Nick Cave is known as a showman, icon, innovator. But the musician has cast aspersions on the beleaguered genre’s future as it faces a post-#MeToo reckoning with its legacy of bad behaviour.
Cave has a website called the Red Hand files. And a fan wrote in to ask how he felt about “the current trend of connecting the shortcomings of an artist’s personal conduct and the art they create and using that criteria to determine if said works are corrupted and therefore to be relegated to the dustbins or not?”
What did it mean for art’s future, they wrote, “if we expect our artists, those that help us collectively explore and understand the human experience, to be morally perfect and beyond reproach?”
Responding to a fan letter about censoring musicians accused of misconduct, Cave suggested ‘dissolute behaviour’ is key to rock’s identity
Cave, describing modern rock music as “afflicted with a kind of tiredness and confusion and faint-heartedness”, suggested that “the new moral zealotry that is descending upon our culture could actually be a good thing”.
He continued: “Contemporary rock music no longer seems to have the fortitude to contend with these enemies of the imagination, these enemies of art – and in this present form perhaps rock music isn’t worth saving. The permafrost of puritanism could be the antidote for the weariness and nostalgia that grips it.”
Cave is currently on tour with his Conversations With Nick Cave event series, in which he answers questions from the audience and performs impromptu songs at the piano. The UK leg of the tour commences on 15 June in Cardiff.
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