{"id":127942,"date":"2018-07-30T09:10:33","date_gmt":"2018-07-30T13:10:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=127942"},"modified":"2018-07-30T15:02:11","modified_gmt":"2018-07-30T19:02:11","slug":"nico-beyond-the-icon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/07\/30\/nico-beyond-the-icon\/","title":{"rendered":"Nico: Beyond the Icon"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Still from Nico, 1988<\/em>.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Nico believed in fate, and she was fated to be an icon. In her youth, she was the femme fatale of Andy Warhol\u2019s Factory and the spectral singer of the Velvet Underground. Later in life, she became an allegory of rock \u2019n\u2019 roll\u2019s excess, the moon goddess felled by heroin. In the thirty years since her death, she has variously served as a feminist symbol\u2014the Judith Shakespeare to her canonical male peers\u2014and a stand-in for European trauma, an exile wandering the world in the aftermath of war.<\/p>\n

But for Nico, being an icon was a problem. When she sang \u201cI\u2019ll Be Your Mirror\u201d in 1966, she wasn\u2019t asking to become a permanent surface for our collective reflections. Even through her many permutations, Nico\u2019s artistic achievement remains out of focus. As in the case of her favorite poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, critics tend to misunderstand her work as unfinished, as if severed before its full flowering. While contemporaries such as Joni Mitchell occupy the very center of pop history, Nico remains apart. Today she is best known for the songs she came to loathe. Of course, they\u2019re also her catchiest, but I wonder if her artistic mission\u2014a mission of destruction\u2014is simply incompatible with any of the images we\u2019ve made of her. We construct icons, but Nico was an iconoclast.\u00a0<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

In a way, history has been kind to Nico, insofar as it has occasionally recognized her as someone whose story hasn\u2019t quite been told. As Judy Berman writes in\u00a0Pitchfork<\/em><\/a>, Nico was \u201cin need of rehabilitation\u201d after her death in 1988. In 1995, the documentary Nico Icon<\/em> gestured at a reconsideration of her art and life beyond the Velvet Underground. Yet even that film devotes only a few fleeting minutes to the actual content and style of her major albums. Over the years, a handful of Nico biographies and memoirs have passed in and out of print, but it still seems that we\u2019re missing something essential to this difficult, even hostile artist.<\/p>\n

The latest reconsideration is Nico,<\/em> 1988<\/em>,\u00a0<\/em>a biopic directed by the Italian filmmaker Susanna Nicchiarelli and starring the Danish actress Trine Dyrholm, which is set to premiere in the U.S. this August. The film dramatizes one of Nico\u2019s chaotic tours from the eighties, not long before her death at the age of forty-nine. We see her perform behind the Iron Curtain, at times triumphantly, at times disastrously, as she wrestles with personal demons and the broader traumas of European history. Dyrholm, while actually healthier-looking than the woman she portrays (the clean white teeth are a giveaway), successfully captures Nico\u2019s oracular cadence and hilarious lack of rhythm.<\/p>\n

But the film takes liberties that suggest that another Nico icon is emerging, once again distorting our view. Certain biographical omissions seem like deliberate attempts to fit Nico into a shape more agreeable to contemporary mores. In Nico, 1988<\/em>,\u00a0for instance, the singer is repositioned as a feminist hero, a former sex symbol now rebelling against social expectations of physical beauty. But the awkward truth is that Nico regularly exhibited a deep misogyny. \u201cWomen are poison,\u201d she said. \u201cIf I wasn\u2019t so special, I could hate myself.\u201d In the film, her entourage includes women, but on those doomed last tours, she wouldn\u2019t even let her all-male bandmates have girlfriends. \u201cWomen are<\/em> inferior,\u201d she once said, adding in Nico Icon <\/em>that her only regret was being born a woman. She may have rebelled against physical beauty, but she did so not through a spirit of feminism but of vandalism.<\/p>\n

And though in Nico,<\/em> 1988<\/em>,\u00a0<\/em>her touring guitarist is black, one doesn\u2019t learn of Nico\u2019s antiblack racism in the film. She attributed her bigotry to having been raped at the age of thirteen by a black American soldier, who was subsequently court-martialed and executed. But as Richard Witts writes in his book\u00a0Nico: Life and Lies of an Icon <\/em>(1993),\u00a0\u201cEach strand of reality is tangled in a skein of fantasy.\u201d Witts doesn\u2019t go so far as to say the rape never happened, but he couldn\u2019t locate any record of the crime, trial, or execution, when similar incidents were assiduously documented. On the other hand, we have ample proof of her racism. Indeed, Island Records dropped her after learning of racist comments. \u201cI said to some interviewer that I didn\u2019t like Negroes,\u201d she said. \u201cThat\u2019s all \u2026 I don\u2019t like the features. They\u2019re so much like animals.\u201d<\/p>\n

By not addressing these features of Nico\u2019s life, Nico, 1988 <\/em>overreaches the mark. It isn\u2019t that Nico doesn\u2019t deserve empathy; it\u2019s that a historical revision has to be total. Otherwise, we\u2019re just swapping one false image with another. If we can agree that Nico has been wronged by simplistic reductions, then we only wrong her further by not seeing her on her own terms, even\u2014or perhaps especially\u2014if they destroy her reputation. If we gather together all the accounts of her life, even those out of print, and closely study her art, a radically anarchic Nico emerges.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Before she was anyone\u2019s icon, she was Christa P\u00e4ffgen, born in Cologne on October 16, 1938. Her mother was a talented dressmaker, and her father was a soldier of the Reich, executed after becoming mentally disabled from a gunshot wound. During the war, Christa stayed with her grandparents in L\u00fcbbenau, where she liked to play in the graveyard. Her grandfather entertained her with stories ranging from traditional fairy tales to German mythology\u2014essential touchstones for Nico\u2019s archetypal poetry. When the family moved to Berlin after the war, this gothic idyll was replaced by what Nico called \u201ca desert of bricks.\u201d \u201cThat is the image that still comes in my dreams,\u201d she said of postwar Berlin. \u201cIt is something that I use in my lyrics, that hides behind my lyrics like scenery.\u201d A will to destroy would hide behind every artistic gesture she\u2019d make.<\/p>\n

Coming of age in the ruins of Berlin, the young Christa hoped to become a star. As Witts writes in Nico: Life and Lies of an Icon<\/em>\u2014still the only serious, extended treatment of her life and art, now regrettably out of print\u2014Christa \u201cwished to be discovered. At what she did not care.\u201d Although Nico would later see her beauty as a curse, modeling was her first path to fame. Christa was tall and bold, with massive eyes, sensuous lips, and steel-plated cheekbones. \u201cHer hands were like milk and glass,\u201d her aunt recalled.<\/p>\n

Nothing could be uncannier than seeing the future singer of \u201cJanitor of Lunacy\u201d advertising an Electrolux dishwasher, but she was a successful model. Soon, she was posing for Elle,<\/em> Esquire<\/em>, and Vogue\u00a0<\/em>and traveling all over Europe. In Paris, she claimed, Ernest Hemingway told her to become a blonde, and Salvador Dal\u00ed gave her the name Nico as an anagram of icon<\/em>\u00a0(in truth, she lifted the name from the filmmaker Nikos Papatakis). As she would sing on \u201cAfraid,\u201d from her 1970 album Desertshore<\/em>,\u00a0she learned how to be a mannequin, animated by the desires of others, and it was a hateful condition:<\/p>\n

Cease to know or to tell
\nOr to see or to be your own,
\nHave someone else\u2019s will as your own,
\nHave someone else\u2019s will as your own,
\nYou are beautiful and you are alone<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

*<\/p>\n

When she landed a part in Federico Fellini\u2019s La dolce vita <\/em>(1960), Nico thought she might become an actress, but she lacked the discipline. Instead, she turned to singing. In some regards, it was an odd choice. Her musical upbringing consisted of opera and the love songs of her mother\u2019s favorite singer, Zarah Leander. Nico couldn\u2019t play an instrument, she couldn\u2019t write songs, and she had an incredible lack of rhythm, almost an antirhythm. Nevertheless, she felt she could make an impact in pop music. She just needed the songs.<\/p>\n

When she met Bob Dylan in 1964, they commenced a brief affair that resulted in his writing a song about her called \u201cI\u2019ll Keep It with Mine.\u201d \u201cBut he didn\u2019t like it when I tried to sing along with him,\u201d she said. \u201cI thought he was being chauvinistic.\u201d Nico would always be met with resistance when she tried to sing with the boys. By the midsixties, she had a young child with the French actor Alain Delon (who has never recognized his son) and was determined to become a famous chanteuse. But as Richard Witts writes, \u201cShe knew there was no chanteuse <\/em>to be <\/em>as famous as.\u201d None of her contemporaries, such as Joan Baez or Mary Travers, shared her otherworldly aesthetic.<\/p>\n

Nico secured a modest recording contract and released a peppy Gordon Lightfoot song, \u201cI\u2019m Not Saying,\u201d with Brian Jones and Jimmy Page playing guitar. Although her early musical talent was much maligned, Nico\u2019s signature contralto, with its elongated vowels and strangely stateless accent, is there from the beginning. The record didn\u2019t make her famous, but when she went to New York in 1965, it helped gain her entry to Andy Warhol\u2019s Factory. Warhol, the master of surfaces, instantly recognized an icon. He began casting Nico in films such as\u00a0Chelsea Girls<\/em> (1966), in which her face is used as a psychedelic projection screen\u2014an apt metaphor for that period of her life. More important, he installed her as the front woman of the Velvet Underground, hoping to compensate for Lou Reed because people at the Factory said he had no personality.<\/p>\n

Nico has often been seen as superfluous to the Velvet Underground. Certainly, that\u2019s how Reed saw it, advising her to knit when she wasn\u2019t singing \u201cAll Tomorrow\u2019s Parties,\u201d \u201cFemme Fatale,\u201d or \u201cI\u2019ll Be Your Mirror.\u201d \u201cI wanted to be a singer,\u201d she said, \u201cbut I was like a mannequin.\u201d In reality, Nico was integral to the band. In fact, they landed a deal for their debut album, The Velvet Underground and Nico <\/em>(1967), only because a record executive thought Nico\u2014not Lou Reed, not John Cale\u2014was great. The history of pop sounds a lot different if Nico doesn\u2019t sing on that LP.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Nico emerged from the Velvet Underground at a crossroads. In many ways, she had internalized Lou Reed\u2019s contempt. \u201cI thought men write songs and women sing them,\u201d she said, and her repertoire at that time was entirely man-made: Bob Dylan, Gordon Lightfoot, Jimmy Page, Lou Reed. After adding songs by Jackson Browne, she recorded what is still her most popular album, Chelsea Girl <\/em>(1967),\u00a0<\/em>which contains folksy numbers like \u201cThese Days.\u201d But while Nico had finally become a solo act, an iconic blonde on a record sleeve, she considered Chelsea Girl<\/em> an artistic failure. To her horror, which I share, the producer had added a flute to the arrangements. \u201cI cried when I heard the album,\u201d Nico recounted. \u201cI cried because of the flute \u2026 There should be a button on record players, a \u2018no flute\u2019 button.\u201d<\/p>\n

The lesson was clear: Nico had to control everything, and the only way to do that was to become a composer. Already she had amassed one of the strangest, most fertile collections of influences. In addition to what she took from Dylan and Reed, the Dadaist Tristan Tzara had given her lessons in wordplay, the blues artist Victor Brox had taught her about composition, and Ornette Coleman had provided her instruction in harmonics. But two new keys fully unlocked her art. The first was her acquisition of an Indian harmonium, an acoustic organ that Allen Ginsberg used during poetry readings. The second was Jim Morrison. She and her \u201csoul brother,\u201d the front man of the Doors, would take drugs and wander through the California desert. They studied the Romantic poets, particularly Shelley and Coleridge, and he encouraged Nico to record her dreams\u2014the raw material of the unconscious\u2014and refine them into lyrics.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Courtesy of Lutz Graf-Ulbrich, from his memoir\u00a0In the Shadow of the Moon Goddess<\/i>.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Living in the tower of \u201cThe Castle,\u201d a twenty-two-room hilltop mansion in Los Feliz, Los Angeles, with the curtains drawn and surrounded by candles, Nico started composing. She was determined to upend Chelsea Girl<\/em>. Gothic wasn\u2019t yet a genre of pop, but she began channeling distant historical epochs with her harmonium. \u201cI rebel against the present,\u201d she said. \u201cMy melodies are from the Middle Ages.\u201d Viva, the actress and Warhol superstar, recalled how against the grain Nico seemed. \u201cWe took nothing seriously,\u201d she told Richard Witts. \u201cNico, on the other hand, started to take everything <\/em>seriously.\u201d A photo captures Nico\u2019s morbid cast around that time. While others bathe in the South of France sun, Nico is seen in the shadow of a parasol, draped in black and reading the Tibetan Book of the Dead. The result of her reinvention was The Marble Index <\/em>(1968), the first of a trio of albums that stand almost entirely alone in pop history. John Cale, her Velvet Underground bandmate, did the arrangements, and in the documentary Nico Icon<\/em>, he proudly called The Marble Index<\/em> \u201ca contribution to European classical music.\u201d<\/p>\n

It could never be said that Nico was a virtuoso, but you don\u2019t need to be when you\u2019re original. To a new listener of her major albums, the first thing that stands out is her self-taught style on the harmonium. Ornette Coleman had shown her the basics\u2014the right hand plays the melody while the left plays the harmony\u2014but also suggested that these rudiments could be reversed. In Nico\u2019s harmonium songs, she mostly plays the melody in the bass and the harmony in the treble\u2014a bewildering, destabilizing inversion.<\/p>\n

The lyrics, written in the California desert and inspired by Berlin\u2019s \u201cdesert of bricks,\u201d return us to the archetypal netherworld of her grandfather\u2019s fables: \u201cSince the first of you and me \/ Asleep \/ In a Nibelungen land \u2026\u2009\u201d This desolate dreamscape is populated with gnarled characters, sometimes reclusive, as in \u201cFrozen Warnings<\/a>\u201d\u2014<\/p>\n

Friar hermit stumbles over
\nThe cloudy borderline,
\nFrozen warnings close to mine,
\nClose to the frozen borderline<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u2014and sometimes terrifyingly flamboyant, as with the demon of \u201cNo One Is There<\/a>\u201d:<\/p>\n

In a crucial parody
\nDemon is dancing down the scene,
\nHe is calling and throwing
\nHis arms up in the air,
\nAnd no one is there<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Having written The Marble Index <\/em>in a castle, Nico retreated to a small Italian island to compose Desertshore <\/em>(1970), my favorite of her albums. She brought all her talents to bear upon this project, which contains songs in English, French, and German, including cryptic tributes to Brian Jones (\u201cJanitor of Lunacy\u201d) and Andy Warhol (\u201cThe Falconer\u201d).<\/p>\n

On Desertshore<\/em>, Nico\u2019s voice is at its zenith, carrying like a compressed psychic beam from her mind to yours. At their best, her songs reduce experience to essential images, like the deceptively simple verses of William Blake. Has there ever been a fitter description of depression, rendered in so few words, as on \u201cMy Only Child<\/a>\u201d? (\u201cThe morning small \/ The evening tall.\u201d) And perhaps there\u2019s no more haunting minute in the history of pop than \u201cLe petit chevalier,\u201d an uncanny parable sung by Nico\u2019s toddler son while John Cale plays the harpsichord, seemingly in another room:<\/p>\n

Je suis le petit chevalier<\/em>
\n Avec le ciel dessus mes yeux,<\/em>
\n Je ne peux pas me effroyer<\/em><\/p>\n

(I am the little knight
\nWith the sky above my eyes,
\nI cannot frighten myself)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The blonde icon of Chelsea Girl <\/em>had been totally smashed, along with its insidious flute.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Nico once said her music came from \u201cthe life inside,\u201d but the nature of that life remains a mystery. Some of those who knew her insist she was perfectly void. Her friend Carlos de Maldonado-Bostock said, \u201cShe hadn\u2019t an idea in her head,\u201d and Viva averred, \u201cShe had no inner life.\u201d The more I read about Nico, the more she resembles the blackened Berlin ruins, echoes of which she sought in all the cities she visited. Like the German writer W.\u2009G. Sebald, for instance, Nico felt a dark affinity with Manchester\u2019s blasted industrial cityscape. In this way, her work seems like an attempt to externalize a ruinous inner condition, an artistic mission hinted at by something she once told a British journalist: \u201cIf I were not Nico, I would be a terrorist.\u201d<\/p>\n

And indeed, after she had built her own albums and voice, she set about tearing them down. It began with a series of personal disasters: \u201cPeople around me started dying.\u201d Her mother and Jim Morrison both passed away, in 1970 and \u201971, respectively, and some friends thought she\u2019d suffered a mental breakdown or even become schizophrenic. Ever since her modeling days, when she\u2019d been prescribed amphetamines as \u201cdiet pills,\u201d Nico had struggled with substance abuse. Now an addiction to heroin intensified. In his memoir of his time as a member of Nico\u2019s band, Songs They Never Play on the Radio <\/em>(1992), James Young recalls her use of heroin as self-medicating. \u201cAll the bad <\/em>things you\u2019ve done,\u201d she told him, \u201call the bad things that happened to <\/em>you. It comes back \u2026 like a riot \u2026 the heroin calms me down.\u201d<\/p>\n

During these years, Nico recorded one last major\u2014albeit lesser\u2014work, The End\u2026\u00a0<\/em>(1974). The spirit of Jim Morrison courses through the album, which includes a cover of \u201cThe End\u201d and a song inspired by the last time Nico saw him in Paris, on July 3, 1971. Morrison was in the back seat of a black car. \u201cI signaled, but he didn\u2019t see me,\u201d she said. \u201cHe was looking straight ahead, facing death.\u201d The song, \u201cYou Forget to Answer<\/a>,\u201d is among her most powerful, with John Cale playing piano, Phil Manzanera on guitar, and Brian Eno on the synthesizer:<\/p>\n

You seem not to be listening,
\nYou seem not to be listening,
\nThe high tide is taking everything<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Nico\u2019s addiction prevented her from composing new music, but it incidentally achieved something else of her terroristic mission: it destroyed the icon of her beauty. \u201cShe decided that she must become unsightly in the eyes of those who loved her for her good looks,\u201d Richard Witts writes. And she was successful. Andy Warhol\u2019s longtime collaborator Paul Morrissey said, \u201cShe had been one of the most famous blonde models there was, an icon to thousands of people \u2026 It was tragic to see this change.\u201d But his tragedy was Nico\u2019s triumph.<\/p>\n

The common picture of Nico\u2019s ruinous final years has been shaped by James Young\u2019s memoir, Songs They Never Play on the Radio<\/em>. It\u2019s estimated that she performed more than twelve hundred shows from 1980 to 1988, crisscrossing Europe in a drug-addled nightmare that enshrined her as an icon of pop-star implosion. Young played keyboard in the ad hoc bands assembled for these tours, and in his sometimes kind, sometimes savage telling, \u201cshe was a monster,\u201d appealing only to \u201cheroin users and those who thought self-destruction a romantic vocation.\u201d<\/p>\n

I find it remarkable that somewhere in this dark night of the soul, Nico recorded a final album, Camera Obscura <\/em>(1985), <\/em>which contains one last masterpiece, \u201cK\u00f6nig<\/a>.\u201d The last song she ever recorded consists of just her voice and her harmonium, as it was at the very beginning of her artistic journey:<\/p>\n

K\u00f6nig, lass dich leiten,<\/em>
\n Lass mich dich begleiten,<\/em>
\n Auf diesem weiten Strand<\/em>
\n Ergreife meine Hand<\/em><\/p>\n

(King, let yourself lead,
\nLet me accompany you,
\nOn this wide beach
\nTake my hand)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Death took Nico on the island of Ibiza. On July 17, 1988, she suffered a brain aneurysm while riding her bike and died the following day. James Young recalls the words of a man who was among the first to see her corpse and who perceived a \u201cterrible look on her face of \u2026\u00a0aloneness<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Where did Nico\u2019s will to destruction come from? It\u2019s the central mystery of her life and art. The biopic Nico, 1988 <\/em>opens with a vision of wartime Berlin in flames and suggests that her music was a quest to recapture the sound of the destruction. It\u2019s true that her experience of the war was foundational to the artist she became, an artist whose work is full of negations\u2014empty cradles, empty pages, empty hearts. Yet it wasn\u2019t the dynamism of Berlin\u2019s burning that entranced her. It was the ruins left behind, the silent and still desert of bricks. She perceived something there, something deeply personal, and it makes me wonder: Were the ruins really a prophecy, or was the destruction already inside her?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Michael<\/span>\u00a0LaPointe is a writer in Toronto.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  Nico believed in fate, and she was fated to be an icon. In her youth, she was the femme fatale of Andy Warhol\u2019s Factory and the spectral singer of the Velvet Underground. Later in life, she became an allegory of rock \u2019n\u2019 roll\u2019s excess, the moon goddess felled by heroin. In the thirty years […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1093,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[922,34843,13160,7273,34839,16149,34844,7840,34837,34836,34841,4495,34842,34838,7838,34840,34834],"class_list":["post-127942","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-andy-warhol","tag-christa-paffgen","tag-federico-fellini","tag-joni-mitchell","tag-judy-berman","tag-la-dolce-vita","tag-lubbenau","tag-nico","tag-nico-1988","tag-nico-icon","tag-nico-life-and-lies-of-an-icon","tag-pitchfork","tag-richard-witts","tag-susanna-nicchiarelli","tag-the-factory","tag-trine-dyrholm","tag-velvet-underground"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nNico: Beyond the Icon<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"A new biopic of the elusive Nico\u2014whose career extended far beyond the Velvet Underground\u2014reduces her to yet another icon. 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