In a rather un-Nico-like manner, she actually did develop as an artist. Between The Marble Index and Desertshore there occurred a noticeable mastering of form, a perfecting of her idiom. Not that anyone gave a shit at the time: the music on The Frozen Borderline passed at once into a cultic gloom, where dank generations of punks and goths could enjoy it at their liberty, and Nico became a heroin addict. (She called her involvement with the drug “a seduction . . . like loving someone you hate.”) Dressed in the heavy dark fabrics that she favored, she went for a bicycle ride one day in 1988 on the Spanish island of Ibiza. She was found later by the side of the road, where her clothes had become the “blackened shroud” foreseen 20 years earlier by Lou Reed. Two excellent books have already been written about her: Richard Witts’s biography Nico: The Life and Lies of an Icon (Virgin) and James Young’s picaresque memoir Nico: The End (Overlook). Her legacy is only beginning to be assimilated. We shouldn’t be surprised at the length of the shadow she casts, into music, into history: Nico was a giant.
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