal Serenade is a Lou Reed live album recorded in Los Angeles at the Wiltern Theatre in 2003 after The Raven. The show features a drummer-less band . Reed delivers dramatic readings of some of his most compelling work...

, Reed says: "I wanted to write a song that had a great monologue set to rock. Something that could have been written by William Burroughs

William S. Burroughs

William Seward Burroughs II was an American novelist, poet, essayist and spoken word performer. A primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author, he is considered to be "one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the 20th...

, Hubert Selby, John Rechy

John Rechy

John Francis Rechy, , is an American author, the child of a half-Scottish and half-Mexican father, Roberto Rechy, and a Mexican-American mother, Guadalupe Flores. In his novels he has written extensively about homosexual culture in Los Angeles and wider America, and is among the pioneers of modern...

, Tennessee Williams

Tennessee Williams

Thomas Lanier "Tennessee" Williams III was an American writer who worked principally as a playwright in the American theater. He also wrote short stories, novels, poetry, essays, screenplays and a volume of memoirs...

, Nelson Algren

Nelson Algren

Nelson Algren was an American writer.-Early life:Algren was born Nelson Ahlgren Abraham in Detroit, Michigan, the son of Goldie and Gerson Abraham. At the age of three he moved with his parents to Chicago, Illinois where they lived in a working-class, immigrant neighborhood on the South Side...

, maybe a little Raymond Chandler

Raymond Chandler

Raymond Thornton Chandler was an American novelist and screenwriter.In 1932, at age forty-five, Raymond Chandler decided to become a detective fiction writer after losing his job as an oil company executive during the Depression. His first short story, "Blackmailers Don't Shoot", was published in...

. You mix it all up and you have 'Street Hassle'."

"Street Hassle" was included in 2008's The Pitchfork Media

Pitchfork Media

Pitchfork Media, usually known simply as Pitchfork or P4k, is a Chicago-based daily Internet publication established in 1995 that is devoted to music criticism and commentary, music news, and artist interviews. Its focus is on underground and independent music, especially indie rock...

 500: Our Guide to the Greatest Songs from Punk to the Present.

The song is featured during the last scene of the 2005 film The Squid and the Whale

The Squid and the Whale

The Squid and the Whale is a 2005 American drama film written and directed by Noah Baumbach and produced by Wes Anderson. It tells the semi-autobiographical story of two boys in Brooklyn dealing with their parents' divorce in the 1980s. The film is named after a giant squid and sperm whale diorama...

.
Rock band Simple Minds

Simple Minds

Simple Minds are a Scottish rock band who achieved worldwide popularity from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s. The band produced a handful of critically acclaimed albums in the early 1980s and best known for their #1 US, Canada and Netherlands hit single "Don't You ", from the soundtrack of the...

 covered the song in an abbreviated version on their 1984 album Sparkle in the Rain

Sparkle in the Rain

Sparkle In The Rain is the sixth studio album by Simple Minds, released in 1984. It peaked at number one in the UK album charts on 18 February 1984.-Album profile:Sparkle In The Rain, Simple Minds' US breakthrough album, is a rock-oriented album...

, using two verses (the first and third) from the "Waltzing Matilda" section and a verse from the "Slipaway" section.
Drone rock band Spacemen 3

Spacemen 3

Spacemen 3 were an English alternative rock band, formed in 1982 in Rugby, Warwickshire by Peter Kember and Jason Pierce. Their music was "colorfully mind-altering, but not in the sense of the acid rock of the '60s; instead, the band developed its own minimalistic psychedelia"...

perform "Ode to Street Hassle" which employs similar music.