Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds create a maximalist anthem to God, The Universe and Everything Else.
A minor epic of seven minutes of sweeping pop culture and high learning Cave stars into the hi tech abyss and draws the search for the ‘God particle’ back to earth. Across Push The Sky Away Cave connects with the 21st century as his core theme; the shipwreck of popular culture that unmoored old ideas from their foundations, fractured old certainties, where natural doubt soon swells to become a wrecking ball. “Higgs Boson Blues” stands testament to the struggles between memory and forgetting, past and future mired in the bleeding edge of the present.
Recorded in one live take, Cave would improvise his sprawling lyrics on the mic, his widescreen vocal throwing its arms around the world in the face of imminent apocalypse, a non-instrumental process he would continue with Carnage — being captive to the moment — holding the listener with him heartbeat-close in a high wire act, balancing flight and utter collapse.
Cave wanders past the Brighton palm trees that in his dreams are ignited in flame to fade off into smoke, a vision which reaches forwards to the blood-bright Australian flame trees laid down to die, only to rise up again as ghosts from the earth. Borrowing the melancholy intensity of ‘Jubilee Street’, Warren Ellis’ slowburn riff hammers on a note then slowly slides the same chord shape up the neck to another octave, drawing upon Neil Young’s ‘On The Beach’, builds the mood and groove of both songs towards an inevitable explosion.
From his more virtuoso familiarity with the violin, Ellis takes an almost minimalist, raw sound approach to guitar playing; more about texture and groove, using a four-string tenor electric guitar tuned to 5ths as C-G-D-A, more like a mandolin or a cello. A major progression from The Bad Seeds “six strings that drew blood” toward the revolutionary auto-cannibalism of ‘Lyre of Orpheus’ Ellis’ deconstructed guitar style helps to overturn rock and roll heritage as Cave presents the birth of the instrument, adding a modern voice to Orpheus, the original singer of songs.
READ MORE – Darker With The Dawn: Nick Cave’s Songs Of Love And Death
The epic intensity of the track takes on the metaphorical weight behind the ATLAS experiment Hadron Collider; the reactor designed to perform a scientific reenactment of the creation of the universe, seeking out the original ‘God particle’. A process which Professor Nick Groom sees as a thwarted ambition to “replace celestial creation with theoretical physics.”
The lurching chaos and restraint of ‘Higgs Boson Blues’ trawls pop-culture iconography meeting with a car-crash of post-millennial comedown it becomes his latest anthem to the next apocalypse, all set against the burning world of 20th century atrocity—the listener is abandoned to a landscape not knowing if they are alive or dead.
Cave finds himself driving to Geneva, towards the mystical epicenter of this great (re)happening, where in the fierce rush towards scientific advances that threatens to leave humanity behind, or as suggested by Mark Mordue, rush towards the earth’s ending. The explosive reckoning of the God particle is realised in the information overload of ‘Higgs Boson Blues’; the interruption of decaying information as static, Cave grapples with the blind will of this new wild, untameable energy.
He sings of the missionary who comes at you with a smile; presenting the false gift of a stack of smallpox-infected blankets, the conquering of the Wild West by germ warfare of smallpox blankets, with thousands of Native Americans succumbing to European diseases, as the invention of the cracked atom becomes the new, bigger bomb, an inventory of murder and tyranny performed in God’s name, to kill with the kindness of assumed moral authority.
After the birth of the universe’s heart, humanity becomes its throbbing beat – where there were no answers, only endless questions — so it remains. “Higgs Boson” presents the mixed equation that science is unequal parts, faith, beauty and trial by error. John Mulvey hears the “eliding barriers between truth and lie, ” where Robert Johnson, Martin Luther King, Miley Cyrus, and the Devil himself breach the limits of the personal, political, and the universal at the crossroads of destruction and creation. These hot spots of cosmic energy become tipping points of history where professor Nick Groom would note: “Human culture collapses into the idiocy of popular culture, and like an eternal and unrelenting cycle at the very end we return to our beginning,” where Cave restates the song’s opening line of mental intertia: ‘I can’t remember anything at all’.” From this endzone of negative capability, Cave found a renewed freedom in free-association lyrics that would come to encompass many of his major themes thoughout the Bad Seeds back catalogue.
The song is laden with core Cave themes of lust, numbness and spiritual exhaustion in the face of crisis. Evoking Push The Sky Away’s background setting of Brighton, Cave looks up from his basement patio “hotspot” seeing young women drift by in summer skirts, “their roses all in bloom”. His ongoing condition invites Alan Bennett’s compound adjective of being perennially “cunt-struck”; not unlike the agony and the ecstasy of St Theresa’s moment of revelation caught between pain and joy.
Shifting from the mermaids stranded upon the rocks of young lust, Cave would find new doomed chaunteuses in the emergent figures of the new pop culture hit list. Ending “Higgs Boson Blues” with Miley Cyrus “floating in a pool” in Toluca lake (a wealthy area just north of LA), the latest addition to Cave’s burgeoning cast of pretty girls lost to watery graves.
Earlier in the song, Cave seems to satirize her Disney alternate, Hannah Montana, going on a safari tinged with colonial alienation, with simulated rainfall and pretending to join long queues for unglamorous toilets; hinting at the heavily mediated roles of the manufactured young ingenue forced to perform for children, teenagers and adults alike, such thath they blur into one infantile sexualised audience. Cave leaves her true fate open: lying supine on a lilo, dead or alive, or elegantly wasted, to the point of mute indifference, he claimed the final option as the more devastating image, in keeping with “the nature of the song and the absolute spiritual collapse that’s happening all around her.”
HIGGS BOSON AND BEYOND
In July 2013, Cave and his family would be invited by the CERN institute to visit the small Hadron Collider, bringing the author face to face with his cosmic muse, presented with the past staring into the future. The letter points out the very enormity of the CERN experiment: “The ATLAS detector is about half the size of St Paul’s cathedral, weighs the same amount as the Eiffel Tower and is buried 100m underground. It is the culmination of more than 20 years work by thousands of scientists and the discoveries we are making are unlocking the mysteries of the universe.”
The desire to reach back into the creation of the universe and discover some essential truth would haunt the reflections of Push The Sky Away, the modern world confronting Cave with the death of knowledge, drowning in information the more we know the less we understand. The album was written over the course of twelve months, with Cave writing draft lyrics in his own little black notebook.
On ‘We Real Cool’ Cave heralds the bulletproof thrill of cocky young youth, set against the new determinism of Wikipedia as heaven. The 1959 poem ‘We Real Cool’ by Gwendolyn Brooks offers Cave the sharp slang phrasings of young African-American men hanging-out in a 1950s pool hall, the short three-word lines that describe their simple, joyful lives soon becomes a rhythmic chant, ending with the abrupt line “We die soon”. It suggests the young lives run short, either burning out into middle age or premature death, all of their bragadaccio, though rooted in self-knowledge, will not save them.
Shivering strings and descending piano chords plot th way towards deeper uncertainty beyond the immediate now; where the stark simplicity of black and white conceptions of good and evil become mired into shades of grey. The wandering thoughts Cave accumulated were a sign of his trawling the internet, drifting through the shifting sands of knowledge and jotting points down “whether they’re true or not” scraps coalesce to form the emergent post-truth world.
Cave exposed the new order of disposable knowledge and shifting facts drawn from a history that seems static, but is constantly rewritten and diffracted by warring narratives. Embracing the fresh hell of the online universe’s mass content posing as information becomes a state of mental overload. Cave accepts the risk of balancing-out the internet’s “societal dissonance” alienating and lonely, where people retreat into narrow viewpoints, desperate to attack and to defend for fear of making a mistake, getting stuck and hung-up on other people’s opinions: “these songs convey how on the internet profoundly significant events, momentary fads and mystically-tinged absurdities sit side-by-side and question how we might recognise and assign weight to what’s genuinely important.”
In his poem The Dreamer of Samuel Vale House, Antony Owen wrote: “I have googled the earth/And I’m tired of paradise”, suggesting the search for knowledge both spans and has outgrown our world but also the idea that the internet could somehow map reality, where travel becomes point-to-point transaction, leaving the human perspective behind.
The fear of a modern age of surveillance is announced on ‘We No Who U R’ a track driven by gentle paranoia as moral self-checking that meets with ‘Jubilee Street’ a girl with no name but the letter ‘B’, two broad semi-circles sniffed about by the secret police who discover her little black notebooks of oblique secrets. The song is stalked by the shadow of betrayal, Cave evades brute text-speak for florid scenes of devastation set among shards of chiming organ and synth notes as the lyrics turn upon themselves, like burnt edges of paper curling in towards their center, we feel the rising heat of being watched.
Cave’s song shows modern man feeling blindly around the body of the elephantine system, constantly shifting, growing changing, a false constellation. For Professor Nick Groom ‘We Real Cool’ lays out the crisis “of the virtual universe of the internet and the infinity of Wikipedia, which like Jorge-Luis Borges’s ‘Library of Babel’ has the potential to contain all knowledge, but in which it is impossible to distinguish truth from illusion.”
The scourge of the internet is to suffer its own restless drive to remain alive and up-to-date, shuffling knowledge like a deck of cards, we see glimpses but never the whole. This grab-bag of discovery is displayed in Cave’s wild listing of beliefs and shaken certainties in ‘Mermaids’ and ‘Higgs Boson Blues’. They become instantly dated like a passing breath, a heritage act, what the ten year anniversary press release for the album stated as: “The contemporary settings of myths, and the cultural references that have time-stamped Nick’s songs of the twenty-first century mist” Cave affirms the relentless tides of time where the past is “here to stay”.
Sometimes it feels like the further we go on, the less we know, the manifestation of the uncertainty principle. Cave allows that human life often seems to continue outside of space (and time), we simply happen to coexist in the same universe, as if by coincidence, piling-on impressions overlaid like waves eroding the shoreline into fresh uncertainty. What limited design there is appears stripped of direction or intent, as if swayed by the Unmoved Mover. We are bundles of raw energy aged by experience and buoyed by native curiosity, from which a little wonder can go a long way. The nature of art is to move beyond the surface of things, rebounding and sparking from one idea to another, the magical wonder that emerges from the chaos of life becomes its own spiral of energy, a light that never goes out.
Remain true to yourself, but move ever upward toward greater consciousness and greater love! At the summit you will find yourselves united with all those who, from every direction, have made the same ascent. For everything that rises must
–Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s, Omega Point
READ MORE – this blog post is extracted from my book
Darker With The Dawn: Nick Cave’s Songs Of Love And Death
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