Nico, however, disliked the album’s chamber-folk production. “The first time I heard the album, I cried,” she said later, “and it was all because of the flute.” ...

Nico, 1988 tells the story of the Velvet Underground singer who left for a solo career — one weighed down by her addiction to heroin — and depicts the last, tumultuous year of her life.

For Nicchiarelli, Nico, 1988 is a corrective to the prevailing narrative of Nico’s fade into obscurity. “It was a way of turning around the cliché of being famous and then declining,” she said.

When writing a recent article about the biggest internet stories in Japan for 2007, I wrote about probably the biggest story of the year, hot-shot video site Nico Nico Douga. This site is uniquely ...