“Where’s the Rage?” Nick Cave “Changed After My First Son Died”
The post “Where’s the Rage?” Nick Cave “Changed After My First Son Died” appeared first on Consequence.
Nick Cave responded to a cranky fan who accused him of turning into a “Hallmark card hippie,” by agreeing that he had indeed become a gentler person, saying he “changed after my first son died.”
Writing on his website The Red Hand Files, Cave shared a letter from Ermine in the US demanding to know, “Where’s the rage, anger, hatred? Reading these lately is like listening to an old preacher drone on and on at Sunday mass.”
“Things changed after my first son died,” Cave replied. “I changed. For better or for worse, the rage you speak of lost its allure and, yes, perhaps I became a Hallmark card hippie.”
Cave’s eldest son Jethro Lazenby died at the age of 31 last May, a tragedy that followed the loss of his son, Arthur, only seven years earlier at 15. After the latest blow, Cave recalled, “Hatred stopped being interesting. Those feelings were like old dead skins that I shed. They were their own kind of puke.”
Cave compared his previous stance to “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.
“When my son died, I was faced with an actual devastation, and with no real effort of my own that posture of disgust toward the world began to wobble and collapse underneath me,” he continued. “I started to understand the precarious and vulnerable position of the world. I started to fret for it. Worry about it. 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.”
He concluded, “Perhaps, Ermine, you are right, and I did, for good or ill, turn from a living shit-post into a walking Hallmark card. But, well, here we are, you and me, sending smoke signals to each other across a yawning ideological divide. Hello Ermine, I drone, hello. Love, Nick.”
That doesn’t mean that nothing can stir Cave to anger. A few weeks back, he lamented a “bullshit” attempt by AI to write Nick Cave lyrics. But he has been trying to find more grace, even for the “disgraceful” antisemite Kanye West. Last year, he and Warren Ellis scored the soundtrack to Blonde.
“Where’s the Rage?” Nick Cave “Changed After My First Son Died”
Wren Graves
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