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The Art of Nick Cave: New Critical Essays
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.
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.
- GenresMusicNonfiction
282 pages, Paperback
First published November 15, 2012
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
June 20, 2013
I am a big fan of Nick Cave's work, so it pains me to say that this book of essays was overall, quite disappointing. While several of the essays are interesting and provide useful insights into Cave's work, this book really suffers from a pervasive neglect of Cave's music. Even though most of the essays focus on Cave's songs, they discuss the musical features or elements of these songs only fleetingly and superficially if at all. Instead, the authors focus entirely on the lyrics as texts, as if they are discussing poems. This often made the essays' arguments about the songs' construction and meaning extremely weak. Even when the textual analysis was strong and perceptive, it would have been immeasurably strengthened by incorporating the musical aspects. Thus, unsurprisingly, The Art of Nick Cave was at its strongest when discussing his work on the films of John Hillcoat.
Here are some highlights and lowlights among the individual essays:
Into My Arms:Themes of Desire and Spirituality in The Boatman's Call - Peter Billingham
This essay was the worst offender when it came to a lack of attention to musical matters undermining the argument. Billingham posits that The Boatman's Call is a song cycle with a clear progression from one state to another. Yet he only looks at the lyrics, and never once addresses harmonic or motivic relationships among the songs. This completely undermined his thesis - I just don't think one can prove that a group of songs is a cycle without evidence of musical relationships in addition to textual links. For the record, I am not convinced by the text-based argument, either. I know this album well, and I just don't see it.
Executioner Style: Nick Cave and the Murder Ballad Tradition - Nick Groom
This was one of the best essays in the book. Groom does an excellent job of connecting Murder Ballads to the ballad tradition and its bloodier manifestations. Groom adeptly compares Cave's songs to traditional material, bringing out parallels and departures, and even provides the source material for some of Cave's songs.
People Just Ain't No Good: Nick Cave's Noir Western, The Proposition - William Verrone
This was a very good, detailed, and insightful examination of how The Proposition fits into and diverges from both typical westerns and revisionist westerns. Verrone pays a lot of attention to the way Australian setting and context affect the film's approach to the genre. His exploration of the film's themes as they relate to the typical genre concerns is particularly good. The only real problem with this essay is its unfortunate neglect of The Proposition's only female character, Martha. Verrone pretty much leaves her out of the discussion, making statements like "... the characters in the film really have no moral compass...", completely discounting Martha (who is not a minor character), of whom this is distinctly not true.
The Time of Our Great Undoing: Love, Madness, Catastrophe and the Secret Afterlife of Romanticism in Nick Cave's Love Songs - Steven Barfield
I quite liked this essay's examination of the complexity of Cave's approach to love and love songs. Barfield's analysis of "Where Do We go But Nowhere" was especially great - he delved into all the ambiguities and mysteries of the song's narratives and did not offer simple answers for any of it. The discussion of "Straight to You" is similarly nuanced. Of all the essays in the book, I think this was the one I learned the most from.
(As and aside, the essay by Fred Botting which concludes the book was one of the worst pieces of impenetrable academic bullshit I've ever read. I couldn't even finish it. I can't fathom why it's in there, and I am not factoring it into my overall assessment of this book.)
Here are some highlights and lowlights among the individual essays:
Into My Arms:Themes of Desire and Spirituality in The Boatman's Call - Peter Billingham
This essay was the worst offender when it came to a lack of attention to musical matters undermining the argument. Billingham posits that The Boatman's Call is a song cycle with a clear progression from one state to another. Yet he only looks at the lyrics, and never once addresses harmonic or motivic relationships among the songs. This completely undermined his thesis - I just don't think one can prove that a group of songs is a cycle without evidence of musical relationships in addition to textual links. For the record, I am not convinced by the text-based argument, either. I know this album well, and I just don't see it.
Executioner Style: Nick Cave and the Murder Ballad Tradition - Nick Groom
This was one of the best essays in the book. Groom does an excellent job of connecting Murder Ballads to the ballad tradition and its bloodier manifestations. Groom adeptly compares Cave's songs to traditional material, bringing out parallels and departures, and even provides the source material for some of Cave's songs.
People Just Ain't No Good: Nick Cave's Noir Western, The Proposition - William Verrone
This was a very good, detailed, and insightful examination of how The Proposition fits into and diverges from both typical westerns and revisionist westerns. Verrone pays a lot of attention to the way Australian setting and context affect the film's approach to the genre. His exploration of the film's themes as they relate to the typical genre concerns is particularly good. The only real problem with this essay is its unfortunate neglect of The Proposition's only female character, Martha. Verrone pretty much leaves her out of the discussion, making statements like "... the characters in the film really have no moral compass...", completely discounting Martha (who is not a minor character), of whom this is distinctly not true.
The Time of Our Great Undoing: Love, Madness, Catastrophe and the Secret Afterlife of Romanticism in Nick Cave's Love Songs - Steven Barfield
I quite liked this essay's examination of the complexity of Cave's approach to love and love songs. Barfield's analysis of "Where Do We go But Nowhere" was especially great - he delved into all the ambiguities and mysteries of the song's narratives and did not offer simple answers for any of it. The discussion of "Straight to You" is similarly nuanced. Of all the essays in the book, I think this was the one I learned the most from.
(As and aside, the essay by Fred Botting which concludes the book was one of the worst pieces of impenetrable academic bullshit I've ever read. I couldn't even finish it. I can't fathom why it's in there, and I am not factoring it into my overall assessment of this book.)
April 11, 2018
First you probably have to be a Nick Cave fan, and as they know his prose and character can be a 'dark thing'. The book is a collection of essays based on various themes and songs - not all wll grab every fan but some are very insightful and well worth buying this book.
February 24, 2022
Its such a joy to read something written by serious fans and even more so when there is academic analysis to back it up. The passion jumps off the pages the whole way through and each chapter presents a new angle, something new to think about; this book took me so long to read because I had to mentally chew on each essay for a while before starting the next one. Some are better than others of course, for instance there are some perfectly good deep dives into his Murder Ballads period but I personally think everything that could possibly be said about that time has been said already (and to be honest much better in Santi Elijah Holley's 33 1/3 text), and I found this material slightly repetitive. Repetitive also was the tendency of multiple contributors to lean much too heavily on Cave's 1999 lecture 'The Secret Life of the Love Song' as evidence for his own thought processes. It's true that until the advent of the Red Hand Files four years ago that Cave generally avoided public speaking, but I still think there are plenty of other interviews available from every era if one goes looking for it.
Highlights for me were the chapters on his often ignored cinematic career in his collaborations with John Hillcoat. I think far too much has been made of the influence of the American Southern Gothic on Cave's work and too little of the Australian Gothic, so it was vindicating to see this influence get the attention it deserves. Other gems in here is the look at Christianity on Cave's work, and my personal favourite being the final chapter looking at the role of sex in his career through the lenses of Georges Bataille and Valerie Solanas. That one is so tailor made for me that it reads like something I conjured up in a fever-dream. I would love a second volume of this, I think there is so much more to say since its publication in 2013 - the past 6 years alone have had a greater transformative impact on Cave's work than anytime in the 30+ years before that, and some of the conclusions in my opinion do not push far enough. Going to read and re-read this great book!
Highlights for me were the chapters on his often ignored cinematic career in his collaborations with John Hillcoat. I think far too much has been made of the influence of the American Southern Gothic on Cave's work and too little of the Australian Gothic, so it was vindicating to see this influence get the attention it deserves. Other gems in here is the look at Christianity on Cave's work, and my personal favourite being the final chapter looking at the role of sex in his career through the lenses of Georges Bataille and Valerie Solanas. That one is so tailor made for me that it reads like something I conjured up in a fever-dream. I would love a second volume of this, I think there is so much more to say since its publication in 2013 - the past 6 years alone have had a greater transformative impact on Cave's work than anytime in the 30+ years before that, and some of the conclusions in my opinion do not push far enough. Going to read and re-read this great book!
August 24, 2018
Yeah, I’m afraid I didn’t learn much I didn’t already know.
September 19, 2020
A dry and academic book of essays on Nick Cave’s music and books. I am big fan of Nick Cave but this book sucked the soul out of his music.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews