Login
Nick Cave is embarking on a solo North American tour this fall. He will be joined by Radiohead bassist Colin Greenwood.
— Read the restCave's solo tour begins in Asheville, North Carolina on September 19th and features shows at Washington, D.C.'s Lincoln Theatre, Chicago's Auditorium Theatre, Austin's Moody Center, and New York's Kings and Beacon Theatres before wrapping up with a two-night stand at Los Angeles' Orpheum Theatre on October 27th and 28th.
In this interview, Amanda Petrusich talks with Nick Cave about grief, resilience, religion, music, and Faith, Hope and Carnage, a book based on his conversations with journalist Seán O’Hagan. Sure, these are topics you’d expect in a Q&A with the Australian singer-songwriter, but that doesn’t make it any less rich or moving. I like their exchange about channeling spirituality or some kind of “enigmatic otherness” when making music, and dealing with loss over time, which Cave says gives us a deeper understanding of being human. His thoughts on AI, ChatGPT, and art also bring music to my ears.
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. 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.
In a recent interview, Damon Albarn (of Blur and Gorillaz) showed Zane Lowe where the hit song “Clint Eastwood” came from — the “Rock 1” preset on his Suzuki Omnichord.
I loved this clip and it got me thinking it would be fun to make an entire playlist of hit songs that were based on synthesizer presets or pre-programmed drum machine patterns.
At the top of the list would have to be Wayne Smith’s “Under Mi Sleng Teng,” which came out of Jamaica in 1985 and “kick-started a new genre and changed the island’s culture almost overnight.” The beat came from the “rock’n’roll” present on a Casiotone MT40 keyboard, which was programmed by a Japanese woman named Okuda Hiroko, who was straight out of music college and working for Casio.
The Guardian has a whole list of “the greatest preset sounds in pop music,” including:
And so on and so forth. Once you go looking, the list is endless.
Thinking about presets coincided with my discovery of the Panda Bear (Noah Lennox) and Sonic Boom (Peter Member) collaboration from last year, Reset.
The album is sample-based, with a little twist that all the samples come from really obvious and identifiable bits from vintage tracks which are worked up into something different:
At first, Kember began re-familiarising himself with his long-lost collection of ’50s and ’60s American doo-wop and rock-and-roll LPs. Crafting song-length loops from classic intros to tracks by Eddie Cochrane, The Troggs and The Drifters, Lennox then added his own vocal observations to create fully-formed songs.
I discovered the album when I got excited that KUTX was playing The Drifters’ “Save The Last Dance For Me” and suddenly Panda Bear started singing. (The song was “Livin’ in the After.”)
Sonic Boom explains the thinking behind the sampling:
[It] struck me that a lot of these tracks had intros that juiced the whole thing even though they were independent from how the rest of the song sounded. I just felt they had a vibe that we could grow something from.
When I listen to the album, I ask myself why these “obvious” samples feel rich to me while other obvious samples sound cheap.
For example, I was at my kids’ swim lesson the other day and a song that turned out to be Coldplay’s “Talk” came on. I’d never heard it all the way through, but the song takes a riff from Kraftwerk’s “Computer Love” and plays it throughout. It felt really cheap somehow to me in a way that “Planet Rock” — which samples the Kraftwerk songs “Trans Europe Express” and “Numbers” — doesn’t.
Coldplay even cleared permission with Kraftwerk’s Ralf Hutter to use the song. But maybe that’s why it feels cheap to me?
For me, great sampling is about transformation. It usually comes from two places:
1) the sample is from something obscure or humble (like a preset)
2) the sample is from something huge and classic and is re-contextualized — usually by someone in a more humble position (like with early hip-hop, the kind of Robin Hood theft of taking from your parents’ records and twisting it into your own thing)
A great sample works on the original in a sense, it changes it a bit, makes you hear it in a different or more interesting way.
The sampling in the Coldplay song feels like neither to me: A wildly popular band borrows a line from a masterwork to make a completely mediocre song that you’d hear on the mix at your kids’ swim school.
It reminds me of something Nick Cave wrote on the subject of creative theft:
Theft is the engine of progress, and should be encouraged, even celebrated, provided the stolen idea has been advanced in some way. To advance an idea is to steal something from someone and make it so cool and covetable that someone then steals it from you. In this way, modern music progresses, collecting ideas, and mutating and transforming as it goes.
But a word of caution, if you steal an idea and demean or diminish it, you are committing a dire crime for which you will pay a terrible price — whatever talents you may have will, in time, abandon you. If you steal, you must honour the action, further the idea, or be damned.
And speaking of Cave, I need to wrap this post up, so let’s bring it back to the beginning with a tweet by his bandmate and collaborator, Warren Ellis, on using presets to get started:
“The perilous time for the most highly gifted is not youth,” the visionary Elizabeth Peabody, who coined the term transcendentalism, wrote in her timeless admonition against the trap of complacency. “The perilous season is middle age, when a false wisdom tempts them to doubt the divine origin of the dreams of their youth.”
A century and a half after her, contemplating how to keep life from becoming a parody of itself, Simone de Beauvoir observed: “In old age we should wish still to have passions strong enough to prevent us turning in on ourselves.”
Moving through the stages of life and meeting each on its own terms is the supreme art of living — the ultimate test of self-respect and self-love. Often, what most blunts our vitality is the tendency for the momentum of a past stage to steer the present one, even though our priorities and passions have changed beyond recognition.
How to honor the unfolding of life without a punitive clinging to past selves is what Nick Cave explores in a passage from Faith, Hope and Carnage — one of my favorite books of 2022.
At sixty-five, he reflects:
We’re often led to believe that getting older is in itself somehow a betrayal of our idealistic younger self, but sometimes I think it might be the other way around. Maybe the younger self finds it difficult to inhabit its true potential because it has no idea what that potential is. It is a kind of unformed thing running scared most of the time, frantically trying to build its sense of self — This is me! Here I am! — in any way that it can. But then time and life come along, and smash that sense of self into a million pieces.
In consonance with the great Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön’s insight that “only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found in us,” he considers what is found on the other side of that self-shattering:
Then comes the reassembled self, the self you have to put back together. You no longer have to devote time to finding out what you are, you are just free to be whatever you want to be, unimpeded by the incessant needs of others. You somehow grow into the fullness of your humanity, form your own character, become a proper person — I don’t know, someone who has become a part of things, not someone separated from or at odds with the world.
A generation earlier, Bertrand Russell touched on this in his astute observation that growing older contentedly is matter of being able to “make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life.”
Complement with Grace Paley on the art of growing older, then revisit Nick Cave on self-forgiveness, the relationship between vulnerability and freedom, and the antidote to our existential helplessness.
For a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
FreshRSS 