The Blizzard of Oz: Nick Cave’s Wearisome Ubiquity

ABSTRACT

Nick Cave is a hugely successful rock musician who has progressed from post-punk outsider in the 1980s to widely lauded singer-songwriter in the twenty-first century, while simultaneously enjoying critical recognition in fields such as literature and film. This article uses Cave’s 2022 book of interviews Faith, Hope and Carnage, as well as his ongoing blog The Red Hand Files, as a stepping-off point to consider his career trajectory in the context of longstanding accusations of misogyny, his extensive public commentaries on grief (stemming from the 2015 death of his son), and Cave’s latter-day excursions into conservative political commentary.

KEYWORDS:

• Nick Cave
• rock music
• politics
• celebrity
• post-punk

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Quoted in Pouncey 51.

2. Quotes sourced from “The Death of Bunny Munro” https://www.textpublishing.com.au/books/the-death-of-bunny-munro

3. From “Papa Won’t Leave You, Henry” (1992), quoted from Cave, Complete Lyrics 187.

4. In his music Cave’s ability over time to switch from one extreme to another has proven giddying: for example, from the ludicrous early “Hard On for Love” (1986), where he “imagines his phallus as God's sceptre” (Reynolds and Press 32), to the insufferably soppy mid-period love song “Into My Arms” (1997), then back again to the scurrilous lechery of Grinderman’s “No Pussy Blues” (2007). Yet Cave from time to time does manage to craft a laudable song that fits somewhere in the middle, such as the boisterous singalong (accompanied by a hilarious star-filled video clip) of “Fifteen Feet of Pure White Snow” (2001).

5. https://www.theredhandfiles.com/.

6. But not, evidently, Simon Reynolds and Joy Press, who in their 1995 book The Sex Revolts (in a subsection titled “Ladykillers”) repeat Cave’s claim from a 1986 interview that “I’ve always enjoyed writing songs about dead women” (28) before spending several pages eulogizing his ability to construct songs where “the woman’s death elevates the man” (29), where he “imagines his phallus as God’s ‘sceptre’ venturing into the perilous, dark and dank domain of the female,” or where “peace is finally achieved by putting her out of her misery” (32).

7. As outlined in Darcey Steinke and Janine Barrand’s appendix to Cave’s 2020 book Stranger Than Kindness, titled “contextualisations” (pp. 257-68).

8. BA thesis, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic (2007); and PhD thesis, University of York, York, UK (2019), respectively.