Devotion #16

I was visiting a friend during the week of Thanksgiving and noticed a CD on the corner of her coffee table. She’s been in a bit of a Krautrock phase as of late, a genre in which I find much of the music unlistenable, but I’ll try anything once. Especially after seeing something like this lying in front of me:

I inquired about the CD, and she began telling me a little about the life of Klaus Nomi (born Klaus Sperber), a German-born operatic vocalist who moved to New York City in the mid-1970s and found fame on the burgeoning New Wave scene as a master showman and exhibitionist. Nomi, while not quite Krautrock, was something of an expressionist, using the stage and both his body and voice as canvases for the exploration of outer space themes and ethereal interpretations of what was standard performance fare at the time. His live shows were mind-blowing affairs, and as my friend and I watched a superb documentary on his life – Andrew Horn’s “The Nomi Song” – I began to find his story utterly fascinating. And it was funny, because my reaction to the album cover and initial impression of Nomi was much like the reaction one of the film’s interviewees had after seeing him for the first time on 4^th Street in Greenwich Village, the area of NYC where Sperber’s character began to adopt its garish, alien-elf persona. It wasn’t so much who is Nomi as much as it was what is Nomi? But Nomi was indeed human, and despite everything that people saw and heard to the contrary, was very much real.

Klaus Nomi was a character, but Klaus Sperber was a somewhat ordinary man who deliberately crafted an image to push boundaries and expand upon the perceived oddities – gay, lesbian, vaudeville, cabaret, punk, New Wave – of the environment that embraced him. As a result, Nomi became highly influential, and more important, wholly original.

I might as well look as alien as possible because it reinforces a point I am making. My whole thing is that I approach everything as an absolute outsider. It’s the only way I can break so many rules. Remember, my background is totally strange - German classical opera. So I was uncertain about coming from that to rock. It was just as shocking for me to sing opera in a falsetto soprano in Germany. It was another rule I was breaking. You just didn’t do that. And I am helped by the fact that pop and rock, which you would think has no rules at all, is really just as conservative as classical music. So what I do is doubly shocking. The difference is that punk audiences admire that I can shock them. Nothing is sacred to me. Who is making the rules anyhow? – Klaus Nomi, “The Nomi Song” website

Klaus Nomi – “Lightning Strikes,” “Nomi Song,” and “Total Eclipse” – Klaus Nomi (RCA 1982)

Here is Nomi (in black) backing David Bowie in a Saturday Night Live performance of “The Man Who Sold the World” (1979). Note Bowie’s stage attire, inspired by Nomi’s own inverted pyramid tops, which would become his trademark. The second clip is Nomi’s rendition of Henry Purcell’s “Cold Song,” from the 1691 King Arthur semi-opera. This performance took place in Munich, Germany, just months before the singer’s death from AIDS at the age of 39.