Grlllll, you don't Nomi!

Klaus Nomi. What a looker!

So we watched a documentary on Klaus Nomi for class and I got out of the room feeling rather sad. I don't particularly know if it was because the man had died of AIDS alone in a hospital, or because he was portrayed to have lived a lonely life or because it didn't really seem as though Mr. Nomi was trying to really do anything other than becoming famous (not that I have a problem with that). The film was very New York centered and the information provided about Nomi may have been rather biased and I don't really know what to make of it. The part that really did interest me was in the beginning when they talk about the underground punk/club scene that was happening in New York during the 70's that came to be known as 'The New York Scene'.

The mid 70's till the early 80's came to be a period of musical revolution taking place in the city of New York, where 'kids' from all over the place (US and other countries) were gathering to show their work and make their mark. These were people who felt out of place in their small town beginnings and wanted to do something less mundane than a white/blue collar future. It seems that Nomi came to the right place at the right time, or more importantly, met the right people at the right time or else he would have probably died in obscurity as an unsuccessful opera singer. His whole look was rather outstanding and I can see how artists today (e.g. Lady Gaga, Bat for Lashes) may have been influenced by his method of assuming a completely constructed stage persona but I don't know if his music had any function in revolutionizing pop music. The interesting part is that it almost seemed as though Nomi had stumbled on to this idea of creating this special stage persona, like it was almost an accident. It could have been the biases in the way he was portrayed in the film, but he was not really made out to have been a pillar of intellect and all his innovations were credited to the people he had the fortune of having stumbled on to in the New York scene. Nevertheless, I suppose it takes someone special to wear the weird suit and Nomi wore it quite well. I enjoyed the fact that there was a scene that gave birth to and encouraged performance artists like Klaus Nomi but I must admit that I found him to be a lot more intriguing before I watched this film.