“Women are inferior,” she once said, adding in Nico Icon that her only regret was being born a woman. “If I wasn’t so special, I could hate myself.” In the film, her entourage includes women, but on those doomed last tours, she wouldn’t even let her all-male bandmates have girlfriends. But the awkward truth is that Nico regularly exhibited a deep misogyny. In Nico, 1988, for instance, the singer is repositioned as a feminist hero, a former sex symbol now rebelling against social expectations of physical beauty. Certain biographical omissions seem like deliberate attempts to fit Nico into a shape more agreeable to contemporary mores. Dyrholm, while actually healthier-looking than the woman she portrays (the clean white teeth are a giveaway), successfully captures Nico’s oracular cadence and hilarious lack of rhythm.īut the film takes liberties that suggest that another Nico icon is emerging, once again distorting our view. 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. The film dramatizes one of Nico’s chaotic tours from the eighties, not long before her death at the age of forty-nine. The latest reconsideration is Nico, 1988, 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. Over the years, a handful of Nico biographies and memoirs have passed in and out of print, but it still seems that we’re missing something essential to this difficult, even hostile artist. Yet even that film devotes only a few fleeting minutes to the actual content and style of her major albums. In 1995, the documentary Nico Icon gestured at a reconsideration of her art and life beyond the Velvet Underground. As Judy Berman writes in Pitchfork, Nico was “in need of rehabilitation” after her death in 1988. In a way, history has been kind to Nico, insofar as it has occasionally recognized her as someone whose story hasn’t quite been told.
We construct icons, but Nico was an iconoclast. Of course, they’re also her catchiest, but I wonder if her artistic mission-a mission of destruction-is simply incompatible with any of the images we’ve made of her. Today she is best known for the songs she came to loathe. While contemporaries such as Joni Mitchell occupy the very center of pop history, Nico remains apart.
#NICO JANITOR OF LUNACY FULL#
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. Even through her many permutations, Nico’s artistic achievement remains out of focus. When she sang “I’ll Be Your Mirror” in 1966, she wasn’t asking to become a permanent surface for our collective reflections. In the thirty years since her death, she has variously served as a feminist symbol-the Judith Shakespeare to her canonical male peers-and a stand-in for European trauma, an exile wandering the world in the aftermath of war.īut for Nico, being an icon was a problem. Later in life, she became an allegory of rock ’n’ roll’s excess, the moon goddess felled by heroin. In her youth, she was the femme fatale of Andy Warhol’s Factory and the spectral singer of the Velvet Underground. Nico believed in fate, and she was fated to be an icon.
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