Day 205: Nico - Desertshore

I haven’t listened to Nico in ages, and when I have, it’s been either the albums Velvet Underground & Nico or Chelsea Girl. I’ve never listened to the album that many people view as her finest work: her 1970 release, Desertshore. I guess today is the day.

Album cover courtesy of Reprise

Nico was a German actress/singer/songwriter/model who was a mainstay in Andy Warhol’s Factory scene, and who appeared in films like La Dolce Vita (as herself) and several Warhol productions, like Imitation of Christ and Chelsea Girls. She recorded her debut album Chelsea Girl with covers of songs that other people had written, but her lover Jim Morrison later convinced her to start writing her own songs.

Desertshore was released three years after her debut, and it was produced and arranged by Velvet Underground’s John Cale, who was recently probably introduced to a new generation from his work with Charli XCX. It’s as you’d expect, a little bit out there, slightly avant garde and hard to categorise, maybe falling into some sort of a proto-goth or art punk label.

It’s hard to pinpoint her charisma as an artist, but safe to say she has it by the boatload. “My Only Child” begins with only her voice and then a choir, and it really shows what makes her so special: her English is accented and her voice isn’t exactly soft, but it stops you in your tracks. It’s that thing where some people sing songs and others interpret them, she does the latter. I don’t speak a lick of German, but even to me her German-speaking songs,  “Abschied” and “Mutterlein”, are probably the most striking one on the album.

Now, here I was getting hyped about Nico, and then I read a little bit more about her personal beliefs. As someone who knows her as beautifully reserved in singing in tender songs like “I’ll Be Your Mirror” or “These Days”, I absolutely did not expect that she was a violently racist Nazi. And it’s not like she can claim ignorance of Nazi terror, she grew up next to a death camp and her own father died in a concentration camp.

I think it’s funny to read about how authors approach this, there’s a very “hmm, well, some have accused her of being a Nazi, we just don’t know”-type of framing to it, and the follow that up with her describing herself as a Nazi, people around her saying she frequently went on screeds about Jewish people and saying she publicly performed Nazi songs and thought of herself as superior due to being Aryan. Very ambiguous! But to be fair, she was also a heroin addict for 15 years, so it’s probably safe to say that for a good chunk of her life, she wasn’t exactly firing on all cylinders.

She’d gotten sober before she died, maybe she could have become a bit more humane later on in life. Or she could have just been a sober racist Nazi, I guess some people just aren’t good. If I’m separating the art from the artist, I’m giving it an 8.5/10. Taking into account the ideology, it’s not even worth a review.