Camera Obscura is Nico’s last studio album (though not the last CD of hers to feature new material). John Cale produced this album, as he did The Marble Index, Desertshore, and The End. The accompaniment is not always good—James Young strikes again—though it can be fine, as in “Das Lied von Einsamen Mädchen.” The new material on this album is not as strong as on previous efforts. Songs like “Tananore” have their moments, and the essential ideas are good, but they sound less shaped and developed than her earlier work. Much of this album seems clearly pitched to a younger pop market, making use of synthesizer clichés then current. Nowhere is this more apparent than on "My Heart is Empty," which was also shot as a video. The best song on the album is the oldest: "König," which was featured at the end of Garrel's La Cicatrice Interieure. On this track, Cale lets Nico accompany herself on harmonium, with nothing else. Not only is the sound characteristically hers, but the song itself shows more care and feeding than the others on the album.
One other cut on the album deserves mention: Nico's cover of "My Funny Valentine." This may seem an odd choice, though Nico began her singing career doing standards in a New York nightclub. This cover has achieved some notoreity, in part for some of the same reasons as Chet Baker's late renditions of classic songs--I allude to the freak show quality. But Nico does a good job with this song. She infuses it with some real pain and is sensitive to the song's nuances.
Nico's music, and the story of her life, have always had an elegiac quality. Nowhere is this truer than with Nico's Last Concert: Fata Morgana. It was, quite literally, her last concert. Arranged by her former lover and accompanist Lütz Ulbrich, it took place on June 6, 1988. A few weeks later, Nico died of a brain hemorrage while on the island of Ibiza.
For the most part, the music on this album is new, the only exception being the final cut "You Forget to Answer," from The End. The new material is even less-shaped than on Camera Obscura. Here’s an example from the lyrics to “Your Voice”:
Your voice will frighten my horse
Your voice will frighten my horse
Am I the target moving closer to your choice?
A certain familiarity lies in your tone of voice
Oh no no no no no no no no
These lyrics are then repeated. Even for Nico lyrics, this is pretty poor stuff. A lot of the vocal lines have no words at all. But this is not necessarily a bad thing. Nico uses her harmonium more as a solo instrument, rather than as simple accompaniment to her voice. She also interacts with the other musicians to a greater extent than previously, with some interesting results. In fact, much of the material seems improvised, a concept that is almost unimaginable with most of her earlier work. The conventional thing to say at this point is that all of this suggests that Nico was perhaps ready to grow musically, but that it was all cut short by her tragic death. But I don’t think that that’s true. I think that her earlier work was really better and that, for whatever reason, she was not able to write songs as effectively as she had once done.
***
I opened part II of this essay with a quote from the poet Jack Spicer: his last words in fact. Spicer’s last words seemed appropriate to me because they made me consider that art, which we usually think of as expanding the human spirit, can also mark our limitations. This is what makes Nico’s art (and not just hers) so poignant. Through it, we see someone define an artistic image that allows her to produce some really compelling music; this same artistic image (solitary, even solipsistic experimental poet/composer) limited her ability to communicate with very many people and probably interacted with aspects of her personality that led to some self-destructive behavior.
But forget that last part: I have avoided writing about the merely biographical in this essay, preferring to focus on Nico’s work. The two are impossible to completely separate, obviously, and one always suggests the other, but for me, this was an attempt to redress some of the imbalance that exists in the current literature on Nico, which focuses too much on her life. About her work, there is certainly much more to be said; her live recordings, bootleg and otherwise, offer much and deserve a more thorough looking-into. Then there is Nico’s fragmentary diary, kept towards the end of her life. It is an extremely bizarre document, equal parts documentation, lies, fantasies, and sketches, composed in an evocative and frustratingly laconic style. I could go on about these, but the end has to come sometime. I don’t want to close with any sweeping conclusions about Nico’s work, because that would seem jarring and untrue; besides, I don’t have any. Instead, what I am thinking about as I turn away, for now, from my obsession of the last several months with Nico’s music is why? Why did Nico strike such a chord within me? What was it about Ofteringer’s documentary that made me decide to seek out her music and films (not an easy task in many cases, I can tell you) and spend so much time with it all?
The best I can do right now is give an oblique answer. Part of the reason has to do with Spicer, which is one of the reasons I think that his last words suggested themselves to me as an epigraph. The more I thought about the connection, the more I thought about Spicer’s book After Lorca. His first book of poems (of those that survive), it is a kind of elaborate game in which the poet translates and adapts Lorca’s poetry and also writes letters from himself to the dead Lorca and vice versa. In the last letter, Spicer writes
The connection between us, which had been fading away with the summer, is now finally broken. I turn in anger and dissatisfaction to the things of my life and you return, a disembodied but contagious spirit, to the printed page. It is over, this intimate communion with the ghost of Garcia Lorca, and I wonder now how it was ever able to happen . . . There are no angels, ghosts, or even shadows . . . Yet it was there . . . What is real, I suppose, will endure.
