Nico
The End

Nico's music is timeless, and it's just a trivial detail that "The Marble Index" ("Chelsea Girl," I don't even consider it) was released in '68, because it could have come out yesterday or a hundred years from now. Many define it as dark ante litteram, but this music is something more, it's something otherworldly, belonging to the distant past or the farthest future, so much so that it could describe the desolate landscapes of prehistory as well as the ravaged ones of the Apocalypse. Nico seems to speak to us from another world, and her voice, so afflicted yet simultaneously disenchanted, in its cosmic fatalism, takes on the consistency of a chilling wind blowing over the ruins of an immense catastrophe, the tragedy of Humanity, destined to perish, like everything else, devoured by a universe where everything is precarious and insubstantial.

Nico doesn't invent anything, but she is able to orchestrate a sound completely divorced from her time, and, we might add, completely divorced from this world. If every motion has a cause, what then originated the first motion?, we might ask ourselves, what led to the blossoming of this flower? Like a small big bang, Nico's music seems to arise more from an internal short circuit than from an external cause. But instead of giving birth to a universe, Nico's music represents the implosion of a galaxy, a black hole, a doorway to another dimension.

"The End", from '74, concludes the ideal trilogy started with "The Marble Index." It isn't Nico's artistic pinnacle, but it succeeds in the difficult task of delving deeper into the discourse begun with the two illustrious predecessors and, in particular, with the absolute masterpiece "Desertshore." Here, the process of estrangement is completed, that work of reduction aiming at the essential, making this art something autistic and totally self-referential, where the only points of reference remain certain folk influences, dark chamber music, flashes of minimal avant-garde. And naturally, the poetics of the End inherited from Jim Morrison, friend and master, to whom this work is dedicated.
What prevails, as usual, is Nico's sparse recitation and her dark harmonium. In the background, we continue to appreciate the alchemy of that Nobel laureate for ingenuity, John Cale, who works like a madman, among bass, piano, organ, percussion, and various contraptions, to give body to the sound of the dark priestess. Eno's synth brushstrokes and the sporadic incursions of Roxy Music's Phil Manzanera's guitar prove less influential, nullified by the intensity of the protagonist's performance.

The opening triptych is spine-tingling: the opener "It Has Not Taken Long" assaults us with a swirling organ riff branded with Cale’s fiery mark, reminiscent, not coincidentally, of the paranoia-infused Velvet Underground, those of "Venus in Furs," to be precise. And it's mind-boggling to think that this macabre voice sinking amidst the children's choirs is the same strong and epic one we find immediately after in the medieval "Secret Side". The same voice, afflicted and resigned, that embroiders the sad song of solitude in the piano ballad "You Forgot to Answer". What a voice, folks: the words are articulated like in a sermon, the syllables are edges that pierce the skin, and that grim sexless register, always identical yet always so different, bears within itself the paradox of being a black of a thousand shades.
Not everything else will reach these levels, but the album continues more than worthily amid the noisy outbursts of "Innocent and Vain", the nothingness of "Valley of the Kings" (for voice and harmonium alone, chilling in its simplicity), and the alchemist's esotericism of "We've Got the Gold". Little monoliths of desolation that lead us to the album's pinnacle, the ten minutes of "The End". Yes, indeed, the "The End" you're thinking of, that monument of rock music which is "The End" by The Doors. And when one thinks of the immortal classics of popular rock, now indelibly imprinted in the DNA of the collective imagination, like "Stairway to Heaven," "Child in Time," or "Yesterday," one thinks of something immutable and inviolable, to which one cannot change a comma without creating dissonance within us so much as we have (willingly or unwillingly) assimilated and crystallized them in that specific form. Yet Nico succeeds even in this feat, making this great classic her own, overturning it without the listening suffering the physiological irritation I just spoke of.
Where Morrison's "The End" evokes desert and sunlit landscapes, as Oliver Stone’s (poor) film suggests, Nico's version resembles rather a descent into the Inferno: between Shakespearean theater, psychoanalysis, and Greek tragedy, this spiritual journey is stripped of rock, psychedelia, and any earthly reference, until becoming something metaphysical, an artistic metaphor of approaching the End.
Set in the dead of night, or rather underground, where the sun never shines, the song is an inner situation that delves so deeply it becomes universal, and such is its alienating power that it truly feels like traversing a dark tunnel, opening doors and crossing thresholds into secret, shadowy places. It's not Robby Krieger's proverbial guitar riff guiding us, but the hypnotic procession of the harmonium and organ and Cale's random piano strikes, which give the whole a sense of imminent tragedy. And Morrison's flow of consciousness is here replaced by Nico's cold and didactic descriptions, along the corridor, door after door, up to the famous Oedipal conflict: "Father? Yes, son. I want to kill you… Mother? I want to… ", but it won’t be the boyish shout from the sixties we expect to shake us, but rather a gasp that gets lost in emptiness, opening into the final crescendo of percussion, guitar, and piano.

The tribute to the homeland, the concluding "Das Lied der Deutschen", brings us back to this world, reminding us that Nico is, after all, a human being, no more, no less, but her music, more than unique, remains something unrepeatable in history, and doing without it would really be a shame, even for "minor" works like this one. For a connoisseur…