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Nick's Caveman Morals

Photo by Steve Double

The Bad Seed: Brutal balladeer Nick Cave

'Murder Ballads,' Nick Cave's new album, pushes ultraviolence over the top

By Gina Arnold

Rock music abounds with songs about violent death, ranging from the sappy "Teen Angel" to Snoop Doggy Dogg's all-too-believable treatise "Murder Was the Case." But no artist has taken the topic to the extreme that Nick Cave (with the Bad Seeds) has on Murder Ballads (Reprise), his latest album.

Murder Ballads consists of ten songs about violent death, each more gruesome than the last. The record begins with a woman and her three children getting bound, gagged, stabbed and stuffed into a sleeping bag, and ends with a 14-minute song about a bar fight in which a killer decimates half the population of his town before giving up to the police: "I spun to the right and I spun to the left again/yelling, 'fear me fear me fear me,' but no one did, 'cos they were dead."

Clearly, like Quentin Tarantino, Cave finds some aspects of murder and violence funny, and the violence he sings about is kind of humorous, at least as envisioned in the video for the single "Where the Wild Roses Grow," in which Cave kills co-singer Kylie Minogue--the English equivalent of Debbie Gibson--by hitting her on the head with a rock.

But although in one sense Cave's songs are as detached from real violence as the antics of The Simpsons' Itchy and Scratchy, they are also much more violent than most other songs you'll hear today, not even excluding gangsta rap. On Murder Ballads, heads wind up on in the kitchen sink; bowels wind up on the floor; children are buried under houses; boys are beaten to death in creek beds; and women are, of course, menaced, as on "The Kindness of Strangers," which ends with the discouraging pair of couplets, "So mother keep your girls at home/don't let them journey out alone/tell them the world is full of danger/and to shun the company of strangers."

Cave can't be faulted for being sexist, though--since his album encompasses a bunch of women killing men as well. On "Henry Lee," for example, guest vocalist PJ Harvey kills her faithless man by throwing him down a 100-foot well. Both "Crow Jane" and "The Curse of Millhaven" are about female serial killers. And then there's Cave's deftly unsyncopated version of the old song "Stagger Lee," which has a weird filthy sex angle.

Cave, an Australian, began his musical days in an art-punk outfit called the Birthday Party before transforming himself into a solo artist with a penchant for Biblical imagery.

He has always excelled at maintaining a theme, a mood and an atmosphere for an entire album. The combination worked extremely well on The Good Son, a record about prodigality and forgiveness, and on Let Love In, about romantic obsession.

But when the subject is murder, Cave's ability to get into character becomes more than a little unsettling. Each song is a long, slow, scary rumination on violence, containing lascivious descriptions of murder and mutilation, and all-too-explicit imagery.

Blood spills like "a steaming scarlet brook." Women remind him of "those fishes with bloated lips." And in the end, a killer yells, "If I have no free will, how can I be morally culpable?" Apparently, Cave's spent a lot of time reading the collected works of Flannery O'Connor.

Cave's stance is all intentionally over the top, of course. I suppose an argument could be made defending Murder Ballads as a kind of catharsis, like reading murder mysteries or seeing Seven. But although in the past I've enjoyed Cave's twisted Elvis persona, the bottom line is, I find the record unpleasant to listen to. Life's scary enough without romanticizing murder.

Murder Ballads does have a moral, which is that death comes to everyone, and death--more O'Connor here--is not the end. But that's small comfort if you're one of the families of the 23,000-plus people killed in America last year--or even just someone who's a tiny bit squeamish.

After all, if the O.J. Simpson trial has taught Americans one thing, it is that all murders, regardless of the grandness of the circumstances or the celebrity status of the participants, are sordid and mean and ugly. Cave can try as hard as he likes, but he'll never write a song as peculiar or as tragic as real life.

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