Blissed Out

Here's the first section of a long interview/essay on Nick, a chapter
printed in the book "Blissed Out: The Raptures Of Rock" (published by
Serpent's Tail, 1990).

It can be a bit too earnest and academic (in another chapter, on
Sonic Youth, Reynolds applies the theories of Roland Barthes to the
music of My Bloody Valentine- gulp!), and occasionally it covers
familiar ground (it is 5 years old, after all).
Nevertheless, I think it's very illuminating, and furthermore, it
proves that Nick Cave and his work can quite easily absorb and reward
academic analysis. PLEASE read it! Here goes...

NICK CAVE

Discipline and Punish

Nick Cave looks the part. Deep gashes of black under the eyes, skin
the colour of ashes, a slight wobbliness to his movements. His speech
is fastidious, precise in a way that would seem pompous if he were at
all ebullient; but with his small, grave voice- sometimes withering,
always withered- the impression is of a wary distrust of words and
the way they can be misconstrued. But he's much more forthcoming than
in an earlier, abortive encounter. Almost affable.

Pardon the ignorance, but what exactly is "The Mercy Seat"?

"It's the throne of God, in the Bible, where he sits and throws his
lightning bolts and so forth. But it's also about this guy sitting on
Death Row, waiting to be electrocuted or whatever. It's juxtaposing
those two things. A person in his final days, thinking about good and
evil and all the usual fare."

So the fallibility and the arogance of human justice is something
that obsesses you?

"It's something that interests me a lot. My social conscience is
fairly limited in a lot of ways; there's not much I'm angry about
that doesn't affect me quite directly. But the prison system- not
particularly capital punishment- but the penal system as it is, and
the whole apparatus of judgement, people deciding on other people's
fates...that does irritate, and upset me quite a lot."

Is that why you got involved in the film about prison life, "Ghosts
of the Civil Dead"?

"It's a two-way thing: I had those feelings long before I wrote the
drafts for the script, but the process of writing and research
inflamed them. It should be clear to anybody that the basic idea
behind the prison system is corrupt and unjust, but the more I worked
on the film, the more I understood how extreme the injustice was.
This particular film has quite a strong political statement to make,
which is something I'm not really known for.

"I was involved in writing the first two drafts of the film, but by
the sixth draft there weren't that many of my ideas left. I also had
a small part: I play a kind of known provocateur, who is brought into
the prison- one of the new hi-tech ones- in order to disrupt the
equilibrium. He's a psychotic with some kind of death wish...spends
his whole time screaming abuse.

"What angers me about the system goes beyond the unreliability of
"proof"...it's that the way criminals are dealt with has nothing to
do with rehabilitation and readjusting people who've stepped outside
society's norms. The same goes for mental institutions and so forth.
But it's also the very idea of someone being judged "criminal" or
"insane" because they're unable to fit into what a basically corrupt
society considers "social" or "sociable"".

So you take issue both with the very idea of the "the normal" and
"normalisation", and with the fact that the authorities don't even
bother to fulfil their professed project of "rehabilitation"?

"Yeah, something like that. I did a lot of homework when I started
working on the script. The initial plan was to use the prison world
to create a certain kind of readymade atmosphere. But over the eight
drafts, what emerged was a particular vision of the whole penal
system as almost a plot by the higher powers to perpetuate the whole
system of crime, keep it rolling, keep criminals on the streets..."

In order to terrify the population into accepting the existence of
the police.
All this reminds me of the ideas of Michel Foucault. He
looked back to an era (pre-industrialism) before the things we
consider "natural"- prisons, asylums, hospitals- had been devised, in
order to trace the "genealogy" of pseudo-sciences like penology,
criminology, psychiatry and sexology. What he discovered is that
these "disciplines" were not really about uncovering truth for its
own sake; the "knowledge" they generated was inseparable from and
instrumental in "techniques of domination". Later, he shifted his
focus from social hygiene (segregation /surveillance /normalization)
to study mental hygiene: the ways in which each individual is
involved in self-policing. We define ourselves as "normal" by
repressing our own capacity for violence or the visionary- just as we
suppress and marginalize those people in the body politic who've gone
over limits.

Looking back, it's clear that Cave has always been obsessed with
this latent other within each individual, that can be catalysed by an
extreme predicament. See how he describes his novel "And the Ass Saw
the Angel":

"It's set in a small valley in a remote region somewhere in the
world. A sugarcane-growing valley. It's the story of the people who
live there. The fascination of these closed communities and hemmed-in
lives, that recur in my work, is that they breed a certain ignorance,
can be the breeding ground for very extreme, absurd emotional
releases."

In Cave's work, most of the characters are in a sense prisoners- of
an obsession, or a claustrophobic environment. But maybe this sounds
glib when set against the specific and extreme misery of imprisonment.

"I've been writing songs about prison ever since I started writing
songs. But I have a less romantic conception than when I started. The
film is in two sections- the population section and the maximum
security section. When the film-makers were in America, going from
penitentiary to penitentiary, looking in libraries, interviewing
people, they stumbled on this amazing story about Marin.

"Over six months, the inmates were subjected to these totally unfair
changes of routine, from small things like not getting coffee one
day, to next day having their cells raided and all their possessions
confiscated.
The whole balance between guards and inmates was totally
disrupted. The convicts became more and more upset, the guards were
afraid, but they kept getting orders from above telling them to
maintain these random violations of the equilibrium.

"Until eventually it broke- and a prisoner stabbed two guards to
death. This was leaked to the media, who began to clamour for
stricter control. Marin was put onto immediate lockdown- which is
where no one is allowed out of their cell and all privileges are
removed. Twenty-one months later it was still in lockdown.

"The point is that two guards were sacrificed by the authorities in
order to achieve this control situation. That's the kind of system
you're dealing with.

""The Mercy Seat" is about this person in solitary confinement,
becoming more sensitive to inanimate objects, and as he sits thinking
about human and Divine Justice, finding himself judging these things
as Good or Evil."

Some say that "The Mercy Seat" is the best thing Cave has done for
five years, since "Mutiny in Heaven". I wouldn't go this far (that
would be to devalue all the peaks in the interim)- but the single is
stupendous. It's a gigantic, near illegible swirl-surge, a
horizontal, disciplined avalanche.
With its maddened strings, echo-chamber vocal and the odd filigree
of lonesome country whistling, it is vaguely suggestive of the
sixties pop-melodrama of "Wichita Lineman" or "Something's Gotten
Hold of My Heart". But a sense of the epic driven to such histrionic
pitch that it verges on Velvet's white noise and viola hysteria.

"Dignity" is not a word that figures in my lexicon of praise (too
redolent of the prattle of soulboys) but with Cave's work since
"Kicking Against the Pricks", it's unavoidable. A ruined dignity, the
courage of someone staring into the abyss with "nothing left to
lose".
Here it's the condemned man waiting to "go shuffling out of life/just
to hide in death a while". Eventually, the song becomes a real-time
simulation of a locked groove, an out of control roller-coaster of
dread but also of resilience: "And the Mercy Seat is waiting/And I
think my head is burning/And in a way I'm yearning/To be done with
all this measuring of proof/An eye for an eye /And a tooth for a
tooth/And anyway I told the truth/And I'm not afraid to die."
Over and over and over, 'til you think your cranium is set to bust.

[END OF PART ONE, PART TWO SOON...]

Nick White.
Sheffield University, England.