I never quite got to see the Birthday Party play live, but I was quite a fan of their dark, confronting noisescape. Nick Cave’s solo debut, From Her to Eternity remains one of my favourites. Since the 80s, though, to my mind it’s all been downhill, as Cave has slowly but steadily disappeared up his own clacker.
Still, Cave has maintained a certain integrity as a writer and performer, not least by refusing to bow to contemporary wokeness. When a fan recently asked Cave if he felt the need to alter “problematic” lyrics from his past, the singer quickly quashed the idea.
These days, some of my songs are feeling a little nervous. They are like children that have been playing cheerfully in the schoolyard, only to be told that all along they have had some hideous physical deformity. Their little hearts sink and they piss their pants. They leave the playground burning with shame, as a scornful, self-righteous future turns around with its stone and takes aim.
Cave is being typically pretentious, here, but what he’s saying is that there’s nothing wrong with what he wrote back whenever. It’s the present culture which is to blame.
What songwriter could have predicted thirty years ago that the future would lose its sense of humour, its sense of playfulness, its sense of context, nuance and irony, and fall into the hands of a perpetually pissed off coterie of pearl-clutchers? How were we to know?
Still, even Cave apparently feels compelled to make placating gestures to modern snowflake culture.
[The] must be allowed to exist in all their aberrant horror, unmolested by these strident advocates of the innocuous, even if just as some indication that the world has moved toward a better, fairer and more sensitive place. If punishment must be administered, punish the creators, not the songs. We can handle it.
Mind you, it appears as though Soyboy McSnowflake isn’t overly familiar with Cave’s ouevre, if he thinks “a fag in a whalebone corset dragging his dick across my cheek” is the most offensive thing to ever come from his pen. Presumably, he’s never read any of Cave’s one-act plays, nor listened to Saint Huck (“a bad-blind nigger at the piano”) or Stagger Lee (“I’ll crawl over fifty good pussies just to get one fat boy’s asshole”), nor seen the swastika-adorned artwork (by Cave himself) of the Bad Seed and Mutiny! EPs.
But, as Cave says:
I would rather be remembered for writing something that was discomforting or offensive, than to be forgotten for writing something bloodless and bland.
theredhandfiles.com/do-you-need-to-change-lyrics/
This is not the first time that Cave has cocked a snook at woke culture:
[…]that finds its energy in self-righteous belief and the suppression of contrary systems of thought. Regardless of the virtuous intentions of many woke issues, it is its lack of humility and the paternalistic and doctrinal sureness of its claims that repel me.
Wokeness, for all its virtues, is an ideology immune to the slightest suggestion that in a generation’s time their implacable beliefs will appear as outmoded and fallacious as those of their own former generation. This may well be the engine of progress, but history has a habit of embarrassing our treasured beliefs. Some of us, for example, are of the generation that believed that free speech was a clear-cut and uncontested virtue, yet within a generation this concept is seen by many as a dog-whistle to the Far Right, and is rapidly being consigned to the Left’s ever-expanding ideological junk pile.
theredhandfiles.com/why-do-you-write/
Unlike Cave, however, I struggle to find a single “virtue” in wokeness.
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