Die [fill in the blank] Die!

2011-09-07T00:53:00.000-07:00

I don't really like the 'new' Misfits compared to the classic Danzig Days, but I've always enjoyed the catchy tune of this chorus rattling round my head space. What struck me as amusing today, though, was that the word 'hipster' kept replacing 'monster' in my mind. Listen to it that way yourself and see if it doesn't make you chuckle aloud.

(Honest, I don't hate people or want anyone to actually die. But sometimes I do hate trends and wish them a swift and crushing demise.)

Is Nick Cave’s God Strictly Fictional?

2009-12-01T16:23:00.000-08:00

And so it goes
And so it seems
That God lives only in our dreams

-Nick Cave, ‘There Is A Town’ (Nocturama, 2003)
I’ve been speaking to various groups about Nick Cave’s idiosyncratic spirituality over the past few years, calling my material on the matter ‘Nick Cave: From Her To Eternity – The Christ-Haunted Journey of a Bad Seed’. I’ve tried to trace elements of this journey from the early days of his seminal early ‘80s punk band The Birthday Party through his early, mid, and late work as Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds. Particularly I’ve focused on the not infrequent mention of the name and person of Jesus or Christ or both and what seemed to clearly be his burgeoning belief in some kind of God, particularly the one whom Jesus called Father in the ‘canonical’ Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John). I intend to post my findings in segments on this site. But at the moment I want to document something of a late-breaking news, this just in, sort of moment in this unfolding development of his publicly stated views on the matter.

Even his latest novel (The Death of Bunny Munro, 2009, which I hope to review here soon), toward its staggering conclusion, continues this consistent theme of being richly haunted with Christ-imagery as well as having a few characters bring up the subject of belief in God. On the latter, observe (both instances, interestingly, in connection to a character’s perception of great music):

‘Instead Bunny punches the radio and a bombast of classical music pours out and Bunny hits it again – this radio with a mind of its own – and lucks out on a commercial station and wondrously, miraculously, there, pouring from the speakers in all its thrilling optimism and sexual emancipation and gold hotpants comes that song [Kylie Minogue’s ‘Spinning Around’] – and all the aggrieving rage hisses out of Bunny like a leaky valve, the boiling heat drains from his face and he turns to his son, knuckles his head and says, “Whoever said that there isn’t a God is full of shit!”
‘“Full of craperoo!” says the boy, smiling, and rubbing his eyes.
‘“Full of about ten tons of steaming manure!” says Bunny. “I mean, what a song!”
‘“Full of a big bucket of faeces!” says the boy.’ (pp. 68-69)

‘Bunny realises to his surprise that there is an oversized transistor radio on the table that has been playing classical music the whole time he has been there.
‘Mrs Brooks swoons dramatically, and then rocks back and forth and says, with great reverence, “Beethoven. Next to Bach, no one does it better. Streets ahead of Mozart. Beethoven understood suffering in the most profound way. You can feel his deep belief in God and his raging love for the world.”
‘“It’s all a bit over my head,” says Bunny. “I’m just a working stiff.”
‘“Auden said it all. ‘We must love one another or die.’” (p. 173)
But I confess I was surprised and rather disturbed at Cave’s comments in an interview with guardian.co.uk (10 September 2009) about the novel:

Interviewer: ‘Are you religious?’

Cave: ‘No.’

Interviewer: ‘Not at all?’

Cave: (Laughs) ‘As a person sitting here now, no I’m not. But I do write songs and over the years I have a kind of community that I look over, which are the characters that crawl out of my largely narrative songs. And within that environment I think some kind of God exists. And sometimes it’s malevolent and sometimes it’s kind and sometimes it’s just there by its absence in some kind of way. But do I personally believe in a personal God? No. I don’t.’

Some of the comments in a forum discussion on the official website of Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds about this very topic (entitled ‘Bunny interviews: Cave no longer Christian?’) show I’m not alone in being somewhat shocked and troubled by this seeming about face from Cave’s previous statements. From the time of The Boatman’s Call (1997) onward Cave’s lyrics evince an unsteady but budding faith in God, Christ in particular. I won’t go into those now, but will save that for a later entry. Instead a sampling of some of Cave’s blatant statements about this issue outside his lyrical oeuvre, mainly from interviews, will show why his statements above come as a surprising turn of events. In a 1999 interview with The Times he stated (with the joyous hubris of a new ‘convert’):

‘In my business God has a very, very bad reputation. He needs to get a new spin doctor… and I’m the man for the job.’

That same year Cave wrote an excellent and thought-provoking essay called ‘The Secret Life of the Love Song’ in which he makes statements like these:

‘Writing allowed me direct access to my imagination, to inspiration and, ultimately, to God... The death of my father was the 'traumatic experience' Auden talks about which left the hole for God to fill…

‘Though the Love Song comes in many… they all address God…

‘The Love Song is the light of God, deep down, blasting up through our wounds.’
In the essay Cave even reveals his self-perceived role in this divine-human encounter:

‘Me, I'm a soul-catcher for God. Here I come with my butterfly-net of words. Here I catch the chrysalis. Here I blow life into bodies and hurl them fluttering to the stars and the care of God.’

In an interview for an Israeli paper in 2001 he was asked directly:

Do you consider yourself a believer?

“Yes, of course I believe in God. I’m knowledgeable in spiritual scripts, but I don’t belong to a particular religious doctrine. I don’t go to church; I’m not affiliated with a religious establishment whatsoever. Sometimes I’m sorry I’m not. I could just say… ‘I’m catholic’ and that would be it. I wouldn’t have to try and explain my spiritual identity. You would know where I come from, exactly. And that is why sometimes I find myself in the awkward situation, where I’m asked to define my relationship with God, which is changing and developing all of the time.”

Whilst the details are clearly in process, just as clearly Cave’s affirmation of personal belief in God is unequivocal. Skipping ahead to just last year an interviewer for the Guardian (February 2008) reports:

‘I ask whether he really does believe in a greater force, or would he just like to be a believer? "I do believe, but my belief system is so riddled with doubt that it's barely a belief system at all - I see that as a strength rather than a failing."’

Cave is not coy about either his beliefs or his doubts, seemingly happy with them in tension. More concretely an interviewer in the May 2008 issue of NME magazine writes:

‘Cave told me that he does not go to church, and that he is not affiliated with any particular branch of Christianity, but there is no question that his God is a Christian God. When I asked Cave if he had any interest in other religions, or in a broader, non-religious spirituality, he replied, “Oh, a passing, skeptical kind of interest. I'm a hammer-and-nails kind of guy.”’

He remains ‘unaffiliated’ and yet he was at this time quite willing to put a certain tag on ‘his God’. A few months later Q magazine (June 2008) was just as forthright in enquiry and Cave obliged with a forthright answer:

‘Do you believe in God?’

‘Yeah, me and about five billion other people on the planet. I have big problems with organised religion [though earlier in the interview he admitted ‘I have a lot of respect for people in the church’]. I have certain beliefs I couldn’t shake if I wanted to. What, for example? The existence of another higher force. That makes me angrier about the shit that’s done in the name of God across the board. I’ve invested something into it. I take it personally. Atheism is fashionable. I know that. But we as human beings have the innate right to stand alone in this world and imagine a force that is greater and to ask the question and not to be considered foolish for doing so.’

Cave still answers in a clear affirmative to the God-question but he does also air his awareness of the ‘in-group’ sort of pressures on those inhabiting the worlds of art and rock n roll who hold this rather unpopular minority belief (even though it’s a majority belief considered globally and trans-culturally). There is tension here too in terms of a belief he can’t shake and yet that belief is formulated more as a question and something imagined. And God is here again described as ‘another higher force’, less like the personal-infinite Christian God. It’s apparently not easy to hold to this belief in his cultural milieu as he expressed in the NME interview:

‘I asked him if he was surprised that his religious beliefs were so rarely mentioned in articles about him. “I know that the editors talk to the journalists before they go and say, ‘Don't get him going on about God,’” he said. “The concept of God in America is very different than it is in England. Because we see the horrendous outcome of religion as being an American thing, in which the name of God has been hijacked by a gang of psychopaths and bullies and homophobes, and the name of God has been used for their own twisted agendas. So that if you mention God, or a belief in God, in England, it’s almost automatically associated with that kind of thinking. Religion’s gotten a really bad name”’

It’s perhaps harder to play the role of God’s spin doctor in his cultural milieu than Cave thought. So, is he faltering, retreating into ‘fiction’? Is he capitulating to the ‘fashion’ of atheism? (Cave hardly seems like the sort of character to buckle under popular pressure, yet he is only human and he comes across more and more cagey about being a theist of sorts.) Or is he merely going where he was always going? To be fair, in ‘The Secret Life of the Love Song’ he also said:

‘I found that through the use of language I was writing God into existence. Language became the blanket that I threw over the invisible man, which gave him shape and form. The actualizing of God through the medium of the Love Song remains my prime motivation as an artist.’

This comment though is in tension with other comments in the essay that make God sound more concrete and factual as do Cave’s thoughts on the matter in the years subsequent to this essay. (Indeed, the ‘blanket over the invisible man’ metaphor could imply that God’s existence was real all along but not ‘seen’ by Cave until he discovered him through songwriting.)

But in another recent Bunny interview from a few weeks after the one referenced above (The Afterword, 26 September 2009) Cave gave a similar but slightly more nuanced answer to the direct question:

Q: Are you religious?

A: Am I personally religious? No.

Q: Spiritual?

A: In a way. The imaginative world that I've developed over the years, it's a particular world. And the thing that I'm most proud of in terms of songwriting and all that – and I feel very much that I've written good songs and I've written bad songs – is that I've developed a world that is kind of a consistent, "Cavian" kind of world. And within that imaginative world, some kind of God exists. Sometimes it's a maligned God, sometimes it's a forgiving God, but something's going on there. But do I personally believe in a personal God that is looking after me personally? No, I don't. But also, I'm open (laughs). The last thing I want is for anyone to prove that God exists. I love that our existence is mysterious. People call me a "Christian writer". I don't mind what I'm called.

To date, it is clear to me that Cave has backed off from plain affirmations of believing in God (made only last year) and is now stating quite the reverse. (Unless he is now merely making clear that he never meant a personal God at all and was only affirming a ‘pantheistic’ sort of non-personal ‘God’ – but that was certainly not the one he was writing about in his lyrics.) However, he is indeed still open to the existence of a personal God who may be personally involved with him (and presumably ‘the world He created’, ‘As I Sat Sadly By Her Side’, And No More Shall We Part, 2001).
There are many more affirmations of belief in interviews that could be sited and of course the lyrics themselves. And I have much more to say on this (I confess I still find it) unexpected development. Like Cave, I too get angry about some of the things done in the name of God because I too have invested something into it and take it personally. Cave has definitely come out ‘in the name of God’ one way or the other over the past decade and to now be told it’s all a fiction is, to put it generously, disappointing. Is this a phase, perhaps a mere misstep in communication? Is it a loss of faith or was there ever faith to begin with? If words mean anything (some don’t believe they truly do in the end, I know), then Cave definitely in the past identified himself as a believer in God and now says he is not. I think this deserves an explanation and I look forward to it in both his art as well as his comments. I don’t believe we’ve heard the last word from Mr. Cave.

Hey, little train! Wait for me!
I once was blind but now I see
Have you left a seat for me?
Is that such a stretch of the imagination?
Hey, little train! Wait for me!
I was held in chains but now I’m free
I’m hanging in there, don’t you see
In this process of elimination
Hey, little train! We are all jumping on
The train that goes to the Kingdom
We’re happy, Ma, we’re having fun
It’s beyond my wildest expectation
Hey, little train! We are all jumping on
The train that goes to the Kingdom
We’re happy, Ma, we’re having fun
And the train ain’t even left the station

-Nick Cave, ‘O Children’ (Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus, 2004)

Cap'n B, Nick Cave, Clutch, and Others

2009-11-28T16:23:00.000-08:00

Ok, this is where I'm gonna publish my writings about music, since literature is covered on my other under-blogs. This will start mainly with Nick Cave as I've been working on him for some time. Captain Beefheart (from whose lyrics the blog-title is taken) will eventually feature as well as Clutch (because Neil Falon's one of rock's lesser-known great lyricists). Beyond that I'm not sure yet. But those'll keep me fairly busy for now. I'm especially interested in lyrics and the worldviews they en-flesh artistically. That will be the main thing analysed, though the music also will feature, but to a lesser degree. I come from a punk rock background (70s/80s, though I only started listening to it in the late 80s/early 90s as a teenager). But punk led me backwards into 50s/60s rock n roll and pre-rock blues, r'n'b, and country. And punk also led me forward into post-punk developments. I love both the elemental as well as the experimental (and sometimes the just plain 'mental'). I should also mention that lyric-writing led me slowly into that dangerous territory of 'poetry', and I don't just mean Alan Ginsberg and 'beat poets' and what have you. One of my favourite poets is John Milton and I'm not the least bit ashamed or apologetic about it. He's as ballsy and organic (as in 'like a big ol' beast of a pipe organ') as it gets. So my lyrical investigations are blatantly 'literary' - again, without apology. I stopped trying to be punker-than-thou about two decades ago, so I'm not worried either about trying to be what philosopher Roger Scruton called 'prolier-than-thou'. I was reared fairly white-trash and I'm still essentially blue-collar in terms of my income and probably a number of other things. But my tastes range from the trashy to the high brow and though I'm outside the establishment of academia and don't pretend to be an academic, yet some of my central preoccupations are unavoidably intellectual, scholarly, and academic. So let's look at some of this beautiful brutal music and see what happens!

SHINY BEAST OF THOUGHT

Die [fill in the blank] Die!

Is Nick Cave’s God Strictly Fictional?

Cap'n B, Nick Cave, Clutch, and Others