Nico: Beyond the Icon
Still from Nico, 1988.
Nico believed in fate, and she was fated to be an icon. In her youth, she was the femme fatale of Andy Warhol’s Factory and the spectral singer of the Velvet Underground. Later in life, she became an allegory of rock ’n’ roll’s excess, the moon goddess felled by heroin. 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.
But for Nico, being an icon was a problem. When she sang “I’ll Be Your Mirror” in 1966, she wasn’t asking to become a permanent surface for our collective reflections. Even through her many permutations, Nico’s 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’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. We construct icons, but Nico was an iconoclast.
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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. As Judy Berman writes in Pitchfork, Nico was “in need of rehabilitation” after her death in 1988. In 1995, the documentary Nico Icon 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’re missing something essential to this difficult, even hostile artist.
