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Material Type | Library | Call Number | Item Barcode | Location |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Book | Searching... Andover - Memorial Hall Library | BIOGRAPHY NICO | 31330009066808 | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
A new, definitive biography of the iconic and mysterious singer, Warhol superstar, Velvet Underground collaborator: influential solo artist Nico.
YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL AND YOU ARE ALONE is a new biography of Nico, the mysterious singer best known for her work with the Velvet Underground and her solo album Chelsea Girl . Her life is tangled in myth--much of it of her own invention. Rock and roll cultural historian Jennifer Bickerdike delivers a definitive book that unravels the story while making a convincing case for Nico's enduring importance.
Over the course of her career, Nico was an ever-evolving myth: art film house actress, highly coveted fashion model, Dietrich of Punk, Femme Fatale, Chelsea Girl, Garbo of Goth, The Last Bohemian, Heroin Junkie. Lester Bangs described her as 'a true enigma.' At age 27, Nico became Andy Warhol's newest Superstar, featuring in his one commercial break out hit film Chelsea Girls and garnering the position of chanteuse for the Velvet Underground. It wasn't Nico's musical chops which got her the gig; it was her striking beauty. Her seeming otherworldly and unattainable presence was further amplified by her reputation for dating rock stars (Brian Jones, Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison, among others). She became famous for being Nico.
Yet Nico's talent and her contribution to rock culture are often overlooked. She spent most of her career as a solo artist on the road, determined to make music, seemingly against all the odds, enduring empty concert halls, abusive fans, and the often perilous reality of being an ageing artist and drug addict. She created mesmerizing and unique projects that inspired a generation of artists, including Henry Rollins, Morrissey, Siousxie Sioux and the Banshees and Iggy Pop.
Drawing on the archives at the Andy Warhol Museum and at Nico's record labels, various private collections, and rarely seen footage, and featuring exclusive new interviews from those who knew her best, including Iggy Pop and Danny Fields, and those inspired by her legacy, YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL AND YOU ARE ALONE reveals the complicated, often compromised, self-destructive and always head strong woman behind the one-dimensional myths.
Reviews (2)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Rock historian Bickerdike (Why Vinyl Matters) offers an impressive corrective to the "one-sided narrative... perpetuated about Nico" in an account that unpacks the influential musician's life. Drawing on exclusive interviews and archives, Bickerdike dissects the "apathetic misogyny and stereotyping" that denied Nico (1938--1988) her place in rock history, making "her story a chilling modern narrative on the fetishism of beauty." Haunted by her youth in Germany during WWII, the vulnerable and beautiful Christa Päffgen assumed the persona of "Nico" as a teen in 1956 before going on to model for Vogue, landing acting roles in Fellini's La Dolce Vita (1960) and Andy Warhol's Chelsea Girls (1966), and dating such rock stars as Bob Dylan and Jim Morrison. Nico performed with the Velvet Underground--seducing fans with her "eerie" voice--until professional jealousy forced her from the group a year after joining. Even in the midst of having her talent and, mainly, looks disparaged by the music industry, former bandmates, and friends ("Warhol called her old and fat in 1980"), Bickerdike underscores how Nico continued to make music "against all odds," touring solo for two decades and blazing the trail for future rock legends including Debbie Harry, Patti Smith, and Kate Bush. Music lovers will be enthralled. Agent: Matthew Elblonk, DeFiore and Co. (Aug.)
Guardian Review
In 1966, the artist Andy Warhol was booked to appear at the annual banquet for the New York Society for Clinical Psychiatry. Rather than give a speech, he brought along the Velvet Underground, the house band at his Factory studio, to perform instead. The evening marked the German model Nico's first appearance with the band, which also comprised Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison and Moe Tucker. As diners tucked into their main course, "the Velvets started to blast, and Nico started to wail", recalled Warhol in his book POPism. Factory gadabouts Edie Sedgwick and Gerard Malanga climbed on to the stage and danced with bullwhips, while two film-makers rushed into the room wielding bright lights and Super 8 cameras and began loudly interrogating startled attendees about their sex lives. The next day, the event - more art prank than performance - was written up in the papers, with the headline in the New York Herald Tribune declaring: "Shock Treatment for Psychiatrists." It was a pivotal night for Nico, whose presence and distinctive deep alto would raise the profile of the Velvet Underground and inject their shows with an otherworldly, melancholy glamour. It also forms a significant moment in You Are Beautiful and You Are Alone, the cultural historian Jennifer Otter Bickerdike's account of the life of Christa Päffgen (she adopted the name Nico in her late teens). Before joining the Velvet Underground, Nico had spent more than a decade working as a model and sometime actor - she appeared in Fellini's La Dolce Vita after the director spotted her standing on the set and offered her a role on the spot. But while she enjoyed the lifestyle modelling afforded her, she objected to being intellectually patronised or regarded as a blank canvas, and was uncertain about the path her life should take. Though not all the members of the Velvet Underground were thrilled at her joining - Reed didn't want her singing all his songs; Warhol said he wouldn't manage them without her - she felt at home among artists and avant-garde musicians, and her year-long spell with the band launched a career that would occupy her until her death at 49 following a bicycle accident. Otter Bickerdike sets out her stall at the start of the book: to lay waste to the myths and stereotypes that have clung to Nico, to cut through the misogyny and reclaim her narrative from those who see her primarily as a sexual object and muse rather than a creative force in her own right. As well as documenting Nico's early life and rise to fame in the late 1950s and 60s, Otter Bickerdike's aim is to examine the post-Warhol, post-Velvets years during which she toured Europe and America and made solo albums, all the while trying to manage a catastrophic heroin habit. In some of this, the author is successful. The book is detailed and comprehensive in its research - more than 100 of Nico's friends, ex-lovers and acquaintances were interviewed and archives methodically trawled. Much of Nico's allure as a performer and a personality rests on a perceived mysteriousness that was partly influenced by her coolly monosyllabic manner, but also by the gaps in her story. Otter Bickerdike painstakingly fills in these gaps, piecing together Nico's family history, her early years bearing witness to atrocities in Nazi Germany and her eagerness to leave for a better life. Nonetheless, it's frustrating to find a writer tackling the sexism that made Nico's career as an artist an uphill struggle, and the relentless fixation on her beauty, while liberally deploying gendered language such as "songstress", "chanteuse" and "the German beauty" (wouldn't "singer" suffice?). Also grating is the space given to male assessments of her attributes. While it is, of course, helpful to understand the male gaze and the extent to which Nico's sexual magnetism seemed to paralyse the men who crossed her path, it's hard to fathom the author's inclusion of a long, lasciviously detailed and ultimately humiliating account of the singer's oral sex technique on the Doors' singer Jim Morrison, as relayed by the band's keyboardist Ray Manzarek. Elsewhere, however, the book gets closer to understanding Nico than most, even though, as a portrait, it isn't always flattering. She is self-absorbed, self-destructive, needy and sometimes volatile. An incident in New York where she threw glass in the face of a black woman whom she overheard discussing her experiences of prejudice saw her effectively chased out of town. Her relationship with her son, Ari, with the actor Alain Delon, also makes for upsetting reading. After an early childhood in which Nico would fitfully sweep Ari up and take him with her to shows and parties, he eventually went to live with Delon's parents, who adopted him and then denied his mother access. Mother and son were finally reunited when he was in his late teens, although communication continued to prove difficult until they bonded over their shared passion: heroin. While Nico was never commercially successful - albums such as Chelsea Girl and the harmonium-smothered The Marble Index were too outre for popular tastes - her influence as an artist remains significant (Bauhaus, Siouxsie & the Banshees, Patti Smith and Björk have all expressed their admiration). Among the more joyful tributes to her artistry in You Are Beautiful and You Are Alone comes from Iggy Pop, who had a brief relationship with her and appeared in the video for "Evening of Light". He says: "I'm absolutely convinced that someday, when people have ears to hear her, in the same way [they] have eyes to see a Van Gogh now, that people are gonna just go "WHOOOAAA!"