The Birthday Party at the Mercury Cafe

Nick Cave: On Mongrel Wings

"No one has ever written or painted, sculpted,
modeled, built, invented, except to get out of hell" - A. Artaud

The strange saga of Nick Cave continues. His latest metamorphoses might be billed as Kafka's Hunger Artist Goes To Las Vegas. (This essay was written in 1991 and was printed in Waste Paper #30).

Singer, lyricist, self-immolating performer, playwright, actor, junkie and author. Throughout his career Cave has been a living allegory of Artaud's notion that the artist is a man being burnt at the stake and signalling through the flames a desperate and perhaps incommunicable message.

The intensities of experience, the desire to act out a daily suicide in the face of an uncertain and questionable re-birth, the compulsion to burn away all the wicker of the socially woven masks our families and communities demand we wear, the immersions in pain and pleasure that take brute feeling past all points of endurance and the arrogance of total marginalization, the refusal of a Utility that measures the individual only to determine his/her productive capacities: somehow Cave has survived all this -- and more: is still searching for a performance that is a language at once private, personal and interior that can be understood by the audience, the Other, that haunts his darkest, most solipsistic, nightmares.

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"The writer is a phobic who succeeds in metaphorizing in order to keep from being
frightened to death; instead he comes to
life again in signs." - Julia Kristeva, POWERS OF HORROR

No one in contemporary music has written lyrics quite like Cave's. They are the words, the images, the syntax, of a schizophrenia that fissures the Real, crumbling the brittle verities we rely on to get us through the day. They are a gigantic and hallucinatory "No! Not that... but This & This & This..."

The lines' violent surrealism is not, like Dylan's, elegiac even when angry: they are the vocabulary of a rabid and joyous annihilation: what he writes is a language that is determined to burn itself up, a language that once spoken can never be repeated for it has turned on itself and consumed its very being: nothing is left but the fine ash of memory and loss.

And thus it is that this language must be made up anew each day -- and not drawn from divine inspiration or from some transcendent source -- but drawn out, inch by inch, from the wound in his belly, a tangled, knotted rope of gut, the only thing left that ties him to, keeps him in, this world.

The performances that became the site of this speech, of this utterance, at least early on with the Birthday Party, took on the trappings of the miraculous; they marked the trajectory of a life lived only in its particular moments of frenzy, rage and collapse, for on the stage, we, the Audience, Cave's Other, were witness to, in a sacred sense that is completely opposed to the juridical meaning of mere verification, a sacrificial burning up of Being, a wild and molecular vaporization of the mere dross of a man. Gone were the structures by which we believe we recognize someone -- what we saw was the burned out hulk of an individual -- everything that was him is mere charcoal and waste; what is left standing is monstrous and alien. The terrible paroxysms, the convulsions that threw him about the stage were the outward signs of a seizure more terrifying for its voluntarism than its inevitability.

Let us risk the obvious: what these songs are about is junk and love. Writ large and absolute: Need and Desire. And it is here that we must grapple with the notion that addiction is not merely an illness, a weakness, a flaw in the character that, whatever its etiology, is to be found out, coerced and made uniform with a set of expectations that can only come from the outside, from the Social that for its own reasons demands a total and unwavering obedience.

Addiction is the name we give to a grief that cannot be spoken because that language has no 'human' form: it is mute, dumb, mineral. It is spoken at a level we can no longer gain, and we hear it only dimly as it is dissolved in the corrosive grammars of our Masters -- it is the language that haunts the one we speak even now, its shadow and its ground; its ghost and its actual body.

It is, then, the language of an extinction, forever on the edge of a suicide that begins the moment we are born.

What we are taught is to conserve; what this language demands is to burn, to consume, to devour, to sacrifice. It is the language of what we were, spoken by the body that must die.

That we cannot hear it even as we speak, or are spoken by it; that we are dumb to its rattle and howl, is why we dream, for this language belongs to the night, to the massive subterranean vaults we have built our little lives upon.

Junk and Love. Need and Desire.

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"We are using our own skins for wallpaper
and we cannot win." Gottfried Benn

The conflagration and disintegration that was The Birthday Party at the end could not have a more suitable epitaph than the songs from their last two EP's, THE BAD SEED and MUTINY.

"Mutiny In Heaven" is, by any measure, an extraordinary piece: language, music and performance here coalesce into something far greater than its constituent parts.

Cave, a broken angel whose needle damaged arms display "long thin red ribbons... Like a ground-plan of Hell," tries to rise on tattered wings from the Ship of Heaven, the Ship of the Soul, the Ship of his Body: "If this is Heaven, ah'm bailin' out."

The voice is one of icy delirium, a long anguished howl of paranoia from a man whose very Self is being dissolved in unchecked hysteria and the corrosive solvents of total and absolute Need.

It is immaterial as to the nature of those solvents: Are they illegal? Of course, how could they not be; Are they perhaps the means to a suicide? Perhaps -- but how do you kill your Self when you are already dead; Are they an escape from the responsibilities of the Real? That depends upon what is Real: the death you feel, or the death you are taught.

The Child in the Soul, immobile and mute, is that anomaly in the continuum of the Social that exists as pure Absence -- it is the negation of everything we are able to say we are: for it is always, both before and after, the silence out of which we speak, a silence whose only image is Death, and the shadows of Death: Love and Addiction: Desire and Need.

William Burroughs wrote of junk and the Algebra of Need in NAKED LUNCH. In that equation, Junk has become the perfect commodity: it is consumed wholly, no residue is left over -- it must be replaced in its entirety after each use in quantities as great as before or, more often than not, in even greater amounts. Its use is, as they say, hardwired into the consumption process -- it schematics of Use lying deep in the flesh of the User.

For Burroughs, Junk is not a means to an End: it is not Entertainment; it is Taking Junk: and nothing else.

But if Junk is Evil, it is Evil only in the sense that all Absolutes are Evil: Purity is a plague whose vectors are the Needle, the Bible, the State, the Race.

Purity absorbs our little Selves and replaces everything in them with the slow and inexorable sedimentations of the smaller deaths: indifference, hate, obsession, the cankered tranquility of domestic life and the fevered varieties of the Displaced Orgasms that we experience through television, movies, books, restaurants, clothes, haircuts, tattoos, cars and professional sports: dying is what we do all the time: and it is not Entertainment: it is Dying.

Addiction then is this complicated thing: unspeakable and yet garrulous; inexplicable and yet all too easily understood.

The addict stands in the ruins of his body and says, "Yes, well, I'm an addict because I have an addictive personality... My mother didn't love me and my father beat me and my genetic structure needs it..." And of course, this is all True... It's just that this is not all of what is True...

It is in this sense that Cave's performances and songs are an attempt to speak the rest of what is True about Addiction and Love, Need and Desire.

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"Wee are born ruinous." - John Donne, An Anatomie Of The World

What then are we to make of the remarkable changes Cave has gone through since the demise of The Birthday Party? How did a man, seemingly at the very edge of annihilation, step back from the brink and begin to sing another song: and what is that song and what does it mean?

It is possible that what we see is the long, painful process of maturation -- a growth of the self into an autonomy that recognizes its own connections with an Outside.

Cave began with a fear of connection, a repulsion for the soft darkness of the feminine, a repulsion that was all the more insupportable for the attractions and obsessions of Desire. It is at this point that love becomes bound up with violence and assault. This is Cave's struggle against himself, the point or nexus out of which the demons of his alien body begin to rise. Thus sex becomes morbid, as in the dark flutter of sticky wings under a woman's skirts ("Release The Bats") or in the punning identification of a woman's name, Quixanne, with the shapeless suffocation of quicksand ("Swampland").

At this point, the songs cannot be separated out from Cave's addiction and the terrible paradox of trying to speak out of a place in the Soul that has no language but the chemical articulations of total and absolute Need.

"The Bad Seed" and "Mutiny" are then a bottoming out for Cave. A year or two earlier, it had been far different. "King Ink" was Cave's projection of a Self that could accept both himself and a morbid, rotting world. He still felt, as in "Nick The Stripper", like a repulsive bug but suddenly he could turn that identification to powerful use: "A bug crawls up the wall/ King Ink feels like a bug."

Cave is projecting himself into something alien. In this sense, the projection is an act of mastery and control -- he is creating images and tropes as a way of controlling the world. Writing itself is an act of control and mastery, of power and vitality: "Express thyself, say something loudly."

A bitter humor surfaces in the song, contrasting the sordid details of his room ("sand and soot and dust and dirt") with the pleasure coming to him through art -- in this case a song heard on the radio: "Oh! Yer! Oh! Yer! What a wonderful life/ FATS Domino on the radio."

In this song, the feeling of sovereignty, of kinship, is only partly ironic. There is a genuine feeling of celebration that arises out of the immersion in the detail, the flux and dirt, of the world. Here the total hold of Junk, the Algebra of Death, has not taken over.

We see the same feeling of life and motion mirrored in another song from the same album, "Zoo-Music Girl."

This is Cave's first complex love song, filled with dense, surreal imagery set in an intricate web of tensions and unresolved conflicts. first of all: what is "Zoo Music"? It is the body and its noise of life, the din of blood and appetite. The band, the music behind the words, are at best a poor substitute for the reality of bodies in motion; and Cave orders, "Don't drag the orchestra into this thing." What Cave hears, what he wants, is the body and its cry, its music.

Now, that music is not comfortable or normative. The modern pop love song has evolved into a purely formal evocation of Desire; smooth and facile, there is nothing left in it of the noises of the body.

In his song, Cave demands that we "Just let it twist, let it break/ Let it buckle, let it bend/ I want the noise of my Zoo-Music Girl." This music is not merely fascinating and desirous: it is very dangerous and drives Cave nearly out of his mind -- "My body is a monster driven insane." Note the schizophrenia of body and voice here. It is as though Cave somehow stands outside of his body and looks on in fear and wonderment and growing revulsion as his body becomes more and more alien, a place dark, powerful and horrific.

Thus even in a song that celebrates the animality of pure living, violence and the convulsions of desire and repulsion creep in. Sex is a contest, a conflict, a war between body and body, between body and soul, between body and voice: "I murder her dress till it hurts/ I murder her dress and she loves it." The displacements of metaphor allow Cave to say something very difficult: my love for you is so powerful that I'm afraid it will kill you (that it may also kill him is something we will take up later). Love is a fire that burns everything away -- most especially the flimsy constructions of the merely Social. Here we are seeing a man enact an essentially eternal awakening, a re-living and re-telling of that moment that must come to us all when we realize that what we are being taught to say about our body and its experiences are not the same thing as the Body and its experiences; that in fact what we are taught, what we are allowed to say, is a diminishment and a lie.

This wild confusion -- or profusion -- of the imagery of sex, violence and repulsion will thread its way through most of Cave's work, tying together his various themes: the recovery of innocence, the privileged role of art, the impossibility of a love that does not kill, the inextricable complexities of self-expression and self-destruction, the paradoxical needs of community and isolation, the failures of God and religion and the terrors of the Artist as Messiah and Martyr.

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"Even signs must burn." -- Jean Baudrillard

As indicated earlier, "The Bad Seed" and "Mutiny" EP's, the last fevered gasp and shudder of the Birthday Party, represent the darkest, most dangerous moment of Cave's work.

Morbid, grotesque and filled with self-loathing, the songs from this period have collapsed Need and Desire, Love and Addiction, into a single, mortal wound. Obsessed with a mythical South drawn from William Faulkner (esp. "As I Lay Dying" and "Light In August"), Cave explores the dead-ends of his life -- like a blind man in a charnel house, he finds himself crawling across a floor slippery with blood and viscera as he outlines a map of hell using bodies as landmarks.

Like Marlowe's Faust, Cave too finds there is not escape; and where, four hundred years ago, men were taught that everywhere is evidence of the Fall -- "Why this is Hell, nor am I out of it" -- Cave knows that we have forgotten our post-Lapsarian position: This is the Heaven of the Modern, a fantasia of goods, services and entertainments. Life is easy and survival assured; comfort is universal and all that is required is complacency, obedience and acceptance -- and a blind, stubborn refusal to see the core of death, decay, disorder and ruin that centers the Good Society.

Cave's journey, in this sense, is from the Suburbs to the City, from innocence to experience, from repression to expression. His first steps were backward, toward the recovery of an originary Self that could feel and perceive with the immediacy of a child. But we can neither remain a child nor return to being one. That is the significance of the Birthday Party: the celebration of another year's growth and all that implies in terms of learning, adapting and surviving. The birthday party is a ritual of innocence and experience, each year a marker on a long road that stretches from the Body of the Mother to the Body of the World. And each year, we look both forward toward a future we at once dread and desire, and backward at a past we both regret and long for.

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"This desire to possess her is a wound." -- "From Her To Eternity"

If "The Bad Seed" and "Mutiny" EP's are the spiritual eclipse of Cave's Dark Night of the Soul, this does not mean that things lighten up after this. FROM HER TO ETERNITY, Cave's first post-Birthday Party release with his new group, composed mostly of old friends, The Bad Seeds, is a virtual Grand Guignol of tortured love and demented passion.

The title song of the album, "From Her To Eternity", is one of Cave's clearest statements about a central paradox in his work. Over and over, he has imagined himself killing the object of his desire: "Yeah I recognize that girl/ I took her from rags right through to stitches.../ Oh baby, tonight we sleep in separate ditches." ("Deep In The Woods"); "I got good: I STUCK IT. Dead." ("Just You & Me"); "I stuck a six-inch blade in the head of a girl." ("6" Gold Blade"); "My girl turned as blue as an iceberg do." ("Stow-a-way").

It is this way that Cave describes his Primal Scene -- Desire: Possession: Sacrifice. He has stated directly that to possess the object of Desire is to no longer Desire that Object: Desire kills the Object it Desires when it possesses that Object ("The desire to possess her is wound; And it's naggin at me like a shrew/ But ah know that to possess her/ is therefore not to desire her/ O, O O then ya know that lil girl would just have to go!/ Go! Go-o-o!" -- "From Her To Eternity").

Thus it is that Desire begins to construct and enact an open-ended series of ritual Possessions: Sacrifices. The Sacrifice connects us directly with Desire but, most importantly, leaves us Un-Possessed of the Object: only repeating the ritual will bring us into possession once again.

The Sacrifice is not necessarily anti-Social but it is most assuredly anti-Capitalistic. Capitalism demands the accumulation of wealth -- but this is mere economics. Let us take seriously Proudhom's assertion that "Property is theft": for a child to have something is virtually to incorporate it into an ontology. When we watch a child take his own toy from another child it is as though we are witnessing a theft: What is Mine is not merely Mine, it is also Not Yours -- I have taken it into my very being. Property, in this sense, is a primal theft, a theft felt far below the juridical and social levels of capitalism.

Sacrifice is the denial of Capital, it is the ceremony that dissolves accumulation. It does this by violating the clarity and sanctity of categories.

Georges Bataille, in his book EROTICISM: DEATH AND SENSUALITY, asked "What does physical eroticism signify if not a violation of the very being of its practitioners? -- a violation bordering on death, bordering on murder?" It is this violation, or, better, transgression, that Cave acts out in his performances, outlining a drama of Eternal Recurrence in which he is both Executioner and Victim -- a grotesquely solipsistic nightmare in which we, privileged outsiders, are witness to the peculiarly modern ritual: The Murder of the Self.

Cave's ambivalence toward the Other, toward the object of his Desire, is an ambivalence matched at every point in his private liturgy of death and renewal. Here the ritual of erotics has confounded love and addiction, Need and Desire, making them over in a desperate and ultimately futile epithalamion for his marriage to Death: Cave, caught in the unwinnable struggle to throw off the straitjacket of his Self, becomes what Julia Kristeva called, in POWERS OF HORROR, "An "I" overcome by the corpse": his Body is at once Trap and Exit; his Self, a private and public construct he can seemingly never get outside of, at once the Agent of Control -- and his songs, his performances, at once a Murder and a Re-Birth.

We will see at the end of this essay one of the ways by which Cave in his most recent songs and performances has tried to bypass his own ritual execution -- an effort to stay alive and yet still fell alive: something much more difficult than it would appear at first glance.

But first it might be helpful to take a final look at who it is that is speaking in these lyrics.

Nick Cave is, manifestly, a child of the Seventies, a decade in which the dreams, hopes and aspirations of the Sixties ran aground on the shoals of political and ethical opportunism. During the 1960's, the cultural and political convulsions of the young and disaffected merged with the rising momentum of minority struggles to create a broad and infectious critique of what was then called the 'establishment'. What emerged from this critique was a rhetoric of liberation that was, with the terrible irony of entrenched social inertia, virtually Dead On Arrival. No sooner had it been formulated than this rhetoric became co-opted by the Social, Cultural, Political and Economic structures it was directed against. Isolated and enervated as Style, de-politicized and de-natured in the corrosive acids of media and entertainment, the differences between the rhetoric and its praxis led to a bitter disillusionment.

Cave's background is genteel -- middle class and education oriented. He would then be receptive to the rhetoric of liberation and toleration. Seeing the corruption of this rhetoric in the actual practices of society leads to certain extremes of reaction. The Artist can become a 'Liberator,' a messianic figure whose assumption of anarchic values and lifestyle becomes the type of a 'personal' politics -- especially as 'public' politics becomes dirtier and more closed off from reform than ever.

Typically, the rhetoric of liberation in the Sixties embraced a political and a physical aspect: the physical was Sex, Drugs and Rock n Roll -- the polymorphously perverse as expressed by Norman O. Brown in his revisionist and apocalyptic book, LIFE AGAINST DEATH. Cave began to speak that language -- he did not invent it; and very quickly found that this language, this set of "speech acts," was in some profound ways a false language: False because this language attempted to enforce a Real that did not exist. Part of this stems from the confusion of freedom and license -- the former entailing a necessary structure of responsibility and the latter at best an ignoring and at worst a denial of responsibility.

Cave's lyrics are at the center of this conflict. He both embraces and rejects the rhetoric of liberation: Sex is both Good and Evil; and the same with Rock n Roll and Drugs. The songs place blame on both sides: they are, radically, undecidable: who does this to me? Myself? Or the society I live in? Cave believes it is both at the same time.

This disillusionment is the process of letting go of Utopia -- "If this is heaven I'm bailing out."

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"Now who will be the witness/ When you're all too blind to see." -- "The Witness Song"

Very likely, Cave cannot help playing the martyr: Hamlet, Elvis and Elvis' twin dead at birth, Huck Finn, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Dylan's Wanted Man, The Black Crow King, Yeat's Crow Jane, the Geeks in the Carny, Jack and his Shadow, the inmate on Death Row waiting for the Mercy Seat, and, finally, the Good Son, Cain playing Abel in the eternal family dramas of fratricide and patricide.

Sometime in the past two or three years, Cave must have come to grips with the fact that he did not want to die, that his life long, head long, rush into darkness was coming perilously close to extinguishing the one thing he kept doing no matter how bad it got: like the narrator in Samuel Beckett's THE UNNAMABLE, Cave had reached that final point of perfect paradox, the collapse of all epistemological and ontological fields into a single endlessly repeated statement: I can't go on... I'll go on.

A couple of arrests for possession and involvement in a more or less court mandated substance abuse program were merely the mechanical signs of Cave moving in another directs. Musically, since at least YOUR FUNERAL, MY TRIAL, Cave has been experimenting with a range of traditional musics and lyrics. It is, I believe, a mark of his confidence in himself that he no longer needs to define himself by the merely negative. Theodore Adorno has written that the negation of a negative does not bring about a simple reversal -- it shows that the negation was not negative enough. Certainly Cave's writing through MUTINY and THE BAD SEED EP's could be considered negative, an attack on the complacencies of the post-modern as imaged by rock n roll.

Now, instead of standing on the Outside and hacking away at the Lugubrious Beast, the bloated, mawkish Leviathan of Pop, Cave has begun to insinuate himself into the very body of popular music, worming his way into an anatomy riddled with the voracious carcinomas of hyper-consumerism and ravaged by a universal sub-conscious that manages, against the bleakest of odds, to grind its teeth in the midst of a slumber the Beast will never shake off.

Cave, of course, is that Beast himself: as each and everyone of us, to one degree or another, also are.

There is a disease that results in the uncontrolled growth of the nerves in the body. Some branch outward and must be trimmed like wayward stems and roots, as they push their way out of the body. But more turn inward and the body becomes a jar of snakes: until one, and it only needs one, breaches the heart's walls and the body drowns in its own blood.

Cave, the Good Son, has come home. His songs have smoothed out, the lyrics have taken on the diction and rhythm of folk songs and his voice has uncoiled and relaxed -- it has become a voice recognizably human.

The new material, songs like "The Good Son," "The Weeping Song," "The Hammer Song," "The Witness Song" and "Lucy," are deceptively simple. On stage, Cave appears at ease and healthy, dressed in a conservative dark suit, a white shirt and a narrow black tie. His voice is strong and confident; the band is controlled and careful. He seems to be actually "enjoying" himself.

But don't be fooled. Cave has taken up residence in the body of rock n roll. And he is still the Bad Seed, the wild nerve, and it is our hearts he seeks to pierce.

By Duane Davis, Copyright 1991.