Nico: Desolation Angel
The truths sought by an artist like Nico are elusive, personal, equivocal. Nico is a perfectionist of anti art; a pessimist who somehow manages to fashion beautifulhallucinations from her sense of isolation. Her songs unite the search for, and despair of, salvation with the existential traditions of the European chanteuse.
Nico: Desolation Angel
The truths sought by an artist like Nico are elusive, personal, equivocal. Nico is a perfectionist of anti art; a pessimist who somehow manages to fashion beautifulhallucinations from her sense of isolation. Her songs unite the search for, and despair of, salvation with the existential traditions of the European chanteuse. The fleeting, shadowy . figures who populate her world are possessed of an irreconcilable melancholy, lost in a nihilist void. While many artists examine the plight of their characters, Nico is more concerned with the structure of the trap.
Her songs isolate a set of metaphors for dealing with the unpleasant facts of twentieth century life -s the desolate sub-culture of hustlers, lovers and silence addicts with the hinterland of empty hotels and early morning confessions. Nico’s words are' accurate newscasts from the unconscious, that narrative stage upon which .the whole business of human experience is constantly being dramatised. The scope and depth of her performance result from the artiste’s obvious awareness of life, her care for true and revealing diction.