Cultural Seeds: Essays on the Work of Nick Cave

Tanya Dalziell, Karen Welberry, Karen Welberry, Tanya Dalziell, Karen Welberry

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317156246
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Nick Cave is now widely recognized as a songwriter, musician, novelist, screenwriter, curator, critic, actor and performer. From the band, The Boys Next Door (1976-1980), to the spoken-word recording, The Secret Life of the Love Song (1998), to the recently acclaimed screenplay of The Proposition (2005) and the Grinderman project (2008), Cave's career spans thirty years and has produced a comprehensive (and sometimes controversial) body of work that has shaped contemporary alternative culture. Despite intense media interest in Cave, there have been remarkably few comprehensive appraisals of his work, its significance and its impact on understandings of popular culture. In addressing this absence, the present volume is both timely and necessary. Cultural Seeds brings together an international range of scholars and practitioners, each of whom is uniquely placed to comment on an aspect of Cave's career. The essays collected here not only generate new ways of seeing and understanding Cave's contributions to contemporary culture, but set up a dialogue between fields all-too-often separated in the academy and in the media. Topics include Cave and the Presley myth; the aberrant masculinity projected by The Birthday Party; the postcolonial Australian-ness of his humour; his interventions in film and his erotics of the sacred. These essays offer compelling insights and provocative arguments about the fluidity of contemporary artistic practice.

PART I
Cultural Contexts

Chapter 1
The Light Within: The Twenty-first-Century Love Songs of Nick Cave

Jillian Burt

All of us are born explorers. From the very beginning, as infants and young children, we are a curious species of animal. We observe, reach for, and question everything around us. Many of us carry throughout our lives a series of fundamental questions we seek to answer. Who are we? Where did we come from? Where are we going? When we consider the intricate patterns of life on earth – how everything connects with everything else – our questioning becomes all inclusive. Where did the earth, and the life forms on it come from? Where are we going?¹

Thirteen years ago I mailed Nick a letter that described how I’d begun to recognise symbols from ancient Greek and Roman myths in his songs. I gave it a heading: ‘The Love Songs of Nick Cave’. The mythological symbols identified even his darkest, bloodiest songs as love songs for all of humanity, grappling with love as agape, a selfless love of others. It wasn’t yet fashionable to call them love songs. At that time The Murder Ballads (1996) album had recently been released and Nick was recording the spare, crystalline outlines of the songs for The Boatman’s Call (1997) album (which he sent me on cassette).

I was beginning to delve deeply into Buddhism at the time, and the songs on the cassette – those that appeared on The Boatman’s Call and those that emerged later, on the B-Sides and Rarities (2005) set – made reference to The Gospel of Thomas, a Christian scripture discovered in 1945 that has parallels with the Buddha’s teachings of inner divinity and a sense of personal responsibility. Elaine Pagels opens her study of The Gospel of Thomas with a quote from the video artist, Bill Viola: ‘It’s an invisible world out there, and we’re living in it.’²

I carried around Nick’s songs on my Walkman and they operated as a field guide to this invisible world; through them I could recognise the spirit alive (or not) in the people of the city. When I reached for the words to describe something inexpressible, frequently those words were from Nick’s songs. For instance, young, affluent men in trendy business suits holding fistfuls of hip techno-devices who were sitting on Melbourne’s free City Circle tram, looked straight through a disabled man struggling and lurching as he tried to swing his crutches and himself onto the tram. ‘But watch the one falling in the street’, Nick sang in ‘As I Sat Sadly by Her Side’. ‘See him gesture to his neighbours. See him trampled beneath their feet’.³

And I comprehended the title of the Let Love In (1994) album when I saw a blind man with his guide dog busking on Swanston Street in Melbourne. He played a voluptuous acoustic Spanish guitar and wore two hearing aids. His singing had a distant quality, as if he were remembering the music rather than hearing it as he played. His music was magnificently sad, reminiscent of Portuguese fado ballads. At the end of the Eagles song, ‘Desperado’, after he’d sung the lines about letting somebody love you before it’s too late, he reached around and stroked the muzzle of his guide dog. It occurred to me that to ‘let love in’ is to be humble enough, to strip away one’s defences enough, to accept love.

I gain insights from Nick’s songs in the same way that he gathers the insights to write them, by bringing them into the life of the city. He drives around, without destination, just listening, soaking in the world around him. I first heard the new Bad Seeds album Dig, Lazarus Dig!!! (2008) while Nick was in Sydney for the Grinderman tour in October of 2007, driving around Sydney’s inner city and North Shore with him, along the harbour, on a cool, clear Monday morning. The sounds of the city are in the dazzling beauty of the musical arrangements of the album: temple bells clanking like heavy machinery and a sensual groove, sunshine reflected from the surfaces of buildings and water turned into sound.

Lazarus digs the dark, funky underworld of New York City in the 1970s. Maybe he’s buying branded ‘blue magic’ heroin supplied by the drug lord from Ridley Scott’s movie American Gangster, who has it shipped from Vietnam in military coffins with the bodies of soldiers returning home. Lazarus experiences the spiritual sugar-rush of San Francisco in the aftermath of the summer of love. Joan Didion chronicled this time, but while readers saw the era’s treacly reaching for peace and love, baby, she was writing about the absence of a core myth to guide people. She saw the coming of an apocalypse that W.B. Yeats had alluded to in his poem ‘The Second Coming’ in 1921.⁴ Anarchy has been ‘loosed upon the world’ and ‘the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity’. Nick’s itinerary for Lazarus includes Los Angeles, probably at the time that Dennis Wilson from the Beach Boys crossed paths with Charles Manson. Lazarus may be brought back from the dead but he isn’t reborn. He falls on hard times, becomes homeless, goes mad and becomes violent.

There’s Definitely Something Going on Upstairs

At the end of the nineteenth century, a predatory mysticism exploited the incorporeal advances in science – the x-ray, recorded and projected sound, electricity – and created a fad for contacting the spirit world. The recorded sound industry was pioneered by a company whose logo was an image of a dog sitting on a coffin listening to a machine playing a recording of his dead master’s voice. At the turn of this century two robots, Spirit and Opportunity – reminiscent of Sony’s robot dog Aibo – were listening for the voices of the dead on Mars.

On their website in early 2008 the Bad Seeds sat at a table in a Victorian drawing room, around an antique ouija board, and Nick, a medium in a jewelled turban, made a show of contacting the spirit world. In one session he conjured up an image of a skeleton on a sheet. In another session the table moved up into the air, seemingly of its own accord. The message the spirit world kept sending was the title of the album, Dig, Lazarus Dig!!!

There are many Lazaruses to bring back from the dead. The Lazarus Jesus reanimated, who staggered from his tomb looking like a character from a B-grade horror movie from the 1930s. There’s Lazarus the beggar, who lived at the gates of a rich man named Dives, who dressed luxuriously and dined on sumptuous food and never gave Lazarus so much as a chewed-clean bone from his table. Both men died. Lazarus was given a seat at Abraham’s eternal banquet table in Heaven. Dives was relegated to the fires of Hell and craved just a drop of water from Lazarus’ finger to cool his tongue. Lazarus should be sent back to the land of the living to warn people of the consequences of living without regard for others, Dives told Abraham. The world of the living has its own prophets, Abraham replied, if they won’t listen to them why would they heed the words of a dead man? And Emma Lazarus, whose 1883 poem, graven onto a tablet on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, defined her as a beacon of hope for the dispossessed peoples of the world, holding up her torch to guide the ‘homeless’, ‘tempest-tost’, ‘wretched refuse’.⁵

Love your enemies said another man who was raised from the dead. ‘Far from being the pious injunction of a utopian dreamer, this command is an absolute necessity for the survival of our civilization’, preached Rev. Martin Luther King on this teaching of Jesus Christ. ‘Yes, it is love that will save our world and our civilization, love even for enemies’.⁶

Tempus Non Fugit

The year 2000 is a date to conjure with and hence an excuse to market the Apocalypse in an extraordinary fashion. But perhaps it can also serve, less frivolously, as an occasion to reflect on the notion of the end of time, and beyond that, on the philosophical meaning of time itself. Hasn’t the moment also come to take stock of 2000 years of Christian history and to think about what the key issues are in a society that is undergoing profound changes?⁷

At the end of the twentieth century it was feared that the Y2K problem, the possibility that the time clocks in computers would spin themselves back to 1900, might bring on the apocalypse as the new millennium ticked over. Planes might fall from the sky. Nuclear reactors might melt down. In 1999, Jehovah’s witnesses walked the streets in my Los Angeles neighbourhood warning of the coming of an old-fashioned fireball and rapture apocalypse. The food store Trader Joes was selling a version of its earthquake supplies kit as a Y2K preparedness kit. And William Gibson read from his novel All Tomorrow’s Parties at my neighbourhood bookstore. The world will end he predicted, but we won’t notice. Life will seem to go on as usual but something fundamental, spiritually, will have changed. An old-fashioned watch remakes itself in the final chapter.

French author and screenwriter Jean Claude Carriere says that watching hands moving around the dial of a clock encourages us to think about intervals of time, to place ourselves within time, to see how much has passed and how much is to come. A digital display is simply a number, with no context. ‘If all you’ve got is a little rectangle, you have to live life as a series of moments, and you lose all true measure of time’, he said.⁸

With the Grinderman album, in 2005, Nick stopped writing his songs on computer, as he’d done since the mid-1990s, and returned to writing them in notebooks and with a manual typewriter. Editing on computer had erased the traces of the routes the songs had taken as they were being brought to life. ‘The whole journey to the final creation is lost and in many ways it is this stuff that is the heart and soul of the song’, he said. ‘The great thing about a manual typewriter is that it is so time-consuming to change a line or a verse, as you have to type the whole thing over again and can’t simply “delete”, that one develops a renewed respect for the written word. The other thing is that you never really lose anything’.⁹

A Dead Man Speaks

A dead man explained the significance of Nick Cave’s music to me. Joseph Campbell died the year before his conversations with Bill Moyers became a monster hit on public television in America in 1988. ‘One of our problems today is that we are not well acquainted with the literature of the spirit’, he said during The Power of Myth. ‘We’re interested in the news of the day and the problems of the hour’.¹⁰ What we’d lost, he felt, was the enriching quality of mythology, our ability to see in these ancient stories what’s timeless and eternal about being human and use these insights to harmonise our own lives with our own societies in our own time.

The middle of the twentieth century was a brutal period of social and technological upheaval and things were changing too fast for a guiding mythology to settle in. ‘When you come to the end of one time and the beginning of a new one, it’s a period of tremendous pain and turmoil’, said Campbell.¹¹ He believed the horizon for mythology had expanded...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• General Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I CULTURAL CONTEXTS
• PART II INTERSECTIONS
• PART III THE SACRED
• Index