Klaus Nomi is an easy artist to eulogize. The German-born East Village fixture’s striking, self-made look and soaring operatic countertenor—in layman’s terms, he sang really, really high—brought him to the attention of culture vulture supreme David Bowie. Nomi famously performed with the Thin White Duke on “Saturday Night Live,” hoping for a full collaboration that never materialized. A deal with Bowie’s label RCA, however, enabled Nomi to release two albums abroad before his death, from complications due to AIDS, in 1983. From ANOHNI’s angelic warble to Janelle Monáe’s sci-fi tuxedos, it isn’t hard to find Nomi’s legacy in pop’s outer reaches.
Klaus Nomi, his 1981 debut album, affords us an entirely different opportunity: celebrating Nomi’s music rather than his myth. When an album’s repertoire goes from Man Parrish to Chubby Checker to Camille Saint-Saëns, it’s hard to look anywhere but the music. As beautiful as Nomi was, it’s worth peeling your eyes away from the ghost-white makeup, mountain-range hairstyle, and Tristan Tzara tux to see the truly gifted musician beneath.
A trio of pop covers displays Nomi’s interpretive range even within narrow bounds. Take his handling of Lou Christie’s cloying AM radio hit “Lightnin’ Strikes” as a starting point. (Here it’s titled “Lightning Strikes”; the informal contraction feels beneath Nomi’s dignity.) Working off an arrangement by Kristian Hoffman that plays the song relatively straight, Nomi uses his piercing voice to subvert the lyrics’ smarmy, swinging-bachelor heteronormativity—hearing Klaus Nomi sing “Every boy wants a girl” is never not funny—and the very idea that America’s postwar culture comprised the full range of human experience.
But in covering Lesley Gore’s teen-feminist anthem “You Don’t Own Me,” Nomi lets the power of the original do most of the talking for him. From his pointed delivery of “Don’t say I can’t go with other boys!” to singing “I’m free and I love to be free” even higher than Gore did, he’s simply making the same points in a shifted context. There’s more that unites his struggle and Gore’s than divides them.
“The Twist,” which via Chubby Checker became one of the biggest dance crazes of all time, gets a much more thorough reimagining. Nomi slows it down into a bass-driven space-out, using his upper range and Germanic diction to make one of the most overplayed songs of all time sound disorientingly unfamiliar: “Come on humans,” he science-fictionalizes, “let’s doooooooo the Twist!” By the time you realize he’s transforming the original song’s subtext into text, turning Checker’s hip-shaking anthem into an alien’s plea to understand what we humans call “sex,” it’s already too late!