St. Vincent, Builder Of Rock Futures, Takes Shelter In The Past

There's a scene in Torrey Peters' new novel, Detransition, Baby, where two trans women argue over the enduring legacy of Candy Darling, one of the most memorable stars in Andy Warhol's orbit in late-'60s and early-'70s New York. One character asserts that she was little more than a muse, a blank canvas onto which men like Warhol and Lou Reed (who wrote about her in "Candy Says" and "Walk on the Wild Side") could project their fantasies: "just some helpless languid blonde waiting around for a man to save her and make her famous." In response, the other character lifts her skirt to reveal an enormous, photorealistic portrait of Darling's face tattooed across her thigh. A person's image, when separated from the person, can be tectonic in its meaning or appear as a cheap facsimile: It depends on how many times it's been replicated, the conditions of that replication, and, mostly, whom you ask.

Darling died of lymphoma alongside Anohni, the trans singer who picked a famous photo of Darling on her deathbed as the cover of her 2005 album ; the song they sang together was "Candy Says." Today, nearly 50 years after her death, she appears as a character in a album, a mascot of a certain era of New York. The steadfastly retro winds down with a song named for Darling, in which Annie Clark professes her devotion in the style of a man down on his luck, trying to win back a great love with a stale gesture: "Candy Darling, I brought bodega roses for your feet."