The Art of Nick Cave

Description

Known for his work as a performer and songwriter with the Birthday Party, the Bad Seeds and Grinderman, Australian artist Nick Cave has also pursued a variety of other projects, including writing and acting. Covering the full range of Cave’s creative endeavors, this collection of critical essays provides a comprehensive overview of his multifaceted career.

 

The contributors, who hail from an array of disciplines, consider Cave’s work from many different angles, drawing on historical, psychological, pedagogical, and generic perspectives. Illuminating the remarkable scope of Cave’s achievements, they explore his career as a composer of film scores, scriptwriter, and performer, most strikingly in Ghosts of the Civil Dead; his work in theater; and his literary output, which includes the novels And the Ass Saw the Angel and The Death of Bunny Munro, as well as two collections of prose. Together, the resulting essays provide a lucid overview of Nick Cave’s work that will orient students and fans while offering fresh insights sure to deepen even expert perspectives.

Introduction: Nick Cave, Twenty-First Century Man – John H. Baker

PART I: Cave, the Songwriter

Chapter 1: ‘Into My Arms’: Themes of Desire and Spirituality in The Boatman’s Call – Peter Billingham

Chapter 2: The Performance of Voice: Nick Cave and the Dialectic of Abandonment – Carl Lavery

Chapter 3: ‘The College Professor Says It’: Using Nick Cave’s Lyrics in the University Classroom – Paul Lumsden

Chapter 4: A Beautiful, Evil Thing: The Music of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds – David Pattie

PART II: Murder Ballads

Chapter 5: ‘Executioner-Style’: Nick Cave and the Murder Ballad Tradition – Nick Groom

Chapter 6: In Praise of Flat-out Meanness: Nick Cave’s ‘Stagger Lee’ – Dan Rose

PART III: Film and Theatre 

Chapter 7: ‘You Won’t Want the Moment to End’: Nick Cave in the Theatre, from King Ink to Collaborating with Vesturport – Karoline Gritzner

Chapter 8: Welcome to Hell: Nick Cave and Ghosts … of the Civil Dead – Rebecca Johinke

Chapter 9: ‘People Just Ain’t No Good’: Nick Cave’s Noir Western, The Proposition – William Verrone

PART IV: Influences 

Chapter 10: Nick Cave and Gothic: Ghost Stories, Fucked Organs, Spectral Liturgy – Isabella van Elferen

Chapter 11: The Singer and the Song: Nick Cave and the Archetypal Function of the Cover Version – Nathan Wiseman-Trowse

Chapter 12: Nick Cave: The Spirit of the Duende and the Sound of the Rent Heart – Sarah Wishart

PART V: Sacred and Profane 

Chapter 13: ‘There is a Kingdom’: Nick Cave, Christian Artist? – John H. Baker

Chapter 14: ‘The Time of Our Great Undoing’: Love, Madness, Catastrophe and the Secret Afterlife of Romanticism in Nick Cave’s Love Songs – Steven Barfield Chapter 15: From ‘Cute Cunts’ to ‘No Pussy’: Sexuality, Sovereignty and the Sacred – Fred Botting

Sujets

• Musique
• Histoire de la musique
• Musique
• Performing Arts
• MUSIC
• Multiple signal classification
• Ghosts? of the Civil Dead
• Music industry
• And the Ass Saw the Angel
• General officer
• General
• Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
• Australia
• Nick Cave
• Media

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 28 janvier 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781841507811
• Langue: English

Extrait

First published in the UK in 2013 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2013 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2013 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover designer: Holly Rose
Copy-editor: MPS Technologies
Production manager: Tim Mitchell
Typesetting: Planman Technologies
ISBN 978-1-84150-627-2
eISBN 978-1-84150-781-1
Printed and bound by Hobbs, UK
Table of Contents
Introduction: Nick Cave, Twenty-First Century Man
John H. Baker
Part I: Cave, the Songwriter
Chapter 1: 'Into My Arm': Themes of Desire and Spirituality in The Boatman's Call
Peter Billingham
Chapter 2: The Performance of Voice: Nick Cave and the Dialectic of Abandonment
Carl Lavery
Chapter 3: 'The College Professor Says It': Using Nick Cave's Lyrics in the University Classroom
Paul Lumsden
Chapter 4: A Beautiful, Evil Thing: The Music of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
David Pattie
Part II: Murder Ballads
Chapter 5: 'Executioner-Style': Nick Cave and the Murder Ballad Tradition
Nick Groom
Chapter 6: In Praise of Flat-out Meanness: Nick Cave's 'Stagger Lee'
Dan Rose
Part III: Film and Theatre
Chapter 7: 'You Won't Want the Moment to End': Nick Cave in the Theatre, from King Ink to Collaborating with Vesturport
Karoline Gritzner
Chapter 8: Welcome to Hell: Nick Cave and Ghosts … of the Civil Dead
Rebecca Johinke
Chapter 9: 'People Just Ain't No Good': Nick Cave's Noir Western, The Proposition
William Verrone
Part IV: Influences
Chapter 10: Nick Cave and Gothic: Ghost Stories, Fucked Organs, Spectral Liturgy
Isabella van Elferen
Chapter 11: The Singer and the Song: Nick Cave and the Archetypal Function of the Cover Version
Nathan Wiseman-Trowse
Chapter 12: Nick Cave: The Spirit of the Duende and the Sound of the Rent Heart
Sarah Wishart
Part V: Sacred and Profane
Chapter 13: 'There is a Kingdom': Nick Cave, Christian Artist?
John H. Baker
Chapter 14: 'The Time of Our Great Undoing': Love, Madness, Catastrophe and the Secret Afterlife of Romanticism in Nick Cave's Love Songs
Steven Barfield
Chapter 15: From 'Cute Cunt' to 'No Pussy': Sexuality, Sovereignty and the Sacred
Fred Botting
Notes on Contributors
Introduction
Nick Cave, Twenty-First Century Man
John H. Baker
Few who were lucky enough to witness a gig by The Birthday Party would have imagined that the snarling madman on vocals would live much beyond his mid-twenties, let alone be acclaimed as one of the most significant artists currently operating within the field of 'popular music' in the early twenty-first century. Until the late 1990s Nick Cave was most certainly a cult artist, adored by a small but committed fan base and known, if at all, beyond this circle as a drug-crazed, possibly misogynistic, chronicler of murder and mayhem. He was also associated, however unfairly, with the Goth movement, mainly because of The Birthday Party's 1981 song 'Release the Bats' – an association that misses the song's strongly parodic element.
Flick forward to 2012. Cave is now 54 years old, married and a father. Many fans of The Birthday Party would have been startled to find him still alive at this age, but their jaws would certainly drop if they were told that the middle-aged Cave is not merely still with us, but more famous and successful than ever. The contemporary Cave, while not exactly a 'mainstream' artist, has produced nine top 40 albums in the United Kingdom with the Bad Seeds and two with his new band Grinderman. Two of these albums – Murder Ballads and Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! – charted in the UK top ten. His most recent album with the Bad Seeds, Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!, was his most successful yet, charting at number four in the United Kingdom, and was met with almost universal critical acclaim – 'this is how rock stars are supposed to age', wrote Stephen M. Deusner for Pitchfork, while the NME put aside their usual adulation of youth to offer some patronizing praise for 'Cave and his wizened cronies' (Deusner 2008; NME 2008). His albums have also sold well outside the United Kingdom, particularly in his native Australia, Scandinavia and Germany. He has been less successful in the United Kingdom as a singles artist, with three top 40 singles, but his 1995 duet with Kylie Minogue, 'Where the Wild Roses Grow', narrowly missed the top ten and earned him an appearance on 'Top of the Pops'. He continues to tour, playing to packed houses with the Bad Seeds and Grinderman, his onstage vitality putting performers half his age to shame.
The Cave of 2011 is rightly regarded as a songwriter and performer of tremendous range, talent and charisma, ably supported by a range of superb and sympathetic musicians in the Bad Seeds and Grinderman – most of whom he has worked with for many years. No longer can he be characterized as a lunatic shrieking demented imprecations at his cowering audience (indeed, a man in his fifties doing so would be an undignified spectacle). Although he is not primarily a musician himself, his abilities as pianist and guitarist have grown steadily over his career, as has the range and versatility of his singing voice – he can still scream and howl like his younger self if he wishes, but, as albums like The Boatman's Call demonstrate, he can also sing softly with considerable beauty and emotional power. The range of his songwriting is extremely wide, although he regards himself as primarily a writer of love songs – he can craft a gripping narrative like 'John Finn's Wife' as readily as a haunting lament like 'Lucy' or an ironic commentary on fading sexual prowess like Grinderman's 'No Pussy Blues' (Cave 2007: 13). His abilities as a lyricist are extensive and his command of language often masterly – he has few rivals in the field of 'popular music' in this respect, perhaps only Morrissey and Jarvis Cocker being artists of his generation worthy of comparison. The publication of his Complete Lyrics 1978–2007 in 2007 – all 460 pages of them, from The Birthday Party to Grinderman – allows readers to judge for themselves. Musically, his work with the Bad Seeds ranges from the hymnal 'Foi Na Cruz' to the demented 'Jangling Jack', from the hilarious epic 'Babe, I'm on Fire' to the melancholy fragment 'Watching Alice'. His more recent work with Grinderman, in particular, is testament to his often-neglected sense of humour. It should also be pointed out that although he has claimed to care little for the medium in his commentary on his collected videos, his promotional videos form an impressive and imaginative body of work in the field (Cave 1998). If his talents lay solely in songwriting and performance, his work in these fields for over 30 years would be enough to earn him comparisons with his heroes Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash.
What would surely startle a Cave fan from the early 1980s, though, is the sheer breadth of Cave's artistic achievement. Not content with his success as a songwriter and performer, the Cave of latter days has produced startling and acclaimed work in a number of other genres. And the Ass Saw the Angel, published in 1989, though widely admired, was long seen as a one-off venture into prose fiction on Cave's part until his second novel, The Death of Bunny Munro, appeared 20 years later and won praise from broadsheet newspapers like The Times and The Observer (Litt 2009; Thomson 2009). In addition to the musical and literary worlds, Cave has also enjoyed considerable success in the world of film. He has made occasional appearances as an actor, most notably in John Hillcoat's Ghosts … of the Civil Dead (1989) (see Johinke's chapter in this volume), but has enjoyed more success in recent years as a screenwriter and composer of film scores. He wrote the script for John Hillcoat's powerful The Proposition (2005) and composed the film's soundtrack with his bandmate Warren Ellis; more recently he and Ellis have scored The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007) and Hillcoat's cinematic adaption of Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2009), and a selection of their soundtrackwork has been released as the album White Lunar (2009). His most recent cinematic venture, the Hillcoat-directed Lawless, for which he wrote the script and composed the soundtrack with Ellis, opened in August 2012. He has also branched out into composition for the theatrical stage, with three collaborations to date with the Icelandic theatre company Vesturport.
The Cave of 2012, then, is widely admired as an artist of startling versatility and range. He gives the appearance of a man whose personal and professional lives dovetail exceptionally well, balancing his roles as husband and father with the professional demands of songwriting, touring, writing and composing. The often-mocked order and discipline of his working life, as well as his recovery from drug addiction, have allowed this most professional of artists (he always wears a suit to the office, 'as a worker', and works six days a week) to forge an impressive career that shows no sign of slowing down – it is to be hoped that there are many more albums, novels, scripts and soundtracks to come (Snow 2011: 186, 214). It is undoubtedly a cliché to call Cave a contemporary Renaissance man, but the term seems apposite.
This collection has its origin in a one-day conference on Cave organized at the University of Westminster in July 2008. The call for speakers emphasized that the purpose of the conference was to consider Cave's art as a whole, and that papers on his work outside songwriting would be particularly welcome. The range of papers given at the conferen