Nick Cave dismantled

[Joe Hillshoist]

I blame Jim Morrison myself...

Jimbo, father of a generation
Of Private School depression idols;
From Nick Cave on they don't kill themselves -
Just tell us why they're suicidal.

[AhabsOtherLeg]

Nick Cave wrote:

"I don't believe in an interventionist God
But I know, darling, that you do
But if I did I would kneel down and ask Him
Not to intervene when it came to you"


My Dad, upon hearing these lines sombrely and ponderously intoned by Cave on Jools Holland's music show, gave the most succint and illuminating criticism of an artwork that I think I've ever heard in my life:

"Shite!"

And the channel was changed...

I was a big admirer of Cave at the time. I'd been reading singles reviews in NME (back when I thought NME journalists knew what they were talking about) praising these lines in particular to the highest heavens, singling them out as an example of intelligent lyricism, an antidote to the brainlessness of most modern pop and rock. I lapped all that up at the time. It made me feel clever. Cos i was thick as mince.

Plus, if Cave hung out with Shane MacGowan he couldn't be all bad, could he? Well, he's not all bad, and neither's Shane. But there's plenty about both of them that just aint no good.

It really is shite, though, isn't it? Clumsy, dull, banal shite, mumbled much, much too slowly and portentuously (like he's literally stopping to say -listen to this bit - it's really brainy!) even when the song is a slow one to start with.

He did some good stuff back in the Birthday Party days, and there's even some good solo stuff, but his violinist now produces better work on his lonesome than he does with Cave. The man is definitely far, far too impressed with the awe-inspiring mythology (which he probably thinks pre-dates Summeria) of the Godhead that is Nick Cave.

Here he is unironically explaining how songs that Shane MacGowan throws away are more than good enough for him, and he gratefully scrounges them off the manky old carpet:

It's not a bad song, really. 'Cos Shane wrote it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2rYFxml6A8

@ JOE: I saw you mention "Ghosts Of the Civil Dead," in another thread. It is a fantastic film. I first saw it when I was about eleven, because my mum and and dad thought it was a paranomal-type horror film, which they'd usually let us watch.

It could be considered a horror film, I suppose, except that it's actually terrifying. Powerful stuff - deserves a re-release and a comeback. Nick Cave was not entirely terrible in it, really. Quite impressive for a non-actor, but still the weakest performance in a film full of non-actors non-acting their hearts out to incredible effect.
.

[AhabsOtherLeg]

THE MONARCH OF MIDDLEBROW

Anwyn Crawford on the deplorable career of Nick Cave

published 29 November 2009

http://web.overland.org.au/?page_id=1925

.... Despite his reputation as a libertine, Cave is in reality much more a Puritan: rather than being a celebratory, central force of human existence, sex is a terrifying, insatiable hunger that must be bitterly struggled against. Submitting to it, which means submitting to a woman, leads inevitably to ruination.

To be fair to the man, I think he would admit the justice of this point, and what's more would say that that was his point all along. When he was singing about heroin and Catholic confession in the Birthday Party days, it wasn't the image of an uncaring guiltless hedonist he was trying to put across. I'm sure he would say himself that he's more Puritan than Libertine - and, if he was honest, in political terms, more reactionary than liberal.

It's not wholly his fault that liberals, intellectuals, and cultural commentators often choose to see any kind of transgessory action or art as somehow revolutionary, or valid because it challenges authority, when it's really just a fucked up guy roaring about how he feels about stuff in general.

Hadn't really thought about it before reading the piece, but he sure does kill a lot of women, eh? He champions PJ Harvey, though... but she kills a lot of women too (usually herself, one way or another).*

*in songs.

[stefano]

It's bollocks to suggest you have to be a singer -- much less a good singer -- in order to judge Nick Cave or any other singer, or any other artist (or piss-artist), just as it's nonsense to suggest you have to design vehicles for Ferrari before you can decide whether a car has an engine or not.

Yeah, I know that. it's more of an emotional reaction of loyalty when someone crits an artist I like, and especially when the substance of the crit is that so and so is not intellectually sophisticated enough. Middlebrow. Holds knife like pen. Not our kind, dear.

you're reinforcing the very same bohemian lie that fuels the careers of people like Nick Cave: that only a complete arsehole is capable of Serious Art. In my experience, only complete arseholes are incapable of it.

But is he a complete arsehole? He's a bit of one for sure, but just how far along the, let's call it the Byron Scale of Narcissistic Self-absorption is he? And, would that be fine if his lyrics were better, or his voice? I recall a thread in the lounge that touched on something similar, you'd expressed your disapproval of someone like Michel Houllebecq or HP Lovecraft based on their misanthropy and arsehole-ness, and saying you wouldn't read that person's books. But then again you also posted a delightful clip of Klaus Kinski throwing a tantrum at Cannes. To me, generally, in this kind of discussion about people I'll never meet, the only criterion is whether or not their output gives me pleasure.

[IanEye]

To me, generally, in this kind of discussion about people I'll never meet, the only criterion is whether or not their output gives me pleasure.

[url=http://img687.imageshack.us/img687/8991/stef666whole.jpg]
[/url]

i ran down to the lavey, but the devil cough't me there
he took my 20 $ Bill & vanished in the air ....

.

[MacCruiskeen]

the substance of the crit is that so and so is not intellectually sophisticated enough. Middlebrow. Holds knife like pen. Not our kind, dear.

Stefano, I think you're missing the point that the guy himself carries on as if the world were unworthy to clean his boots. (Maybe it's "not intellectually sophisticated enough" to find the polish.) The love-child of Jim Morrison and Martin Heidegger could not exude more self-importance than Master Nicholas Cave - or, indeed, "snobbery", as the author of the OP said.

But is he a complete arsehole?

No. Nobody is, I guess. I'm sure he has his qualities; and like all of us (or rather half of us), he is somebody's son. (I never called him an arsehole, by the way. I have no desire to dehumanise anyone. - ON EDIT: Shit, I see that I did, indirectly. Oh well... mea culpa. But you started it! And he deserved it. )

But then again you also posted a delightful clip of Klaus Kinski throwing a tantrum at Cannes.

Yeah, but then Kinski was Kinski, and Nick Cave is... Nick Cave. There was more art, and certainly more entertainment, in any one of Kinski's tantrums than in any one of Cave's songs (that I've heard). And there was certainly more art in Kinski's best performances than in anything I've ever seen Cave do.

To me, generally, in this kind of discussion about people I'll never meet, the only criterion is whether or not their output gives me pleasure.

Fine, stefano, fair enough. I always come away with a pretty shitty feeling if I feel I've spoiled somebody's enjoyment of anything. (I had a similar experience with c2w a while back.) The thing is, as I say, there's an ethical and political dimension to all this too. I mean, I've known people who were (I think) damaged, in their lives - and in their art too, if they were also practitioners - by their admiration of several different varieties of bad art.

In a day or two, I might ask Jeff to put this thread in the Firepit if the discussion has run its course. Season of goodwill and all that.

Anyway, the best way I can explain what I'm on about is to direct you to this thread I just started, and the two recordings on it. Without words, they say everything I'm struggling and failing to articulate here about the ethics of performance and how it relates to life.

Some performances manage to transcend both genre and virtuosity. But if the genre just isn't up your street, again fair enough. Nobody is obliged to like or dislike anything. Many other performances from many other very different genres would do just as well to illustrate the point - such as this, chosen almost at random:

Booker T and the MGs: Green Onions (live) - ON EDIT: Shit, piss, bugger, fuck - That's the correct link now, finally.

[MinM]

Love, violence, death and America have always been themes for Australian-born singer-composer Nick Cave, so he was a natural to compose the soundtrack for 2007's epically paranoid Western The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.

Cave also wrote the screenplay and soundtrack for the Australian epic The Proposition, which Roger Ebert described as "pitiless and uncompromising, so filled with pathos and disregarded innocence that it is a record of those things we pray to be delivered from."

Cave appeared in Wim Wenders' 1987 film Wings of Desire, and he's written plays and novels. In 2008, Cave released Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! with his band The Bad Seeds. The inspiration, he says, is the biblical story of Lazarus' return from the grave. He joined Fresh Air's Terry Gross for a conversation about that album and more...
http://www.npr.org/2011/06/17/137220550 ... in-america