Music for Sunday: Nick Cave
Nov. 30th, 2014 01:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beer_good_foamyI promised ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
red_satin_doll I'd post some Nick Cave songs for beginners. Which is tricky, because much like that other lot of artists he often gets lumped in with (Leonard, Bob, Patti, Tom, etc) he can be a bit of an acquired taste; at once a horrible and fantastic singer, a whiny dealer of manpain and violence, and a viciously funny or heartbreaking deconstructor of it... There's his band, the Bad Seeds, who can play just about anything in the space between folk and punk as if they just got out of bed after spending three days getting drunk and listening to old blues records. He is one of the best lyricists in rock music - one of the few whose lyrics can even hold up without the music. His lyrics read like short stories, or even complete novels condensed to 5 minutes, with character voices, context and backstory snuck in through subtle little references to everything from the Bible (much like with Cohen and Dylan, there's a LOT of biblical imagery in his songs without it being necessarily religious) to Miley Cyrus.
So here goes, ten songs from young punk to elder statesman of rock'n'roll.
Tupelo (1985)
Being a retelling of the birth of Elvis Presley as a biblical apocalypse.
The Mercy Seat (1988)
Being the last thoughts of a condemned killer trying to find a way to be innocent.
The Weeping Song (1990)
Being "The Brothers Karamazov" as a drunken singalong.
Straight To You (1992)
Being the sort of love song that should probably make the person being sung to consider backing away slowly before they get burned.
Do You Love Me? (Part 1) (1994)
Being the sort of love song that realises that both the person sung to and the person singing it should perhaps have backed away rather less slowly.
Where The Wild Roses Grow feat. Kylie Minogue (1996)
Being the rather over-the-top result of not considering the two previous ones. See also below.
Where Do We Go Now But Nowhere? (1997)
Being a far less violent but more heartfelt result thereof.
Oh My Lord (2001)
Being a prayer that knows God has already backed away slowly, yet refuses to stay silent.
There She Goes, My Beautiful World (2004)
Being a defiance thereof.
Higgs Boson Blues (2013)
Being a consideration of everything going on anyways. Or possibly being about to not do so.
Also, a few thoughts on his 1996 album Murder Ballads as it relates to narratives about, to quote Johnny Cash, love, god and murder:
Over 11 songs, some traditional and some newly written, Nick has at least 65 people and one dog bite the big one. Sometimes it's played for comedy, sometimes with deadly seriousness, and sometimes so far over the top it's impossible to tell if he's having us on or not.
Which is nothing new, of course, either to Nick Cave - albums like Your Funeral... My Trial and From Her To Eternity are full of the same thing - or to music in general. While Cave's take on Stagger Lee is a bit more... colourful in terms of language than most others, it's still a song that's been recorded by hundreds of artists, describing/mythologizing/celebrating a real-life murder. Stories about violent death are a constant throughout cultural history, all the way back to Genesis (the book, not the band), through mediaeval ballads up until today, and it's always first treated as shocking and then as cultural heritage. (It may or may not be a coincidence that Murder Ballads came out in the mid-90s, when the debate about violence in rap music was at its peak - remember when rap music was considered dangerous?) No heroes without villains, no redemption without sin, no catharsis without grief, no idealism without violence.
But by putting that title on the album, and by having songs both old and new tackling lots of different narratives on killing - the sacrifice, the serial killer, the morality ballad, the rape-and-revenge, the scorned lover, the psychotic child, etc etc - he pretty much turns the album into an essay. It's both an album of murder ballads and one about them, self-awarely pointing out that this is what's underneath a lot of our culture, whether it poses as serious literature, entertainment, love stories, religious justification, etc. Violence has been used metaphorically for so long we can only talk about it by explicitly pointing it out, but the lines have been blurred for centuries; he and PJ Harvey do "Henry Lee", an old ballad about a woman who kills an unfaithful man, as a love song - they actually fell in love during the video shoot (and both ended up writing very bitter break-up albums). Whether he offers any conclusions may depend on how you interpret his (considerably less comforting) cover of Dylan's "Death Is Not The End" which ends the album, but he does stand on a pile of lovingly described corpses who have spent centuries dying so that we might feel better about ourselves, and along with Lottie in "The Curse of Milhaven" smirks "I'm a wicked young lady, but I've been trying hard lately... Aw FUCK IT! I'm a monster! I admit it!"
It may, or may not, also be a coincidence that most of what he's written since (including the not-bad novel The Death of Bunny Munro) is rather more likely to subvert or critique that narrative than his earlier songs were.
red_satin_doll I'd post some Nick Cave songs for beginners. Which is tricky, because much like that other lot of artists he often gets lumped in with (Leonard, Bob, Patti, Tom, etc) he can be a bit of an acquired taste; at once a horrible and fantastic singer, a whiny dealer of manpain and violence, and a viciously funny or heartbreaking deconstructor of it... There's his band, the Bad Seeds, who can play just about anything in the space between folk and punk as if they just got out of bed after spending three days getting drunk and listening to old blues records. He is one of the best lyricists in rock music - one of the few whose lyrics can even hold up without the music. His lyrics read like short stories, or even complete novels condensed to 5 minutes, with character voices, context and backstory snuck in through subtle little references to everything from the Bible (much like with Cohen and Dylan, there's a LOT of biblical imagery in his songs without it being necessarily religious) to Miley Cyrus. So here goes, ten songs from young punk to elder statesman of rock'n'roll.
Tupelo (1985)
Being a retelling of the birth of Elvis Presley as a biblical apocalypse.
The Mercy Seat (1988)
Being the last thoughts of a condemned killer trying to find a way to be innocent.
The Weeping Song (1990)
Being "The Brothers Karamazov" as a drunken singalong.
Straight To You (1992)
Being the sort of love song that should probably make the person being sung to consider backing away slowly before they get burned.
Do You Love Me? (Part 1) (1994)
Being the sort of love song that realises that both the person sung to and the person singing it should perhaps have backed away rather less slowly.
Where The Wild Roses Grow feat. Kylie Minogue (1996)
Being the rather over-the-top result of not considering the two previous ones. See also below.
Where Do We Go Now But Nowhere? (1997)
Being a far less violent but more heartfelt result thereof.
Oh My Lord (2001)
Being a prayer that knows God has already backed away slowly, yet refuses to stay silent.
There She Goes, My Beautiful World (2004)
Being a defiance thereof.
Higgs Boson Blues (2013)
Being a consideration of everything going on anyways. Or possibly being about to not do so.
Also, a few thoughts on his 1996 album Murder Ballads as it relates to narratives about, to quote Johnny Cash, love, god and murder:
Over 11 songs, some traditional and some newly written, Nick has at least 65 people and one dog bite the big one. Sometimes it's played for comedy, sometimes with deadly seriousness, and sometimes so far over the top it's impossible to tell if he's having us on or not.
Which is nothing new, of course, either to Nick Cave - albums like Your Funeral... My Trial and From Her To Eternity are full of the same thing - or to music in general. While Cave's take on Stagger Lee is a bit more... colourful in terms of language than most others, it's still a song that's been recorded by hundreds of artists, describing/mythologizing/celebrating a real-life murder. Stories about violent death are a constant throughout cultural history, all the way back to Genesis (the book, not the band), through mediaeval ballads up until today, and it's always first treated as shocking and then as cultural heritage. (It may or may not be a coincidence that Murder Ballads came out in the mid-90s, when the debate about violence in rap music was at its peak - remember when rap music was considered dangerous?) No heroes without villains, no redemption without sin, no catharsis without grief, no idealism without violence.
But by putting that title on the album, and by having songs both old and new tackling lots of different narratives on killing - the sacrifice, the serial killer, the morality ballad, the rape-and-revenge, the scorned lover, the psychotic child, etc etc - he pretty much turns the album into an essay. It's both an album of murder ballads and one about them, self-awarely pointing out that this is what's underneath a lot of our culture, whether it poses as serious literature, entertainment, love stories, religious justification, etc. Violence has been used metaphorically for so long we can only talk about it by explicitly pointing it out, but the lines have been blurred for centuries; he and PJ Harvey do "Henry Lee", an old ballad about a woman who kills an unfaithful man, as a love song - they actually fell in love during the video shoot (and both ended up writing very bitter break-up albums). Whether he offers any conclusions may depend on how you interpret his (considerably less comforting) cover of Dylan's "Death Is Not The End" which ends the album, but he does stand on a pile of lovingly described corpses who have spent centuries dying so that we might feel better about ourselves, and along with Lottie in "The Curse of Milhaven" smirks "I'm a wicked young lady, but I've been trying hard lately... Aw FUCK IT! I'm a monster! I admit it!"
It may, or may not, also be a coincidence that most of what he's written since (including the not-bad novel The Death of Bunny Munro) is rather more likely to subvert or critique that narrative than his earlier songs were.
