Review

Culture

Music

1 March 2024

8 min read

A day, night and dawn with Nick Cave’s lyrics

Does Adam Steiner’s rappel into Cave’s art help us understand its purpose?

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

Through illuminated dry smoke, a figure stands tall, holding a light up to his head.

Nick Cave in This Much I Know To Be True, a 2022 documentary.

MUBI

Nick Cave is inspired by the Bible, Greek myth, and literature, as well as his enduring passion for gospel, the blues, and alt-rock. His life journey arcs from his Australian childhood through his struggles with drug addiction and youthful fascination with the nightmare landscapes of America’s Wild West and southern gothic, toward a reckoning with his own Christian spirituality. In Darker than the Dawn, Adam Steiner rappels deep into Cave's songs of love and death.

The book is organised thematically within an overarching chronological arc moving from dusk to midnight to dawn. This structure aims to broadly mirror Cave's life, with its experiences of addiction, relational breakdown and encounters with grief. Steiner's themes include rock and roll, literature, humour, love, time, spirituality, death, creation, and these indicate the breadth of Cave's concerns. Politics, though, is conspicuous by its absence, being ground on which Cave chooses not to walk in his songs.

Steiner recognises here the influence on Cave, as on several other rock stars including Bruce Springsteen and Bono, of the Roman Catholic Southern Gothic novelist Flannery O’Connor.

Steiner is excellent on Cave's rock roots and biblical inspirations from language to imagery to themes. In an insightful discussion of ‘Tupelo’ from The Firstborn Is Dead, which itself becomes “a Deep South concept album”, Steiner notes that the situation of Elvis Presley’s humble background in Tupelo exposed him “to both gospel and blues music, and the roots of these musics in “spirituals” that would likely have been sung by the enslaved ancestors of his neighbors only a generation before.” Similarly, “the push and pull of deliverance and self-abnegation” are “offered too in Cave’s music alongside the glorious troubles of the blues singing tribute to the “the joys and the pain of the world of the flesh.””

The ”Christ-haunted” American South of Presley and of ‘Tupelo’ becomes the atmosphere in which the early tracks by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds are “mired”. Steiner, whose own use of language is poetic, describes this as “a torrid damp heat of blood driven into sweat all suggesting a permanent sense of ruin and decline”. Within this atmosphere, “we see alienated people searching for escape or redemption, roving outcasts looking to be reborn” whose “sharp-edge story arcs follow the Southern Gothic tradition, at its essence a series of sharp turns”.

Steiner recognises here the influence on Cave, as on several other rock stars including Bruce Springsteen and Bono, of the Roman Catholic Southern Gothic novelist Flannery O’Connor. It was O’Connor who adroitly labelled the Deep South as “Christ-haunted” as opposed to “Christ-centred”. Yet, while Steiner gives us much helpful reflection on Cave and O’Connor, he doesn’t acknowledge two key concepts which also impact Cave’s approach.

The subtlety of Cave’s art, as with that of O’Connor, is that it leaves us pondering the possibility without giving the certainty that a propagandist or evangelist would deliver.

The first is that, in an age when writers with Christian concerns find in modern life distortions that are repugnant to them, their problem “will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural”. O’Connor’s answer to this dilemma was to utilise the grotesque and “make your vision apparent by shock – to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures”. Second, O’Connor embeds this idea in her characters and in the structure of her stories through her use of epiphanies. In her work, she repeatedly gives us religion-haunted sinners who experience moments of revelation (epiphanies) about themselves in which they realise their depravity or their potential for grace or both. These experiences of awakening lead them and her readers to become aware of grace.

Like O’Connor, Cave also seeks to shock by pushing “our faces up to the ugliest side of human behaviors”, in particular when he explores “the question of a fixed human nature where some are “born to be bad” … and … others to become victims”. ‘The Mercy Seat’ is one such song; a stream of consciousness outpouring from a murderer imminently facing the electric chair. In this song, Steiner suggests “outright criminality” is being exhibited, as this Christ-haunted murderer claims he told the truth and is not afraid to die. What Steiner’s characterisation of this song overlooks, however, is the penultimate line in which Cave’s character states, “I’m afraid I told a lie”. It is possible, therefore, that this song ends with an O’Connor-like epiphany, a moment of recognition that, even as the criminal dies, opens up the possibility of grace. The subtlety of Cave’s art, as with that of O’Connor, is that it leaves us pondering the possibility without giving the certainty that a propagandist or evangelist would deliver.

Steiner is also very good when discussing the influence of the Bible on Cave’s work. He briefly outlines Cave’s journey with the Bible from chorister at Wangaratta Cathedral through his choice at 22 to mine its stories to inform his songwriting and on to his rediscovery of the New Testament and the “seduction of Christianity” when writing an Introduction’ to The Gospel According to Mark for the Canongate Pocket Canons. As Steiner notes, “Early on in his career Cave embraced the vitality and urgency of the Old Testament”, while the New Testament “introduced a more personal revelation … an awakening to the possibilities of self-transformation”. For Cave, Steiner suggests, “this would mean creating art that even in profanity, anger, and nihilism worked towards the glory of God, to become an enervating, enriching force”. His adoption of approaches learnt from O’Connor reveal how such a combination is possible.

Cave is also fascinated by the image of the Kingdom of God; a trope that Steiner somewhat overlooks. Tender Prey, the album which contained ‘The Mercy Seat’ is again key in this regard. Tender Prey ends with ‘New Morning’, a song to sit alongside the ‘New Morning’ of Bob Dylan and the ‘Brand New Day’ of Van Morrison. ‘New Morning’ begins with its protagonist awakened by the Sun shining in a sky that “was a Kingdom / All covered in blood”. He kneels in a garden and prays: “Thank you for giving / This bright new morning / So steeped seemed the evening / In darkness and blood / There'll be no sadness / There'll be no sorrow / There'll be no road too narrow / There'll be a new day / And it's today / For us.” Those that know their Bibles will recognise the reference to the coming of God’s kingdom as described in ‘Revelation’.

This vision of the coming kingdom of peace is set at the end of an album that is full of darkness and blood; a choice that becomes symptomatic of the way Cave uses imagery of the kingdom from this point onwards i.e. simply juxtaposed with his exploration of life's depravities as an alternative vision. ‘O Children’, ‘Bright Horses’ and ‘White Elephant’ are all examples of this approach. In ‘Lavender Fields’ the kingdom in the sky is the answer to the question as to where the dead go, while in ‘Sun Forest’, “A spiral of children climbs up to the sun” and God or the lost loved one are here beside in the sun and within. Cave’s most straightforward songs utilising this imagery are ‘I Have Wandered All My Unending Days’ (from Seven Psalms) and ‘There Is A Kingdom’: “There is a kingdom / There is a king / And He lives without / And He lives within / And He is everything”.

This has led to an understanding of art as a religious undertaking, in part because to repair the heart may be the purpose of making music.

Steiner ends his book with a description of Cave’s work that can be understood from either a secular or religious perspective:

“Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds’ songs of life, love, and death often reveal us to be flawed, vulnerable beings, and though we are diminished by death, the opportunity of life gives us the chance to experience and create great things in works of art and acts of love and kindness. In doing so we escape the limits of our mortality, forever moving against the tides in the hope that each of us will find a new day beyond the horizon.”

Although this summary can be read from either perspective, the secular reading is one that would not exist without the religious reading. Cave, as has been made clear through his conversations with the journalist Seán O'Hagan published as Faith, Hope, and Carnage, has been inclining for some time towards the religious perspective.

The grief he has felt at the tragic death of his son Arthur has led to hope in “an “impossible realm” where glimpses of the preternatural essence of things find their voice”. He believes that “Arthur lives there” and “Inside that space, it feels a relief to trust in certain glimpses of something else, something other, something beyond”. Music, of all the creative forms, he suggests “best repairs the heart”. He knows this “because it has restored me and has been my salvation”. It “radiates love and makes things better”. In addition, when his son died, he “started to understand the precarious and vulnerable position of the world”; “started to fret for it” and worry about it. As a result, he “felt a sudden, urgent need to, at the very least, extend a hand in some way to assist it — this terrible, beautiful world — instead of merely vilifying it, and sitting in judgement of it”.

This has led to an understanding of art as a religious undertaking, in part because to repair the heart may be the purpose of making music: “To make art and do things creatively is a way of redressing the balance of our sins in the world. To make art and to write songs goes some way in improving matters. There’s a sort of moral dimension to a song that they do good. And I think that’s one way of making amends or reconciling oneself to the world.”

On Seven Psalms Cave provides in ‘I Have Wandered All My Unending Days’ his own summary of his story to the refrain “There is a mansion in the sky / And we will go there by and by”:

“I have wandered all my unending days

Shuttered your shining aspect in the stars

Hidden alleys and tramp-broken highways

With little in my pockets but my prayers

And I have searched all my unending days

Slept in fields beneath a canopy of stars

Your face emerging in the early morning haze

Held in its position by my prayers

And though I have nothing but this prayer

That all will be revealed by and by

I pray someday, my Lord, you will appear

And lead me to your mansion in the sky”

Adam Steiner, Darker with the Dawn: Nick Cave's Songs of Love and Death, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2023

Review

America

Books

Culture

Politics

2 November 2024

8 min read

James Davison Hunter: diagnosing America’s health

A great experiment is depleted, and nihilism slips into the void.

Roger Standing

Roger is a Baptist minister, author and Senior Research Fellow at Spurgeon’s College in London.

Riot police stand guard outside a White House fence line.

The White House, June 2020.

Angela N., CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

It was unsettling. Disturbing. And in the months since, it has proven to be a powerful and haunting image, etched in my memory. Thinking about it now has exactly the same chilling effect.

So, it was earlier this year. I was at the cinema with a friend, sitting comfortably and waiting for our movie to start. Our shared love of Sci-Fi had taken us there that afternoon. Not unexpectedly, up pops the reel of trailers. Fast paced, dramatic and with loads of loud music, they’re either enticingly engaging or mercifully short.

On this occasion the climax of the reel saw America engulfed in a modern-day civil war. And the image?

A man is pleading, ‘There’s some kind of misunderstanding here, we’re Americans, okay?’

There’s a pause. The music stops. Silence. It’s a long pause.

Then the camera pans to a man in military fatigues, with sunglasses and a rifle sitting ominously on his hip, cocks his head and responds:

‘Okay … [another pause] what kind of American are you?’

Guns cocked, the trailer explodes back into life.

Our movie was really good. My friend’s company, as usual, was delightfully affable. But the image that remains echoes with that question, ‘what kind of American are you?’

I have to confess, I love America. I studied there. I have good friends there. I gorge on American food. I watch American football with my son, every week, on a pay-per-view live stream with real US TV ad breaks (‘Go, Pack, Go!’). In my personal experience Americans are some of the kindest, most thoughtful and most generous of people.

Maybe that’s why I’ve found the image so troubling. Not that it was some kind of fantastical dystopian depiction, but rather that it portrayed something altogether more plausible. Especially in the light of the ‘storming of the Capitol’ on January 6, 2021, the epidemic of mass shootings and the ongoing violent rhetoric on both sides of the political divide.

How do you square the circle of America? How do kindness and generosity sit alongside gun violence? Is the country on the brink of civil war?

Back in 1991 the University of Virginia sociologist James Davison Hunter’s book, Culture Wars: the Struggle to Define America suggested that cultural controversies would be increasingly significant in American politics. At the time not everyone agreed and some even pushed back against such an overblown prediction. Time, however, has vindicated Hunter’s reading of the runes. The ubiquity of his ‘culture wars’ epithet is the proof of his pudding.

Hunter’s latest offering picks up the story once more. Using the present situation in America as a case study, his reflections ‘bookend’ his earlier thinking. However, Democracy and Solidarity is not an extended commentary exploring the rise of populism and the radical right, or the snowflake, woke elitism of the socialist left. Rather, it seeks to understand why the sentence that opens his preface is true: ‘Democracy in America is in crisis.’

Grievance and hurt issue in rage, the unchallengeable moral authority of ‘my personal experience!'

For Hunter, understanding what is going on in a culture requires diving deep into the sources it draws on. What forms it? What drives it? All too easily we focus on the observable and what we can see. The stuff that happens and the values, beliefs and institutions that comprise our common life.

But that is to miss the deeper structures of culture that are formed by our tacit assumptions and the latent frameworks of meaning that nestle unseen and form the cultural architecture that surrounds us. The power of culture is demonstrated by how far it is taken for granted’.

In an interview Hunter likened his approach to be the difference between weather forecasts and climate studies. Or, to put it another way, moving from ‘the politics of culture’ to ‘the culture of politics.’

Beginning at the beginning, Hunter goes to the origin story of the nation. Deeply influenced by the principles of the enlightenment the Founding Fathers of the United States set about their task of nation building. Proposed by John Adams, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson in 1776, the national motto on the Great Seal of the United States, E Pluribus Unum (Out of many, one), summed up their political objective. The creation of solidarity. The glue that binds a society together.

The genius of the Enlightenment in America was that it facilitated this solidarity. What was created was a ‘Hybrid-Enlightenment’, fusing the insights of French and British intellectuals in a context deeply influenced by the faith of religious dissenters, with the Puritans chief among them. The blending of the secular and faith insights from the Enlightenment was what provided its robust inclusivity and durability. For Hunter, this proved key because:

“In the end, the hybrid-Enlightenment in America was a broad enough and opaque enough amalgamation to encompass substantial diversity and the tensions that diversity implied.”

This opacity enabled different groups to see themselves in the enterprise and gave wider American society an ability to absorb a plurality of views, opinions, and traditions. A commitment to Enlightenment rationality also then provided the tools whereby differences could be ‘worked through’ in reasoned debate. Thus, the culture was a living thing, growing, evolving and developing. All the time maintaining the wider solidarity, the ‘buy-in’ from the different communities and constituencies that comprise America.

Opacity also meant that tensions and contradictions were part and parcel of the endeavour from the start. There may have been a promise of freedom, equality and universal justice for all, yet historically these have been denied to large tracts of the American population. But still the centre held, and solidarity was maintained. As Abraham Lincoln presciently reflected in his Second Inaugural Address, given on March 4 1865, shortly before his assassination and the end of the Civil War:

“[We] read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. … [Yet] the prayers of both could not be answered—that of neither has been answered fully.”

The problem today, as Hunter discerns it, is that the elements of the hybrid-Enlightenment are unravelling. He sees a number of contributory causes to this escalating collapse.

Right at the centre is an amoral, materialistic and individualistic neoliberalism which reduces everything to economics and the market. This is deeply corrosive of community and solidarity.

Then there is the fruit of postmodern scepticism that has filtered down from the intellectuals into the general population. Truth is deconstructed, experts are distrusted and misinformation, disinformation and fake news abound.

Widespread immigration also plays a part. It intensifies American pluralism and brings into the country those who are unfamiliar with the legacy of the hybrid-Enlightenment and for whom the national mythos of America is either strange or incomprehensible. Far from being taken for granted, their worldview does not fit.

The growth of identity politics further complicates the unravelling. Solidarity, rather than being found in the national vision, is achieved by defining ‘us’ over and against ‘them’. It doesn’t foster cohesion, it seeds division. Grievance and hurt issue in rage, the unchallengeable moral authority of ‘my personal experience!’ As with Nietzsche, this acts as a narcotic against the hurt, an anaesthetic for the pain.

Of course, identity politics has no room for reasoned debate and mutual resolution. All that matters is the outcome of the zero-sum game where the justice of my position is both acknowledged and acted upon, and you lose. Whether that identity falls on the political right or left, it doesn’t matter. Family, sexuality, public education, the news media, the arts, the law, electoral politics, you name the issue the game play is the same.

Solidarity always involves drawing boundaries. Even the hybrid-Enlightenment drew the line between what was acceptable and what was unacceptable. Who was a part of us, and who was not. Without boundaries there is no identity. It is just that now, identity politics require the boundaries to be much more tightly drawn. “What kind of American are you?”

In all of this, America’s cultural resources for ‘working through’ these issues have been seriously depleted as the hybrid-Enlightenment has unravelled. Into the void, observes Hunter, a form of cultural nihilism slips in. It is far from being all-pervasive, and he maintains that few Americans are nihilists. Yet as a cultural reality he sees it in the prevailing tendencies towards ‘epistemological failure’, ‘ethical incoherence’ and ‘existential despair’. Then, deriving from these he adds a fourth, ‘political annihilation’ and the will to obliterate everything that obstructs acquiring power by destroying enemies completely.

Does it all seem rather depressing?

Hunter admits that he has neither proposals nor a plan to address the crisis he so eloquently describes and accounts for. Yet he concludes:

“… truth be told, I myself am very hopeful – not because I don’t see the seriousness of the problem and its dangerous implications, but because I believe that the times are full of real opportunity if one has the eyes to see them. Sadly, my eyesight is not very good. … [but] without real images of a better world, without myths of a completion of the past in the future, without a world ordered towards goodness, truth, and beauty … We become something like Nietzsche’s ‘last men’.”

I’m grateful to Hunter. I think I understand my American friends, their country and their present challenges better for his insights. As for the possibility of a civil war, he thinks it’s unlikely as the ‘red and blue’ are too intermingled and economically interdependent across the country. In the meantime, political violence will continue to be a very real threat.

As for the future he hopes for, it requires a paradigm shift to imagine and articulate a new vision of public life. It needs the cultural resources of a reconstituted humanism, drawing on the rich insights available in a genuinely pluralist society. Resources that embrace the faith wisdom of exemplars like Martin Luther King, Mohandas Ghandi and Thích Nhất Hạnh. Resources that include a retrieval of the fundamental principle of forgiveness. Without the realism to accept that none of us are perfect, we’ll never be able to live together. As the influential political theorist Hannah Arendt wrote in The Human Condition (1958):

“Without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover; we would remain the victims of its consequences forever.”

Arendt’s insight is altogether more telling when seen in the light of her experience as a German Jew under the Nazis. And if forgiveness is too high a bar, at the very least we have to somehow learn to let things go and move on.

Hunter is under no illusions, such a paradigm shift remains a long haul away.

But he is hopeful.