Nick Cave is now widely recognized as a songwriter, musician, novelist, screenwriter, curator, critic, actor and performer. From the band, The Boys Next Door (1976-1980), to the spoken-word recording, "The Secret Life of the Love Song" (1998), to the recently acclaimed screenplay of "The Proposition" (2005) and the "Grinderman" project (2008), Cave's career spans thirty years and has produced a comprehensive (and sometimes controversial) body of work that has shaped contemporary alternative culture. Despite intense media interest in Cave, there have been remarkably few comprehensive appraisals of his work, its significance and its impact on understandings of popular culture. In addressing this absence, the present volume is both timely and necessary. "Cultural Seeds" brings together an international range of scholars and practitioners, each of whom is uniquely placed to comment on an aspect of Cave's career. The essays collected here not only generate new ways of seeing and understanding Cave's contributions to contemporary culture, but set up a dialog between fields all-too-often separated in the academy and in the media. Topics include Cave and the Presley myth; the aberrant masculinity projected by The Birthday Party; the post colonial Australian-ness of his humor; his interventions in film and his erotics of the sacred. These essays offer compelling insights and provocative arguments about the fluidity of contemporary artistic practice.
Author(s): Karen Welberry and Tanya Dalziell
Year: 2009
Language: English
Pages: 256
Contents......Page 6
Notes on Contributors......Page 8
General Editor’s Preface......Page 12
Acknowledgements......Page 14
Introduction......Page 16
PART I Cultural Contexts......Page 26
1 The Light Within: The Twenty-first-Century Love Songs of Nick Cave......Page 28
2 Planting Seeds......Page 46
3 Nick Cave and the Australian Language of Laughter......Page 62
4 Nick Cave, Dance Performance and the Production and Consumption of Masculinity......Page 80
PART II Intersections......Page 96
5 An Audience for Antagonism: Nick Cave and Doomed Celebrity......Page 98
6 And the Ass Saw the Angel: A Novel of Fragment and Excess......Page 112
7 Red Right Hand: Nick Cave and the Cinema......Page 124
8 Grinderman: All Stripped Down......Page 138
PART III The Sacred......Page 152
9 From Mutiny to Calling upon the Author: Cave’s Religion......Page 154
10 Oedipus Wrecks: Cave and the Presley Myth......Page 168
11 Fleshed Sacred: The Carnal Theologies of Nick Cave......Page 182
12 The Moose and Nick Cave: Melancholy, Creativity and Love Songs......Page 202
Index......Page 218