And Now for Something Completely Different: Love (Pt. 1)

… a new series in which Toilet Guppies takes a look at the finest in popular music love balladry. First off is Lou Reed's classic Velvet Underground & Nico tune «I'll Be Your Mirror»:

I'll be your mirror
Reflect what you are, in case you don't know
I'll be the wind, the rain and the sunset
The light on your door to show that you're home

When you think the night has seen your mind
That inside you're twisted and unkind
Let me stand to show that you are blind
Please put down your hands
'Cause I see you

I find it hard to believe you don't know
The beauty that you are
But if you don't, let me be your eyes
A hand in your darkness, so you won't be afraid

When you think the night has seen your mind
That inside you're twisted and unkind
Let me stand to show that you are blind
Please put down your hands
'Cause I see you

I'll be your mirror
(Reflect what you are)

If we could read minds and see completely into the inner sanctum of other people's nekkid selves, piercing their very being without averting our gaze, chances are we'd be scared. Scared or bored. (Or ashamed, should they happen to be better than us—or worse than us, yet not quite frightening.)

I don't know if it was fearlessness, a perpetual sense of excitement or stupid pride that enabled him to do it, but Lou Reed managed to imagine such a scenario and still salvage a belief in love—and convince us, too, which is the real feat. Perhaps sensing some of the hopelessly broken parts inside the heart & mind of his main squeeze at the time, Nico, he sought to assure her he would not avert his eyes in fright, boredom or shame should she drop her guard and reveal her true nature to him. It wasn't long after this, however, that the German chanteuse abruptly ended their liaison by casually announcing, to the Velvet Underground during band rehearsal, something to the effect that she had gone off Jewish cock. (Or so the gossip mill goes.)

This ultimate come-back aside, «I'll Be Your Mirror» is an enduring song of love and support that rings just as true between real friends as it does between sincere lovers. (Tolerance and acceptance are not yet romantic love, so it may even work better that way.) It also stands out by being, despite the clunky rhymes of its poetry and its lack of eloquence, an intelligent love song, which would be a dying breed if it weren't already just a curious anomaly occurring at intervals so few and far between they're all but statistically insignificant. Fools rush in and write songs about love for other fools to rush in to. But this song doesn't promise anything wild and crazy like everlasting love, or resort to pompous imagery and metaphors. «I'll Be Your Mirror» is pure, simple—too straightforward and sincere for poetry.

When a love song falls flat on its face, by failing to achieve for the writer what he intended it to do, it loses credibility, threatening to take Love itself with it. But despite the failure of Reed and Nico's affair, you'd have to be deeply cynical—damaged, in fact (or simply not very tolerant)—to scoff at the message of «I'll Be Your Mirror».

Besides, Nico and Reed would sing this song again, together, many times. As evidenced by the rehearsal and live versions on this sampler:

V/A: «I'll Be Your Mirror» versions [.zip]

1. The Velvet Underground & Nico—Factory rehearsal
2. The Velvet Underground & Nico—alternate mix, from the Norman Dolph acetate
3. Lou Reed & Nico—hotel room tour rehearsal
4. Lou Reed, John Cale & Nico—live in concert
5. Atlas Sound—cover
6. Beck's Record Club—cover

In Norway, the most requested pop song by far at funerals is «Eg ser» («I See»). Bjørn Eidsvåg—the drunken, fornicating ex-priest who wrote the song—explained its popularity by reference to the fact that, in strife, what people want (or need) the most is simply to be seen. Recognition. In general, you could say it's the most basic psychological need for a mind.

Now, like you're not really crazy if you know you're crazy, you wouldn't be truly «twisted and unkind» if you were aware of it in your mind, and so the «mirror» Reed writes of will either show you that you're «twisted and unkind»—in which case you're not—or that you're not twisted and unkind. And so the mirror is the reason why love could be key, and could actually better a person. But that's not all.

Apparently inspired by Nico once telling Reed, «Let me be your mirror,» Reed set about writing this love song with its emphasis on non-judgment. That the song was intended for Nico—or that she had coined the phrase that inspired it in the first place—seems most fitting, seeing as Nico's music (The Marble Index in particular) does mirror any listener who has the fibre to not only hear but to properly listen to it. Acting as a mirror, her music gets as close as humanly possible to saying what cannot be said—to distilling and conveying what isolates each and every one of us from each and every other person, paradoxically almost transcending loneliness in the process, as if Nico's expression of the isolated nature of consciousness has carried us across the unbridgeable divide that separates us, by saying so completely and definitively, «I Am Alone»—the second most basic truth, unifying us all, following hot on the heels of that most fundamental human statement, the cogito ergo sum—until we realise that's like saying, «I Alone Am,» and we find ourselves back on our own distant shore again, staring over at someone equally alone, yet still isolated, only able to see them as a projected mirror image of our own hopelessly lonely selves.

Nico's mirror almost succeeds in transcending loneliness. «Almost,» because the mirror image doesn't bring the comfort to deliver us from our isolation. The comfort imagined by Reed. Reed, lacking the completely unflinching gaze of Nico, does not want to mirror the other person—unless his mirror is a fun house one, distorting the features (albeit favourably). Reed wishes to project the rose-tinted image of love he sees onto the other person, until even she sees that. Fair enough, and nice try, but Nico was no innocent school girl, starry-eyed and blind to the absolute difference dividing us.

The song goes, «I find it hard to believe you don't know the beauty you are.» Of course Lou Reed—being so familiar with loathing (self- or otherwise)—didn't find it hard to believe at all. But give him a break. Even he could be in love, and that's when your words go mad, delirious with loneliness like so many parched men in deserts spotting magnificent oases on the horizon.

«I'll Be Your Mirror» is a spark within this dark, and I'd never ridicule the sincere dream to which it (and most every one of us) aspires, but suffice it to say:

Mirror? Love is blind.

Rare or Unreleased 37: Nico Meditation Music

Did you ever fall asleep to an album by Nico, drifting in and out of slumber, only to find the same drone, different song? If not, then I've compiled some rare recordings made for the BBC in 1971 and '74. (In 128kps only. Beggars can't be choosers.)

Nico: Peel Sessions 1971-74 [.zip]

1. We've Got the Gold
2. Janitor of Lunacy (1971)
3. Secret Side
4. You Forgot to Answer
5. No One Is There
6. Janitor of Lunacy (1974)
7. Frozen Warnings
8. The End

I'm reluctant to mention their names, so often do they overshadow that of Nico, but the German singer is an icon by dint of the mostly sexually oriented gossip surrounding her association with men: Andy Warhol, Lou Reed, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Jim Morrison, Iggy Pop, Serge Gainsbourg, Andrew Loog Oldham and, er, Jackson Brown. Whereas some of these classic rock heavyweights (and the one modern art giant) are venerated as geniuses absolutely definitive of our modern Anglo-American culture, Nico is the model who gave Jim Morrison a blowjob in an elevator. Patronisingly, she's the «muse» of all these poets, rather than a poet in her own right. (The men are talking, Nico.) Yet Nico had her own muses: on this compilation alone there's Jim Morrison («You Forgot to Answer»), Brian Jones («Janitor of Lunacy») and, er, Richard Nixon («No One Is There»).

More recent generations will perhaps know Nico's music mainly through quasi-arthouse film director Wes Anderson's use of a song that she herself disowned, in the flaccid dramedy and unthinking man's existentialist flick, The Royal Tenenbaums, wherein Nico and Nick Drake alike are cast in the limiting pigeonhole of «suicide music». (Reducing their multi-faceted oeuvre to some kind of suicidesploitation—slaves to the cartoon-like image of their current legacy, as curated by mediocre critics and self-proclaimed connoisseurs more taken with inconsequential gossip and sensational morbidity than the actual contents of the work.)

Not that Drake can compare to Nico. Drake's songs, too, dealt with what one might pompously refer to as «emptiness.» But he filled it with self-pity. This is simply not on with Nico. Though many people take observation for moaning sometimes, you can take cold, hard looks without feeling sorry for yourself. Which makes it all the colder and harder. (And I mean that in a laudatory sense, not a pitying one.)

Laying aside the pop culture references for a minute, if you actually listen to Nico's music you'll find it so uncompromising and courageous you need to summon bravery and stamina just to sit through it.

Not merely for the sake of it, mind you. For all the emotional drain, there's a reward: truth, unsullied by sentimental flourishes to sweeten the pill. Typically, of course, truth is not only a reward, but also a punishment, so you better put yourself in the mindset of a masochist as well as a scientist before you sit yourself down to a session of Nico's unrelenting stare at what lies beneath our fickle, scuttering sentiments. You know, those things we use to distract ourselves from reality?

Unlike Dylan or Cohen, Nico doesn't turn to beauty or passion as effects to make what she sees clearer than most more palatable for the rest of us (or for herself). Upon first hearing the flat drone of her voice you may be mistaken for thinking she's cold. But you'll soon realise she's not; she's merely avoiding sentimentality. And that takes determination and concentration (not to mention guts).

Listening to her best albums, the thought might occur to you that Nico relied on yet another man, her usual arranger John Cale. Without devaluing his contribution to her classic albums, these solo recordings—made for John Peel at the BBC in 1971 and 1974, with only Nico's voice and harmonium (and without Brian Eno's dated and intrusive synths on the '74 sessions)—amply prove that she was a singular, self-sufficient artist of considerable greatness. For all their poetry, neither Reed, Dylan, Cohen nor Gainsbourg ever managed to create as piercing an effect as Nico did—achieving perhaps stolen moments of supreme focus in a couplet here and there, but never in their performances. (Warhol, Pop, Morrison and Taylor never even came close.)

Dylan and Reed, in particular, are always «recreating» themselves and restlessly trying something «new,» lest they stagnate. There was no such need for Nico (except for the financial need that made her play Velvet Underground classics to punks in the later years of her career). She merely kept on staring, her eye on the prize, never wavering from the most uncomfortable, yet ever-present that there is. Once you've hit upon it, there's no point in searching for truth.

The relentless monotony and repetition in Nico's music isn't due to lack of imagination, or to limited range or know-how. It's about concentration; about focussing on the supremely uncomfortable yet fundamental without once averting your eyes. There's no distraction in Nico's music. Nor is there any release. This is what makes it so unbearable, and this is what makes it so great: the true reality for any conscious being, in song format!

Welcome to the hole, without any of the numerous things we try to fill it with.

Rare or Unreleased 26: Your Only Friend

Marianne Faithfull & the Master Musicians of Joujouka: «My Only Friend» [mp3]
Nico: «The End» (live) [mp3]

The guy—probably middleaged, but looking older—was sleeping in the park, oblivious that the patch of sun had turned into cold shade. Every once in a while he'd make sounds intelligible only as plagued pleadings and aggressive recriminations as he half-woke and tossed a little.

How many tough breaks, how many faults and failures… how much resignation, quitting and bitter, spiteful self-destruction had accompanied him to this point, as he'd childishly sabotaged his own existence so that others couldn't take credit for any happiness, but rather be blamed for his misery?

Now he probably only has his drink, junk or prescription pills, all the people he once knew either dead, busy with marriages, children & careers—or as alone as he is, but separated from each other by irreperable, mutual betrayals (real or imagined). Wasted lives waiting to go, riding out the survival instinct…

As for your only true friend, there's always music. People come and go.