Nick Cave

 

NICK CAVE AND THE DERANGEMENT OF THE SENSES

A Review of the album, Tender Prey

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In the Spring of 1871, when he was but sixteen, Arthur Rimbaud wrote in a letter to a friend: ‘Now, I am degrading myself as much as possible. Why? I want to be a poet, and I am working to make myself a seer… It is a question of reaching the unknown by the derangement of all the senses. The sufferings are enormous, but one has to be strong, one has to be born a poet, and I know I am a poet.’

Nick Cave’s work to this point shares in this sense of degradation for it is a martyrology in which the fields of innocence and experience, purity and contamination, salvation and condemnation suffer from the same inversions and warpings as they did at the hands of such like-minded (though admittedly far loftier) artists as Rimbaud, Baudelaire and Artaud.

Such as these, of course, are not born to be poets at all: it is a lifelong struggle in which the terrible grappling with demons, inner and outer, dictates a monstrous self-absorption and suffocating narcissism of vision. This is indeed heroic work in which the poet divides his soul into armed and warring camps that are encouraged to fight without quarter and never surrender no matter what the cost.

And truth to tell: the cost is often excessively high. A long, bitter and occasionally violent interview done with Cave by Jack Barron and recorded in the 8/13/88 issue of New Musical Express gives us some idea of what Cave has been willing to pay.

Barron speaks openly of Cave’s heroin addiction, though referring only obliquely to his two arrests for possession and his subsequent court motivated efforts at rehabilitation.

The interviewer’s obviously ambivalent attitude towards both Cave’s music and to his personal life combine to unhinge Cave with the singer attempting to assault Barron outside a hotel in Hamburg, Germany.

Cave comes off as a monster, a grotesque homunculus reduced to near idiocy and infantile rages, a caricature of the artist as suicide, Baudelaire with dyed black hair and jackboots. Yet through the course of this squalid and depressing dissection, Barron again and again must confront the pure fact of Cave’s power, a talent and vision that constantly evokes a desperate and enormous effort at enlarging and redefining the boundaries by which we are allowed to plot our lives.

Nick Cave’s excesses are, of course, his own. The dark, hypnotic undertow that pulls pleasure into death is a well known and well documented theme in all our human arts.

The Birthday Party, Cave’s earlier band, gave constant witness to the erosion of social convention into the harrowing menace of consciousness torn from its moorings and set to flail and flounder without bearing or compass.

Cave’s soul seemed to migrate toward the American South into a mythical antebellum region of Master and Slave symbiosis, voodoo self-analysis, feverish and hysterical hedonism and fascination with corruption and morbidity.

It seemed as though Cave’s very heart were metamorphosed into Blake’s Sick Rose, gnawed inwardly by the invisible worm that twines about in all our guts, the worm that was born with us and that is always there crying for more and more and more.

Growing up is learning to pretend we can no longer here its voice.

Nick Cave has listened to that whisper so long that the danger is he will one day not be able to hear anything else, but will sink into that autism of the soul we so easily dismiss as addiction and the unwillingness to submit to the disciplines of our masters.

And, on TENDER PREY, his latest lp on Mute, Cave shares with us again what the worm whispers to him on those darkest nights.

The album starts off with ‘The Mercy Seat,’ one of the best songs Cave has ever done. It is a rushed, swampy blues that twists the metaphor of the ‘mercy seat’ (the electric chair or death or life or art or…) back and forth with a manic intensity, breaking open the words so that they take on a multitude of meanings and associations, a headlong, unstoppable torrent of images that builds with a mesmerizing and repetitive power around the central notion of the inevitability of death, closure, judgement… the summing up that comes to us all.

‘Up Jumped The Devil’ finds Cave in blackface and performing a Mr. Bones carnival sideshow revue. Drawing on his fascination with the American South, Cave updates Robert Johnson’s ‘Hellhound On My Trail’ with a broad, farcical song about a guy with a ‘hump of trouble / And a sack of woe,’ who keeps finding the Devil at the other end of the chain dragging him through a life of misery and hard luck.

Yet he sings the lines with such relish that it becomes clear that this is just what he wants because sometimes our bad luck, our evil star, is all that sets us apart from a thousand other schmucks who get up, go to work, go home and pound down the wife and a six pack and then start all over again in the morning.

Cave has been indulging in his own crucifixion for some time now. The outlaw, the freak, the lunatic, who, by the purity of his acts, becomes a martyr/scapegoat for the rest of us.

In a study of VIOLENCE AND THE SACRED, Rene Girard writes in regards to ancient sacrificial rites that such ceremonies were a means of controlling and balancing a society’s tendencies toward anarchic violence. The act of sacrifice became the ritual by which a community exorcised its compulsion to strike out in anger and thus unleash a complex chain reaction of murder and mob rule within its own boundaries.

In modern times it is not hard to see the artist as such a sacrifice or scapegoat. Taking on the trappings of difference or eccentricity, the artist helps the rest of us to define what it is that keeps us the same while at the same time allowing us the vicarious thrill of living out our fantasies through their lives: it is their purpose to live(die) for us.

From Dylan Thomas to Jim Morrison, this pattern has been played out over and over in countless scenarios of glorious excess, exhilarating degradation and sad, bitter deaths.

What is often most powerful about this exchange is the way in which Cave inhabits two bodies, two positions, at the same time: good and evil, innocence and experience, form a complex, shifting persona, a peculiarly gnostic vision in which the Maker (Artist and God) is himself contaminated by his own creation.

Redemption is constantly evoked, as in ‘Mercy’ and ‘New Morning,’ but always with a flawed, jaundiced eye that even as it seeks out grace constantly accepts its own ruin as a given.

For Cave, the simplest acts are weighted with unimaginable peril, as in ‘Watching Alice’ where the singer describes a woman dressing in such a way that he turns voyeurism into a sad morality play about repression and desire.

In ‘Deanna’ Cave transmutes the childhood fantasy of best friends running away from an evil home together into a grim phantasmagoria. Like Goldilocks, they will invade others’ houses and ‘eat out of their pantries / And their parlors’ and strew ‘ashy leavings in their beds.’

And Cave, both friend and enemy, savior and defiler, is at Deanna’s side, cocking the gun (and gunning the cock) that will accomplish both revenge and release. In the end, the pair are Hansel and Gretel, fleeing through the dark wood, the sound of the oven and its fires a distant but unshakable roaring in the background.

TENDER PREY marks another stage in Nick Cave’s maturation as an artist. Love and redemption are constantly sought and constantly lost, often willfully for it is in the act of expiation that the artist approaches closest to what he creates: when it is his, fully and completely, it ironically loses all value.

There is an old Eskimo folk tale that the creatures of the sea were made long ago by a maiden who cut off her fingers and dropped them into the waters that would thereafter sustain the generations of people to come.

This album has the sound of a knife chopping through bone, as though Cave, in losing himself, were to gain another life that is somehow colder, larger and more free.

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Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, 'Mercy Seat'