Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste - Lester Bangs [95]
She's quite a rock critic, that old girlfriend of mine—sometimes she scares me even more than Nico. But then, I’m scared of everybody— I’m scared of you. My girlfriend's eloquence was one reason I loved her almost from first sight, but not why I had to get halfway to the other side of the geographical world to be able to write a song that said how much I loved her. It was because of something obviously awry in me, perhaps healing, at least now confronting itself, which is one way to perhaps not rot. There's a ghost born every second, and if you let the ghosts take your guts by sheer force of numbers you haven’t got a chance though probably no one has a right to judge you either. (Besides which, the ghosts are probably as scared of you as you are of them.) Nico is so possessed by ghosts she seems like one, but there is rather the clear confrontation of the knowledge that she had to get that awfully far away from human socialization to be able to write so nakedly of her love for damn near anyone, and simultaneously and so crucially the impossibility of that love ever bearing fruit, not because we were born sterile but directly the opposite, that we come and grow ever fiercer into such pain that we could sooner eat the shards of a smashed cathedral than risk one more possibility of the physical, psychic, and emotional annihilations that love between two humans can cause, not even just cause but generate totally as a logical act of nature in its ripest bloom. Strange fruit, as it were. But only strange to those who would deny the true nature of their own flesh and spirit out of fear, which reminds me somehow that if you seek this album out you should know that this is a Catholic girl singing these songs, and perhaps her ultimate message to me was that the most paralyzing fear is not sin, not even the flight from the feared object/event/confrontation/ who cares what—that the only sin is denial, you who would not only turn your eyes away from what you fear as I sometimes must turn my ears away from this album, but would then add injury to what may or may not be insult by asserting that it does not exist.
But is she only asking us to let the full perception of the fear flood our hearts, or leading us on to embrace the death she seeks? I don’t know. What I do know is that when I first set out to write this article I got very high—I was so stupid I thought I’d just let the drugs ease my way into Nico's domain of ghosts, then trot back and write down what I’d found there. But when I went and picked up the album, her face on the cover, in a picture I’ve seen a thousand times, seemed to be staring directly at, into me with a malevolence so calm it was inhuman. It was like holding a snake in your hands and having it look you right in the eye. I put the album down and walked away, but when I looked back I saw those two eyes, following me around the room. Let me add that drugs have not ordinarily affected me in this way, at least since the Sixties. I finally got up the nerve to put the album on after that experience, but found it almost unbearable to listen to. Not that it wasn’t beautiful, rapturous in fact, but that its beauty was so deathly and its rapture out of such agony. It's putting lead weights in my heart because I don’t want to listen to it right now (and of course the lead weights are not The Marble Index but its reflection into me of my unknown fears and pangs), but I have to gather some notes and lyrics to finish this article now, so while I do that you all be sure to run right out and buy it, okay kids? Except you can’t,