Nick Cave responds to a fan who misses his anger: “things changed after my son died”
Nick Cave has responded to a fan on his Red Hand Files newsletter in which the fan asked Cave why his music – and even the newsletter itself – had started to become more cheerful, lacking the distinctive vitriol of Cave’s former efforts.
The fan, named Ermine, asked Cave: “When did you become a Hallmark card hippie? Joy, love, peace. Puke! Where’s the rage, anger, hatred? Reading these lately is like listening to an old preacher drone on and on at Sunday mass.”
Cave explained that he experienced a great inner change after his son died in 2015. He wrote: “Things changed after my first son died. I changed. For better or for worse, the rage you speak of lost its allure and, yes, perhaps I became a Hallmark card hippie. Hatred stopped being interesting. Those feelings were like old dead skins that I shed. They were their own kind of puke….”
He added: “I 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.” It’s a fair statement from Cave, especially seeing as he made it in reaction to a rather disrespectful question from Ermine.
Drilling the point home about the kind of depression that Cave sunk into when his son died, he wrote: “Sitting around in my own mess, pissed off at the world, disdainful of the people in it, and thinking my contempt for things somehow amounted to something, had some kind of nobility, hating this thing here, and that thing there, and that other thing over there, and making sure that everybody around me knew it, not just knew, but felt it too, contemptuous of beauty, contemptuous of joy, contemptuous of happiness in others, well, this whole attitude just felt, I don’t know, in the end, sort of dumb.”
Never Miss A Beat
The Far Out Music Newsletter
All the latest music news from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.