It's now 1999. By this point the '60s and '70s are pretty much irrelevent in pop culture. Both decades have been boiled down to stereotypical icons. "The '60s" is a miniseries. "The '70s" is a marketing pitch at Burger King. The Vietnam War is a flashback in a Jerry Bruckheimer movie-- a reason why the bad guy is so wacko. The hippie movement failed miserably. Time has pulled back the curtain of "peace." We now know the whole thing was just a mass, desperate attempt to get high and laid.

The pop art movement was another joke. Thanks for all the postcards, t-shirts and stamps! We now know "pop art" to be another crutch and idea of those with limited talent to gather attention and fame, thus enabling them to get high and laid. Amidst this hazy sea of memory, filled with tacky clothing and gaudy colors, floats Nico-- the Queen of Who She Was With, sucking fame off Bob Dylan, Andy Warhol, and Lou Reed into her high, viking cheekbones.

Whatever relevent historical or cultural context surrounded the recording of Nico's songs, it's been washed away by a couple decades to reveal a batch of really horrible music. At this point, it doesn't matter what cosmopolitan cities she recorded in or who she shared Lower East Side nightclub booths with. All that remains is a brooding German trying to carry a tune over hollow folk and avant- garde stringscapes. The Classic Years is a sad document of tragedy, drug use, and fame starvation. Sure, the limited Velvet Underground music represented here is A+ stuff, but really, you'd be better serviced with a Velvet Underground album.

As Nico moans over depressing string compositions in her latter period work, one can almost make out the primordial framework for Björk. But her abyssmal cover of the Doors' "The End" might be the ambient muzak in an inner circle of Dante's Inferno. A taxing, pretentious epic to begin with, filled with Jim Morrison's retarded poetry, only appreciated by those under severe, life- threatening intoxication, "The End" has been interpreted here with a gothic, minimalist vibe. A modern equivalent would be... say, Rammstein covering a Phish song. Some things from the past are better left as trivia questions.

-Brent DiCrescenzo