The Nomi Song
*** (A must see)
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Like a lot of music fans, I got my first glimpse of Nomi when he appeared as a backup singer for David Bowie on Saturday Night Live in December 1979, and my first eyeful when Nomi belted out the soprano chorus of “Total Eclipse” in the concert movie Urgh! A Music War (1981). What Bowie promised, Nomi delivered: with his trained countertenor, neo-Kabuki makeup, stylized art deco costumes, and proudly gay marriage of rock and grand opera, he was the strangest pop singer I’d ever seen. In those days punk and new wave were still considered pretty bizarre stuff in middle America, and Nomi was beyond the beyond, a visitor from another dimension. Looking at him, you realized that identity could be a dangerous drug, and that overindulging in it could push you outside the bounds of human contact.
As recalled in The Nomi Song, the singer was just as lonely and isolated in real life: born Klaus Sperber and raised by an aunt, he worked as an usher at the Berlin opera before following a lover across the Atlantic to New York City and falling in with the post-Factory crowd in the East Village. The movie collects testimony from many of the people–including performance artist Ann Magnuson, painter Kenny Scharf, art director Page Wood, and musician Kristian Hoffman–who congregated around the shy Berliner now calling himself Klaus Nomi. Together they created the elaborate “Nomi show” that showcased his offbeat talents and took the New York club scene by storm. Their memories of that feverish creative community are warm and vivid, but Nomi eventually shrugged them off in standard rock-star fashion: frustrated by his inability to break out of New York, he signed with RCA Records in France and cut loose his East Village band for a crew of hired guns.
Green’s repartee with the older students–complete with references to smoking dope, shooting heroin, and losing one’s virginity–may raise some eyebrows, but his candor and ability to relate to the kids clearly fuels their camaraderie. Unfortunately joining one community often means leaving another. One of Green’s star students is Madi Diaz-Svalgard, a practicing Quaker who arrives in the program strumming three-chord Sheryl Crow songs and winds up holding her own with the Zappa band in Bad Doberan. Back in her hometown of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Madi hangs with a clique of fellow Quakers who’ve formed a rap group called the Friendly Gangstaz, but she begins dissing it after Green lampoons them in front of the other students. “You’ve let them take something you enjoy and ruin it,” one of the guitar teachers at the school recalls pointing out to her.
When: Daily
