How Nico’s Desertshore Captured the Abrasive Sound of My Womanhood

The sound of my womanhood is a body falling down the stairs, of an organ’s cumbersome strain. Of course, “womanhood” is mostly a marketing term, a set of impossible expectations that we’ve accepted en masse. Something so restrictive and imagined—with goalposts for “acceptable” womanhood shifting wherever those who aren’t confined by it see fit—shouldn’t be allowed to sound like anything. From the time I came into my adolescence, I never resented being a woman—only what the invented concept of “womanhood” makes others think of us, what it makes us think of ourselves. It is a mark of restrictive otherness, a term that should encompass women’s shared experiences in our society, but instead feels like a cheap way to avoid saying “personhood.” In our current world, it takes the form of violent cleanliness and unwavering purity. In this form, the term doesn’t deserve the right to make a sound.

I spend so much of my time worrying about people because their time is wasted on a world where both “womanhood” and “manhood” are largely not synonymous with “personhood.” It feels like a distraction: gender essentialism, where young women simply conform to what’s expected of them because they don’t believe there can be anything more. I’m afraid they’ll only see themselves as caricatures and shun the universes of identity that exist within them. They go through life blind to how much we still have to be furious about.

Yet, I understand the urge to take that term, “womanhood,” in good faith as what it should mean: a neutral marker of one’s identity. If I’m to think about my own version of it, 75% of it is unbridled fury. I’m furious every day of my life. It’s Nina Simone rising from her piano mid-show and insisting to her audience that she’s a queen so they should sit down until she’s finished, Poly Styrene shrieking over the wail of a saxophone and Courtney Love with her leg hitched on her monitor at the lip of the stage. It’s Glenn Milstead clocking in for his day job as Divine, shooting up with liquid eyeliner as the most glamorous woman in the world in Female Trouble. It’s ravenous and smudged in black, subverting the “womanhood” we’ve been handed in the most aggressive way possible. If I must assign meaning to it, it’s the relief that comes with the grotesque, with the sense that I can be all things. I refuse to let a word loaded with silence steal my joy or dictate my reaction to anything. My version of it is monstrous, consuming all in its path.

There is so much art that chronicles experiences many women have shared—their joys, their fears, their sorrows—but I struggle with our current perception of femininity as something that even young women now have made interchangeable with weakness or subservience. The other 25% of my version of womanhood has an interiority, or maybe a sense of surrender to the world, but it doesn’t feel pathetic to me. It has never once made me feel like I’m “just a girl” or that I want to be infantilized. In fact, I’m not sure men even figure into it. For all the previously stated reasons, I hesitate to attach gender to anything—especially art, which is the most effective tool to learn about the experiences of others and shouldn’t be “for” any group exclusively. Still, if I had to give that part of me a sound, I’d say it sounds like Nico once she starts truly sounding like herself.

In fact, I think I first heard Nico the way she wanted us to hear her because of men whose music I already loved. It was Morrissey, in his autobiography, who said Nico’s singing voice resembled “the sound of a body falling downstairs, and she speaks as if the hangman’s hands are at her throat.” To put it mildly, the woman born Christa Päffgen in Nazi Germany lived a complicated, contradictory life that both friends and those studying her continue to parse through—all with differing accounts and the subject no longer here to reflect on her motives or memory of events. That’s not to defend or excuse any transgressions which are now searchable online, but to pinpoint the self-loathing that drove so much of her work I connected to, rather than the person—born into a disgustingly racist, misogynistic regime that molded her into a form she later came to resent. During the years of modeling to pay the bills, making her cameo in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita and being propped up by Andy Warhol as a way to sell the Velvet Underground, Nico is often depicted as a music history caricature: a stoic, untouchable chanteuse meant for the geniuses dressed in black to let their brilliance flow through her.

Later, ravaged by a prolonged drug habit, she was still spoken about as a caricature, even when she began making music she believed in. Of course, she is awarded none of the heroic valor or survivor status of her male counterparts in rock star addiction. We’re meant to understand that Nico post-1967 is supposedly ugly, supposedly haggard, wrapped in a black coat and croaking over crowds in Manchester circa 1988 who have come to see her as a novelty, hoping they’ll get to hear Lou Reed’s songs for old time’s sake. Writing about Joan Baez in 1968, Joan Didion referred to the folk singer as “a personality before she was entirely a person, and, like anyone to whom that happens, she is in a sense the hapless victim of what others have seen in her, written about her, wanted her to be and not be.” In Nico, there was the silence of Warhol Superstar status that created a vacuum for others to fill. Though she provided the perfect conduit to make “Femme Fatale,” “I’ll Be Your Mirror” and “All Tomorrow’s Parties” beautifully believable, it feels like it’s only been in the last few years that music history has come to a consensus that Nico didn’t just fall into musicianship. Even in the most cutting-edge, experimental circles of 1966, Nico’s prior interest in all genres of music was deemed a mere footnote.

As a teenager, I read voraciously about the Velvet Underground, a band I still feel is one of the best representations of my city and what I love about it. Yet, commentators that have shaped our pop culture histories have largely been male, as have most bands’ most vocal fans. These men who wrote books or made films I devoured as a young girl about this time period in New York pulled quotes about Nico’s beauty, Nico’s romantic affairs, Nico’s ousting—as if it all simply happened to her, holding no desires, agency or ability of her own. Or rather, they seem to ask, Even if she had those things, why would they be relevant to us? It took my own digging to find instances of the men she worked with championing her talent in real time. “Nico is a genius,” Lou Reed told NME in January 1976, a quote I tellingly couldn’t remember making the cut in those books from years ago. “She puts the least sellable music out. Those albums are the most incredible albums ever made.”

When Lou Reed refers to “those albums,” he’s not talking about Chelsea Girl, Nico’s solo debut featuring several Reed writing credits. The album in question has brilliant moments—her version of “I’ll Keep It With Mine” is one of my personal favorite Bob Dylan covers, and a young Jackson Browne contributed “The Fairest of the Seasons” and what has arguably become her signature song, “These Days.” It’s one thing to imagine the world weary lyrics of “These Days” coming from Browne’s then-teenaged, California-golden tenor, but the sheer weight of Nico’s vocal tone gives them a depth that sells the song. Yet, she famously did not see herself in the finished record due to the legendary Tom Wilson’s production. “I asked for drums, they said no,” she claimed in 1981. “I asked for more guitars, they said no. And I asked for simplicity, and they covered it in flutes! […] The first time I heard the album, I cried and it was all because of the flute.” As beautiful an instrument as the flute can be, there is a whimsical nature to this type of orchestration—with ‘60s folk songbird implications, for lack of a better image to conjure. Nico learned from this experience that whimsy did not suit her.

Though he does not contribute to Chelsea Girl, it was Jim Morrison—another towering, myth-ridden songwriter of the era—who first suggested to Nico that she should try writing her own material. Her first song, “Lawns of Dawn,” came into being on a harmonium, which would become her instrument of choice for the foreseeable future. In maybe one of the earliest examples of a woman musician making a severe physical change in order to set a more serious tone for what will follow musically, Nico dyed her hair red. It is the intense image of dark-haired, dark-eyed Nico on the cover of The Marble Index—her atmospheric, dissonant second album, arranged by the Velvets’ John Cale—that marked the first time I could see myself in her. Pulling more directly from European folk tradition, the avant-garde world of Cale’s musical training and a gothic sensibility that would permeate alternative music for decades afterwards, The Marble Index weaves eerie nursery rhymes with surrealist poetry over the churn of a hypnotic, harmonium-driven drone. Unsurprisingly, it was not successful upon initial release.

In 1970, producer Joe Boyd, who had recently brought English singer-songwriter Nick Drake into the fold at Reprise Records, expressed an interest in doing the same for Nico and approached her about making her next solo release. Boyd told Nico biographer Jennifer Otter Bickerdike that he remembered the recording for the album, Desertshore, taking about three days in a London studio—with Nico playing her songs as written and leaving Cale (returning in a co-producer capacity) to arrange around them. With Desertshore, Nico tapped into something perhaps more legible to a typical pop or rock listener than she did on The Marble Index, but which still feels both out of its place and time—more like an ancient text passed on over centuries and finally captured on vinyl. It’s a funeral mass for past lovers, for her family, for her child, for herself. It is the sound of all hope lost, of all fight diminished. The crease of such brutality has a physical presence in the music.

So much of that is contained simply in Desertshore’s opening minute, with first track “Janitor of Lunacy” beginning with the audible creak of Nico leaning into the organ, pushing her weight into the sustain pedal so as to physically lean into the sound of the drone. When she opens her mouth, that first syllable of the song title alone contains universes in its echo as she holds it stridently, then lets the note fall to sing the rest of the word “Jaaaaaaanitor.” Though written as a tribute to the then-recently deceased Brian Jones, it reads as a poetic curse, with the lines “Identify my destiny / Revive the living dream / Forgive their begging scream / Seal the giving of their seed / Disease the breathing grief” delivered like an omen no one is there to receive.

“Mutterlein” and “The Falconer,” songs about the death of Nico’s mother, Grete, and Valerie Solanas’s attempt to assassinate Andy Warhol, respectively, only further bake the malaise of death into the album. If Solanas’s retaliation towards an ugly world felt like the 75% of my womanhood, “The Falconer” is a strained transmission representing the more reserved final quarter, retreating into the shadows to the tune of harsh clanging piano chords and percussive flourishes. “Abschied” (the title of which is German for “farewell”), with the scratch of Cale’s viola digging against the steady pulse of the harmonium, lets Nico’s voice stretch to the upper part of its range, as if she stands at a pulpit and attempts to project to the back of a dusty, abandoned church hall.

Though her cryptic goodbyes take on the grandiosity and pomp of old world liturgies, Desertshore becomes most interesting when Nico is mourning herself. “Afraid” is undoubtedly the album’s centerpiece, as well as its most straightforward offering—both musically, as a simple piano ballad, and lyrically. If Jackson Browne wrote “These Days” as a wise-beyond-its-years piece of melancholia that still felt strangely comforting in its traditional folk song structure, “Afraid” is Nico’s own cold, ruthless attempt to retread her own failures. There is not a single hint of treacle in its balladry, no sweetness to counter its plainspoken bite. Jackson Browne, Lou Reed, John Cale and Bob Dylan all wrote at least a few all-time great lines each, but none of them would have written “Cease to know or to tell or to see or to be your own / Have someone else’s will as your own / You are beautiful and you are alone” about themselves and meant it. It is a death shroud for Nico’s own perception of her womanhood, surrounded by modeling agents and artists and actors and musicians and drug dealers who had directed her life up to that point, leaving her an empty vessel. It’s a self-penned eulogy to a woman physically forced outside of herself with little hope to return. I still find it to be one of the most brutal things I’ve ever heard.

Something like closer “All That is My Own,” with its steep build to swooping cacophony at the end, tore open the same wound, recounting those same losses: “Your winding winds stood so / All that is my own / Where land and water meet / Where on my soul I sit upon my bed / Your ways have led me to bleed.” It takes a betrayal within a relationship to a strata of biblical weight, struggling to construct something beyond human scope as if to build a shrine to a situation where Nico feels she will be ignored. “You’ve got to remember that on those solo albums she was really in pain,” John Cale told Otter Bickerdike about the process of mixing her albums and playing the final recordings back to Nico. “Afterward she’d burst into tears of gratitude. It’s that whole thing of self-loathing and the discovery of her personality.”

The classic truism about art is that it is the medium through which people come to best understand themselves, especially amidst the confusion of adolescence—compounded for women, in particular, by being told they cannot look or act like themselves in order to be worthy of love, or of being desired in this body they’ve been given. Nobody tells you how lonely standing in your convictions will be, how that prolonged isolation will twist your own perception of things. They don’t tell you about the elation of finally meeting those people who see you as you really are—who can, at least for a time, be your mirror.

There is so much I do not understand about Nico, but I hear my own terror and sensitivity and grief—the time spent alone before picking myself back up to rail against this unfair, unimaginably cruel world—in the stilted delivery of each syllable she sings. Death hangs around just the image of her so that it can be a shroud I can take on and off as I need to. As any legal protections or common practices that have been proven to help women are rapidly being stripped away in all parts of the world, I’ve been thinking a lot about how I wouldn’t be able to survive if I had to carry all this fury alone. I keep worrying about everyone who has given up in fear that no one will be there to help carry theirs. I know how tempting it is to surrender when there is so much we are forced to hold, when we operate in a system molded to literally work against us. There is something in Desertshore’s temporary surrender that serves as an immense comfort to me, even when the music itself does not contain the slightest sliver of hope.

“My Only Child” is maybe the only song on Desertshore which looks forward—serving as a musical warning from Nico to her son Ari (who sings on the following song, “Le Petit Chevalier”) of those who will try to manipulate him out in the real world: “Their hands are old / Their faces cold / Their bodies close to freezing / Their feelings find the morning small, the evening tall.” The voices of Nico, Cale and Adam Miller twist at the center of the track, supported only by a single sustained horn note and no other instruments. A stately hymn is built out of three misshapen, gorgeous voices puncturing the dead air and rendering it holy again. Even in this consecrated moment, there are histories of grief to uncover: Ari’s fight for his famous actor father to acknowledge him that continued until the end of his life (with said father outliving him by just over a year), mother and son’s shared battle with addiction, the fact that he was likely the last person Nico spoke to before she died riding her bike in Ibiza of a cerebral hemorrhage.

Yet, in that moment, in a drawn-out horn note, there is solace. There is the sound of a child’s anguish compressed into a song that plays like a tool for divine worship. In building temples out of her fear, Nico constructed a still-living piece of art that demands close listening, that is still not easy to categorize. I’m not sure what she stood for, or if she stood for anything except the ongoing pursuit of pouring herself into work which none of her peers could have replicated, all bellowed out in that voice into a void of her own making. But for me, there is respite in the drone. The future is unavoidable and will be dark, but it makes me believe that there is still a place where we can exist in all shades, in all forms—ravenous, smudged in black and ourselves. Those universes of the self, too, are indefinable. Sometimes, they just sound like a creaking harmonium and a woman’s voice which exists outside of time, beautiful and never truly alone.

Elise Soutar is a New York-born-and-based music and culture writer.