"Of course, it's her own sexuality that she's denying", he continued. Did I know that she'd been raped as a teenager in Berlin?
I didn't.
Nico was working as a temp for the U.S. Air Force. A black American Sergeant had raped not only her, but other girls under his employ. She'd kept quiet about it, but he was found out and court-marshalled. She had to testify for the prosecution at his trial. He was sentenced to death and shot. Nico was 15.
"Not only does she have to carry the horror of the rape but the secret guilt of somehow being complicit, by her testimony, in his execution. Sex for Nico....is irrevocably associated with punishment."
--
James Young in Songs They Don't Play On the RadioNico
John Cale did a really interesting version of Heartbreak Hotel, in a minor key. It's incredibly suicidal. I mean you could never believe that that song could turn out to be such a downer as that... Nico did Deutschland Über Alles, which was very good... and she did The End by The Doors, which is the one they put on the album... Nico doing The End was so chilling, it really was. It was incredible. She invests it with so many levels of meaning I didn't hear in the Doors' one. She underplays it... there's just the harmonium, me playing synthesizer— almost doubling the harmonium part— and her singing... which is just like a rich, kind of non-specific miasma of sound...
Nico
There was this one crime I read about that was so heinous, I didn't have any words for it. This guy had killed a girl, her mother, and her grandmother. I mean, I am so pissed off reading this, steam's coming out of my ears. This guy was put on trial and was found guilty and sentenced to death by a jury of his peers. Then, about a week before the execution, a group of people stood up on his behalf, ON HIS BEHALF, to say, "We can't kill him. He's too crazy to know we're killing him!"...So what are we arguing about? If he doesn't know the difference and it makes me sleep better at night...
Ron White
She's unafraid, too, of tackling more problematic areas of sexuality, as for instance when she dealt with cradle-snatching in "The Infant Kiss" and incest in "The Kick Inside". But not all that seems erotic in her music is about sex, as an EMI employee discovered when he found her working on the hypnotic "out-in-out-in" chant section of "Breathing" (from 1980's Never For Ever), and expressed outrage at EMI's young pop princess making such an overtly sexual record. The song is, of course, about breathing. Duhhh!
Kate Bush
I still carry the marks on my body of what those "German supermen" did to me then. I was sentenced to death.
Irena Sendler
Eventually there was a split between my parents about me. My mother obviously knew what was going on with me and the girls my friends lined up. She never came out and said anything directly, but she let me know she was concerned. Things were different between me and my father. He assumed that when I was eighteen, I would just go into the Army and they would straighten me out. He accepted some of the things my mother condemned. He felt it was perfectly all right to make out with all the girls I could. In fact, he was proud I was dating the fast girls. He bragged about them to his friends. "Jesus Christ, you should see some of the women my son's coming up with." He was showing off, of course. But still, our whole relationship had changed because I'd established myself by winning a few trophies and now had some girls. He was particularly excited about the girls. And he liked the idea that I didn't get involved. "That's right, Arnold," he'd say, as though he'd had endless experience, "never be fooled by them." That continued to be an avenue of communication between us for a couple of years. In fact, the few nights I took girls home when I was on leave from the Army, my father was always very pleasant and would bring out a bottle of wine and a couple of glasses.
Arnold Schwarzenegger
Nico
Nicoll, James
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