"The thing about writing a good song is that it tells you something about yourself you didn’t already know.... The good song is always rushing forward. It annihilates..."

"... to some degree, the songs that you’d previously written, because you are moving forward all the time. That’s what the creative impulse is—it’s both creative and destructive and is always one step ahead of you. These impulses can’t be replicated by a machine. Maybe A.I. can make a song that’s indistinguishable from what I can do.... But... that’s not what art is. Art has to do with our limitations, our frailties, and our faults as human beings. It’s the distance we can travel away from our own frailties."

Says Nick Cave, interviewed at "Nick Cave on the Fragility of Life/The singer-songwriter believes that we are deeply flawed, impermanent creatures who can sometimes do extraordinary things" (The New Yorker).

"That’s what is so awesome about art: that we deeply flawed creatures can sometimes do extraordinary things. A.I. just doesn’t have any of that stuff going on. Ultimately, it has no limitations, so therefore can’t inhabit the true transcendent artistic experience. It has nothing to transcend! It feels like such a mockery of what it is to be human. A.I. may very well save the world, but it can’t save our souls. That’s what true art is for. That’s the difference. So, I don’t know, in my humble opinion ChatGPT should just fuck off and leave songwriting alone."

"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."

Writes Nick Cave, responding to a fan who asked "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" — at The Red Hand Files. 

After his younger son Arthur, aged 15, fell off a cliff and died, Cave thought about "the precarious and vulnerable position of the world" and felt he ought to try to help the world, "instead of merely vilifying it, and sitting in judgement of it."

In 2022, his older son Jethro died, aged 31.

I've got 9 TikToks for you this evening. Let me know which ones you like best.

1. "Benjamin Franklin or food?"

2. Taking work seriously. 

3. "People always say that kids with Down Syndrome always super happy...."

4. "The great phone books.... why, yes, I remember them well...."

5. Cursing at the neighbor in Italian....

6. "Stay here with me, an old man..."

7. Nick Cave sings the word "bathtub" 10 times — ranked.

8. So you think your kid will feel the magic of the movie that felt like magic to you when you were a kid?

9. Scott!! 

When is a sign not a sign? When it's art?

I'm reading "Nick Cave’s Truth May Be Writ Large, but Is It a Sign?/The village of Kinderhook, N.Y., is not thrilled with the mark this artist made on a gallery, so the municipal government is demanding that it come down" (NYT).

The black vinyl letters in the artwork “Truth Be Told” measure 21 feet high and stretch some 160 feet across the facade of the 1929 red brick building that now serves as the School, a branch of Manhattan’s Jack Shainman Gallery.

The artwork is intended to start a "conversation" about the death of George Floyd, but the conversation is "about whether the text-based work is technically a sign or not." If it's a sign, it's a violation of law and it needs to come down, because Shainman was denied a permit for a 21'x160' sign/not sign.

"Living in a state of enquiry, neutrality and uncertainty, beyond dogma and grand conviction, is good for the business of songwriting, and for my life in general."

"This is the reason I tend to become uncomfortable around all ideologies that brand themselves as 'the truth' or 'the way.'... This not only includes most religions, but also atheism, radical bi-partisan politics or any system of thought, including 'woke' culture, that finds its energy in self-righteous belief and the suppression of contrary systems of thought. Regardless of the virtuous intentions of many woke issues, it is its lack of humility and the paternalistic and doctrinal sureness of its claims that repel me.... [M]y duty as a songwriter is not to try to save the world, but rather to save the soul of the world. This requires me to live my life on the other side of truth, beyond conviction and within uncertainty, where things make less sense, absurdity is a virtue and art rages and burns; where dogma is anathema, discourse is essential, doubt is an energy, magical thinking is not a crime and where possibility and potentiality rule."

So said the songwriter Nick Cave, responding to a fan who wanted to know if he thinks of himself as "woke" (reported at Consequence of Sound).

ADDED: That phrase! "where... absurdity is a virtue and art rages and burns." I saw it in 1993 in Amsterdam, when I traveled with a fountain pen and a notebook:



That's a detail from this larger page:

At the Buttoned-Up Café...

... you don't have to relax.

Talk about whatever you want in the comments, and please consider supporting this blog by shopping through The Althouse Amazon Portal. 

The sculpture is "Soundsuit" by Nick Cave. Here's a longer view:



ADDED: Nick Cave the sculptor is not the same person as Nick Cave the songwriter. Here's a nice article about the sculptor: "Nick Cave/Using materials that range from twigs to crystals to rainbow-colored hair, the artist makes sculptures that, for all their beauty, are visceral and necessary critiques of racial injustice" (NYT).

"The Nick Cave skateboard – and five other bizarre musical endorsements."

The weirdest one isn't Smokey Robinson's "the soul is in the bowl" seafood gumbo. It's the Rolling Stones' Rice Krispies: