Nick Cave admits he has a “conservative” approach to change
The Bad Seeds frontman Nick Cave has admitted he has a “conservative” view of the world and also explained why he doesn’t believe “progress” is always the answer.
Cave was speaking at Hay Festival and told the audience (via The Times): “I have these days what I would call a conservative temperament. I believe that we need to be cautious about the idea of progress. I just see things moving very rapidly and a whole lot of different things worry me a lot, like AI [artificial intelligence].”
The Australian musician made clear he wasn’t a supporter of the Conservative Party and said he was a small-c conservative. He continued: “I don’t think that progress is, in itself, good. I’m not against progress and I think there are huge problems in the world that we really need to deal with . . . but the idea that everything is systemically fucked as the only way of seeing the world is deeply demoralising to us as a society.”
Elsewhere in the conversation, Cave also discussed separating the art from the artist. The singer warned: “Making art – especially making music – it prevents you from becoming the worst aspects of your character, and that’s why I very much think we need to be very, very careful about the music we don’t think people should listen to any more because of what the artist who has made that music may have been like.”
On the topic of cancel culture, in a recent interview with Unherd, Cave conceded that his classic song ‘Stagger Lee’ is “highly problematic”. The Bad Seeds leader said: “This is a famous Bad Seeds song, and it’s offensive on many, many levels.”
He added: “I won’t go through all the different sorts of people that it offends, but it’s pretty much everybody. It’s a highly problematic song. It is sort of spoken-sung over this crawling, predatory music.”
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