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Nico - Violent Racist.

D

Dubversion

Gorn
Enforced Holiday
Still, there's no doubt talk of her dark side is accurate. When Danny Fields describes her as "Nazi-esque", he's not affectionately referring to her regal, demanding personality, but to her racism. "Every once in a while there'd be something about Jews and I'd be, 'But Nico, I'm Jewish,' and she was like 'Yes, yes, I don't mean you.' She had a definite Nordic Aryan streak, [the belief] that she was physically, spiritually and creatively superior." Worse, on one occasion, she acted those beliefs out, explosively. In the restaurant at the Chelsea Hotel sometime in the very early 1970s, Nico sat with a bunch of musicians, among them a beautiful mixed-race singer who'd worked with Jimi Hendrix. According to Fields, "Nico was, I dunno, feeling neglected, or drunk, but suddenly she said 'I hate black people,' and smashed a wineglass on the table and stuck it in the girl's eye. There was lots of blood and screaming. Fortunately she just twisted it around her eye socket, so the glass never reached [the eye] but it's not like she was being cautious." Fields claims the Warhol crowd spirited Nico on to a plane and out of the country the next morning, while somehow managing to placate the victim and hush up the affair.
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so that's a disappointment, then


full article
 
I read a biography on holiday in Jan....was written about the time she living in Manchester...up to her death....was certainly an eye opener to the Nico I had in my head.
 
lightsoutlondon said:
She was the poo on the heel of the VU, IMO. Not entirely sure why they bothered having her around...
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Whenever you hear Reed or Cale talk about her, it's clear that they absolutely adored her.
Love is blind, I think, and unrequited love is deaf as well, apparently.
 
littlebabyjesus said:
Whenever you hear Reed or Cale talk about her, it's clear that they absolutely adored her.
Love is blind, I think, and unrequited love is deaf as well, apparently.
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Aye, true enough. Have you read the Lou Reed bio? He didn't treat her too well a lot of the time though, IIRC. Mind you, he had a track record of that with most lovers/associates.
 
That biography 'Nico : Songs You Never Hear on the Radio' (1992) by James Young is a pretty interesting read, but it doesn't mention anything about racism, not that I recall anyway. He was concentrating on a specific peroid though -- her chaotically addicted years towards the end of her life.
 
lightsoutlondon said:
:laughing smilie:

Nooooooooooo way. :)
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I'm not putting the VU down, but mostly they're not as different from other 60s rock groups as people make out. They produced some genuinely transcendent improv stuff (Sister Ray, Live 1969's What Goes On) some gorgeous song-writerly stuff like the s/t album.

John Cale however, works far better in the stark formailty of of the Nico albums, than in a rock band. Like Simon Reynolds says, it's 'volk' music, the actual fulfillment of Lou Reed's fantasies fantasy in 'Heroin' of getting lost in time. Also it links art rock up to Brecht, Weill, and Lieder singing, and a way of emoting in pop which has nothing to do with the American tradition.
 
She was a junkie, a totally self-absorbed, egoistic and "would-walk-over-dead-bodies-for-my-next-fix" one. And she was German. And grew up before the war, in a run-down socially collapsed nation where people were looking for scapegoats. A kid when the bombs fell over Dresden, running through smoking ruins seeing blood and deformed corpses everywhere. Rumours had it she was raped in the aftermath, walking barefoot through a city looking like Badgad would do today.
It is probable that she was a racist- Just as the majority of people in a European nation born before 1940 would be, automatically, not that the British was any better in this time period, with your empire and the racism that stood for.
I'm not excusing her at all, but no wonder she was fucking disturbed- under the circumstances, i'm not surprised.
And I don't think she *just* hated black people, i think she hated EVERYONE.
 
maya said:
She was a junkie, a totally self-absorbed, egoistic and "would-walk-over-dead-bodies-for-my-next-fix" one. And she was German. And grew up before the war, in a run-down socially collapsed nation where people were looking for scapegoats. A kid when the bombs fell over Dresden, running through smoking ruins seeing blood and deformed corpses everywhere. Rumours had it she was raped in the aftermath, walking barefoot through a city looking like Badgad would do today.
It is probable that she was a racist- Just as the majority of people in a European nation born before 1940 would be, automatically, not that the British was any better in this time period, with your empire and the racism that stood for.
I'm not excusing her at all, but no wonder she was fucking disturbed- under the circumstances, i'm not surprised.
And I don't think she *just* hated black people, i think she hated EVERYONE.
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well said
 
I liked this quote from the article linked to...

She didn't bother with neurosis, she went straight to psychotic.
 
fwiw, it doesn't affect my enjoyment, as i think character, are soooo not velvet underground. something like that anyway.
 
I've always found the whole VU/AW scene a bit wrong. Perfect aesthetics and mass production etc. It's all a bit wobbly in the wrong way. Very disappointed to read the Nico story, but not at all surprised.
 
I always found her fascinating, yet never felt I liked her in the least bit until I read "Nico, Songs They Never Play On The Radio" by James Young, a sort of rock'n'roll Sunset Boulevard and one of the best book about touring and fading celebrity ever written. It's both very funny and ultimately surprisingly touching. I kind of warmed to her a great deal after that and she seemed a bit more human by the end.

Completely agree with maya, by the way. People are more complicated than they seem in a brief condemnation like that. I never thought she was very cuddly in the first place.
 
Curiouser and Curiouser!
Nico was working as a temp for the U.S. Air Force. A black American Sergeant had raped not only her, but other girls under his employ. She'd kept quiet about it, but he was found out and court-marshalled. She had to testify for the prosecution at his trial. He was sentenced to death and shot. Nico was 15.
"Not only does she have to carry the horror of the rape but the secret guilt of somehow being complicit, by her testimony, in his execution. Sex for Nico....is irrevocably associated with punishment."
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http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Nico
 
It is probable that she was a racist- Just as the majority of people in a European nation born before 1940 would be
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why "a European nation"
is racism of people born before 1940 a particular trait of Europeans?
 
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