Why Banishing Nick Cave Feels Like a Religious Experience
Well, of course that’s melodramatic. Given the subject of this topic, being pretentious is de rigueur...
I resisted Nick Cave for the longest time, entirely due to Nick Cave fans being so fucking annoying. Then, one day, “like a bird that sings up the sun in a dawn so very dark”, I became both a fan and an annoying one with it. A convert to the cult of the eyes-shut, nostrils-flared, holier-than-thou paramours of lyricism. We got things you lesser supplicants to the pagoda of pop simply wouldn’t understand.
Cave radicalised me at a funeral, engulfed by the expected grief, while also pall-bearing an invisible guilt that weighed on other friends who weren’t there for the deceased in the days that led to him taking his own life. And then, one of them picked up the guitar to start singing, “I don’t believe in an interventionist God…” Heart burst, floodgates open, tears that ran into baths taken by candlelight to The Boatman’s Call album for many moons to follow.
His words of repentance and providence aided the healing process by providing the perfect soundtrack to wallow in all the ways that could make someone else’s tragedy all about me (a thing Cave excels at evoking). It was also the first time in a long while where music – for so many years merely instrumental in heightening whatever drugs I was on – hit me on a spiritual level.
Now, no one wants to hear anyone justify their credentials as a muso – you know the ones that would have you believe they were born humming Miles Davies’ Some Kind of Blue – but it’s worth noting: I taught myself English through song lyrics. I grew up in Bangladesh (incidentally, it’s a secular nation and no one abides by the “Music is haram in Islam” bullshit), listening to transistors from slums to our own fancy Sony hi-fi speakers constantly blaring out Boney M, Abba and Michael Jackson. I wrote down every word as best I could decipher them (my misheard lyrics list includes thinking that Men at Work song went “I come from a Land of Allah”), and to this day I mispronounce some words (I still say “won’t” the way Nik Kershaw sang it in I Won’t Let The Sun Go Down on Me).
When I moved to England at the age of 13 to find learning English through Duran Duran wasn’t enough to survive life in a near-all-white private school, I went on to spend the best part of my teenage years avidly reading books and listening to music (foregoing things like sports, video games, or doing that thing English kids in the eighties did of converging around phone boxes). Unsurprisingly, the music I got hooked on was by the same artists all weird outsider kids related to – The Cure, The Smiths, David Bowie.
I can’t say pop lyrics helped me much during my apostasy from Islam. There’s only so much strength a kid battling his God can draw from Depeche Mode’s Blasphemous Rumours. By the time I started reading Nietzsche, dropped acid and started to lose my religion, the music that guided me came with no words. I raised my hands in the air to the Devil’s DJ set at the church of ecstasy, the road to hell lined with glitter balls and strobe lights. Those beats spoke to me in ways the illiterate Prophet M might have felt when Angel Gibreel communicated the message of the almighty to him, instilling in me all the divine answers to the universe that the holy books had failed to provide.
So yeah, music is kind of a big deal for me.
Naturally, most of the musicians I regard as highly as one does prophets are complete and utter heathens, but there have been exceptions. Leonard Cohen being a prime example, a man who could do with religious imagery what Debbie did to Dallas, seeing as his songs somehow always ended up being about fucking. I was also okay with Prince being bang into God, possibly because all his songs ended up being about fucking. The first Nick Cave song I fell in love with I didn’t even know was a Nick Cave song, but a cover version by Johnny Cash (there’s another artist who clothed his lyrics in religious garb without being sententious) – The Mercy Seat, a song about a dying man reconciling with God in his final breaths. It’s an incredible piece of music, Cave’s brazen balls dangling in defiance to the rock mandate as he repeats the chorus in the outro over and over again no less than twenty times.
I related to Cave on so many levels. By finding humour in the darkest recesses of the human soul. Letting love in to a mind full of paranoia and a heart drenched in pain. Embracing the gutter while shooting up stars. Cutting enemies down to size with the pen as his sword. Like me, he used to be a godforsaken druggie who actually gave a fuck, obsessed with the idea there’s more to human existence than eat, shit, work and die. His earlier dabbling with God imagery was the stuff of metaphors – what Cave calls “this most mysterious, baffling and abstract of ideas”, the invisible force that guides those who seek it. Heretic stoners singing about Mother Earth, karma and stardust were only ever giving God another name.
As with Cave, God has always been a source of dizzying fascination to me – that mankind chose to believe in this one entity in the ether independently from one another, long before man went around conquering and proselytising – is the most unified acceptance of an idea humanity has ever known.
But while my interest in God focuses on the idea we created, in a Voltaire kind of way, it appears Cave now buys the whole talking bushes, belly of the whale and Nile turning to blood shtick wholesale.
Cave readily admits in The Red Hand Files: “When I speak of God, I am not speaking of a vague and airy ‘spiritual’ force, rather I am speaking of the God of the Bible… (it is) a book I love dearly, and read regularly – an ancient book of astonishing beauty and deep instruction… I am drawn to the Bible for the same reason I am drawn to the church – because it sits outside of this temporal moment (or at least it should) whilst reflecting deeply upon it.”
Pretentious to a fault he may be, but I get it. The man has lost two children. If a book and a holy place eases his suffering, who am I to take that away from him? While I will maintain to my dying breath that the powerful and corrupt have abused religion to wage the wars of the world, I have no problem with anyone who finds peace and purpose through following it.
The problem, of course, is that all religions profess to be the one true faith, thereby making followers believe they are the Chosen One. And Nick Cave has chosen to preach Israel is that one.
For anyone not up on the hoo-ha surrounding Cave playing in Tel Aviv, something he did petulantly precisely because he was asked not to, here’s Roger Waters to put you up to speed.
Cave’s argument about artistic freedom is as bullshit as Radiohead’s – who have not knowingly made decent music since the day they swapped their melodies and riffs in favour of wailing over haunted ringtones – saying their dislike for Trump and US policies doesn’t mean they shouldn’t play in America to Americans. Well, given that Palestinians are being mass murdered, maimed and starved as justified punishment for their associations with their leaders, I think Israelis can be denied a rock concert for their elected leaders’ sins, so fuck right off with that shit.
To get an idea of just how pro-Israel Cave is, look at this message, from a Jewish person in Tel Aviv, who even as the horrors of October 7th unfolded, knew the blame lay with the Israeli government, admitting even as her heart burst for her fellow Israelis, “For 8 months we are taking part in massive demonstrations against prime minister Netanyahu and his worst parliament.”
And how does Cave respond? “It is with a heavy heart that I read your letter and watch the atrocities against Israel unfolding.”
For a man of so many words, to not spare a sentiment for the plight of the Palestinian people? What happened to being “a home for the hearts of your brothers?”
In his latest The Red Hand Files, he’s still being glib about it.
And so, I’ve unsubscribed. Deleted all my playlists. It hasn’t been easy. I know the one about separating art from artist – a few years back I wrote a piece in The Huffington Post about how It’s Weird Being An Immigrant Muslim Morrissey Fan – that the music belongs to me. It’s only a slight exaggeration to say the thought of never playing Palaces of Montezuma again, nor badly strumming The Ship Song on my guitar fills me with the same conflict and disquiet as when I accepted I may never set foot in a mosque on Eid, or fulfil my father’s enduring wish for me to accompany him to a pilgrimage to Mecca.
I’m not about to damage all my Bad Seeds and Grinderman albums like some right-wing nutjob shooting up bottles of Bud Light, but I’ll be darned if he gets another penny out of me. It saddens me that I will not see him play live again (there’s no arguing he is an exceptional performer and that clambering onto the stage at the end of his shows quite the religious experience).
But I can no longer follow someone who can rest easy knowing the unchosen likes of me can perish in the name of his God.
And so it is with a heavy heart I say, Nick Cave, I hereby denounce thee.
Nick Cave fans, fucking annoying as they remain, still mythologise him the way the religious maintain their God can do no wrong, even in the face of all that genocidal shit that’s been happening since the Bible to the front page of the news today. Some have piped up to dismiss my boycott as knee-jerk wokery.
Which only goes to show that they’ve missed the fundamental message preached both by God and Nick Cave himself. Because if you don’t have the resolve to stand by your principles, you truly have faith in nothing.
Aw, crap. Another one bites the dust. Not easy to separate the artist from the art. 😢
Agree going to Tel Aviv now is def hugely wrong.
I am very tired of easy religious references in music. Please can we use something else. Understand your anger. That doco we went to was sooo pretentious!