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all things move toward their end

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The thing I like about traditional murder ballads is that there doesn’t have to be any motive for the murder. There’s just these two people and he takes her down to the river and he kills her and he throws her in the river and that’s it. They’ve ended up in a murder ballad so one of them’s got to die. It’s a romantic gesture of some sort. It’s an incredibly politically incorrect statement to make, which I also kind of like. These songs are kind of dinosaur songs. They really shouldn’t be allowed. — Nick Cave

We’ve seen how Nick Cave earned his stripes on Kicking Against the Pricks (1986) and Tender Prey (1988), showing that he – a Australian, London-based gothic post-punk rocker — could give authentic voice to American concepts of crime, justice, and atonement and to American roots, folk and early rock music. 


Nick Cave performs “Hey Joe” (covered on Kicking Against the Pricks) with Charlie Haden and Toots Thielemans:

On these early albums, Cave included not only covers of standard songs but – as a true rationalizer and integrator, to use the helpful terminology Pat introduced us to – complete reinventions of them. As just one example, during this same period Cave also released Your Funeral My Trial, an album named after the Sonny Boy Williamson song:

“Your Funeral My Trial,” Sonny Boy Williamson


All the songs on this album speak to this central theme of a man killing his wife/girlfriend which, of course, was also a standard for Cash and many other American blues and folk artists. (As Ken explored in regard to “Frankie and Albert/Johnny,” it is possibly the standard.) With a hint of what was to come, however, Cave’s version of “Your Funeral My Trial” is a total departure – abstracted, slowed down, almost a love song:
Cave’s tribute to the murder ballad American-style reached its apex with his next album, simply titled Murder Ballads – his greatest commercial success to date (and the top result for “murder ballads” on Google). Released in 1996, the album consists of original songs as well as covers, albeit infused with Cave’s gothic post-punk sensibility and aesthetic. 
Nick Cave performing “Stagger Lee”


Cave’s extremely-not safe-for-work cover of “Stagger Lee” is my favorite version of the song. You can watch the video here and listen to the song on Spotify here, but consider yourself doubly warned about the graphic language. (Language worth noting for more than one reason — in 1959 Dick Clark deemed Lloyd Price’s tame hit version too offensive and insisted that he re-write it. It’s hard to imagine how, in 1996, Cave could have made the song equally worthy of censorship, other than by doing exactly what he does with it.)
On Murder Ballads Cave also showed he could play the murder ballad true, however, as he does in “The Kindness of Strangers” (the title nods to Blanche’s final plights in A Streetcar Named Desire):
 
The most complicated (and scary!) original on Murder Ballads is “Song of Joy,” which again questions the relationship between the random slayer and the not-so-innocent man who suffers for his crime (or are they the same?):


Ten years ago I met a girl named Joy
She was a sweet and happy thing
Her eyes were bright blue jewels
And we were married in the spring
I had no idea what happiness and little love could bring
Or what life had in store,
but all things move toward their end
All things move toward their end
Of that you can be sure…
> “Song of Joy,” full lyrics 
> video
> listen on Spotify

Cave released Murder Ballads in 1996, not quite two years after Johnny Cash released American Recordings. It’s not a stretch to consider the former Cave’s response to the latter, and to all that American Recordings and Cash represented.  The video for “Delia’s Gone,” the first single released for American Recordings:

Murder Ballads took its toll even on bad-boy Cave – he has said that it “was such a disgusting record to make” that he had to “remedy the situation by writing a whole lot of very different sort of songs. Some kind of redressing the balance… it does make you feel kind of unclean to make records like that.”


He undertook this redressing through a collection of beautiful spiritual and love ballads collected in The Boatman’s Call which as a whole proclaims, to quote the title of one of its many memorable songs, that “People Just Ain’t No Good” (listen to the song on Spotify). But Cave also began releasing songs in which he fused all these kinds of ballads – love, spiritual, murder – together. And, pointedly I think, in many of these songs, he gives the women in the story their own voice – a significant, and significantly timed, departure from Cash’s body of work. 


We’ve already seen how Cave does this in songs like the stunning “Little Water Song,” which is simultaneously a murder ballad, a love ballad, and a song of baptism and confession-by-proxy. Other songs like “Shoot Me Down” and “Still in Love” all focus as well on the “romantic gesture” of the traditional murder ballad that Cave found so attractive. Significantly, these songs are nearly invisible as murder ballads to the casual listener — not in the least, perhaps, because they are sung by a man killed by the woman he loves instead of the other way around.
“Shoot Me Down,” Nick Cave, in which the protagonist is shot by his lover.
“Still in Love,” Nick Cave, 
in which the protagonist speaks from the grave to the woman who did him in.
 

We don’t see this kind of thing in Cash, and rarely in the murder ballad itself I think.


Cave also performed a second type of redressing. In a return to Cash and his folk and blues precursors, during this same period Cave also released and re-released numerous songs in which the murder and mayhem is acted out against human evil-doers by God himself (who Cash referred to as the “greatest cowboy of them all”).

One of Cave’s many versions of “Red Right Hand,” an allusion to Milton’s reference to the vengeful hand of God in Paradise Lost:
Johnny Cash’s “When The Man Comes Around,” from his album of the same title, American IV: When the Man Comes Around, the last album released before his death (with liner notes written in part by Cave):
Incidentally, among the many, many Biblical references Cash makes in this song is the same citation of the line from Acts — “It is hard for thee to kick against the pricks” — that Cave used to title Kicking Against the Pricks, his the album that included his first homage to Cash.


CODA:

Two years after Cash’s death, Cave released the double album Abattoir Blues/Lyre of Orpheus. The first disc contained Cave’s posthumous tribute to Cash, “Let the Bells Ring,” and the second contained “The Lyre of Orpheus,” a humorous, sad little murder ballad about a songwriter/singer who plays divine, murderous songs, for which he is himself killed by a vengeful God:

“Lyre of Orpheus,” Nick Cave
 

Related posts:

  1. Delia’s Gone – A Digital Compendium, 1993 – Present
  2. The slayer who ran looked a lot like me
  3. Little Sadie – Bad Lee Brown in Black and White
  4. Murder at the Dead Show – First Set

Comments

all things move toward their end — 5 Comments

  1. Thanks for your great comment. One review of Cave’s Murder Ballads described it as “updat[ing] infamous folk tales like “Stagger Lee” with enough profanity and gratuitous violence to satisfy the bloodlusty standards of the post-gangsta rap/Quentin Tarantino era.” It went on to say that “it’s hard not to imagine Murder Ballads as some perverse, alternate-universe West End musical production.” That’s another way of saying what you’ve just said — listening to this album can be both like watching a vapid slasher movie AND some self-indulgent, artsy-fartsy theatrical production. The video for “Stagger Lee” brings this all together nicely, and also underscores that Cave wants you to think of his murder ballad as super cool, super sexy, super edgy, super campy, super smart, and super exclusive. This is all very moody and silly. Except it kind of works as an atmospheric spectacle.

    I also think it has a lot to do with audience. I see Cash as working to build and relate to an audience for sure. Cave is much too much of a snob for that kind of thing:

    “I have always been of the opinion that my music is unique and individual and exists beyond the realms inhabited by those who would reduce things to mere measuring. I am in competition with no one. My relationship with my muse is a delicate one at the best of times and I feel that it is my duty to protect her from influences that may offend her fragile nature.”
    — Nick Cave, in a letter to MTV requesting that his nomination for Best Male Artist (following the release of Murder Ballads) be withdrawn.

    I both respect that and have to roll my eyes at it at the same time.

    He does indeed walk the line.

  2. One thing that I’ve always found both alarming and compelling about Nick Cave is the sadism of his delivery in these songs. s.gee touched on it when he explained how Nick Cave “prolongs the ‘moment’ of the murder itself.” I think his style makes Nick Cave’s murder ballads powerful, but it also makes them disturbing. I feel my own response as a listener is often a combination of sadism and horror. The perspective is a lot like watching a slasher movie (complete with the gasps and screams of the victims), but more emotionally compelling, and I tend to feel sort of sick after too much of it. Nick Cave’s Murder Ballads is one of my favorite albums, but I can only listen to it once or twice a year. Johnny Cash, on the other hand, I can listen to any time.

    There’s something to be said for a more pared down delivery, like Cash gives. I find the incongruity between the vocals and the acts depicted compelling in its own way. It seems to say this is just one more human tragedy, this happens every day. It lets you listen without forcing you into a particular mood with lots of ghoulish ornamentation the way Cave does, and in a certain way, it feels more authentic. Nick Cave always walks on the line between compelling drama and melodramatic posturing for me, and sometimes I can’t hear him as anything but incredibly silly. But when it works for me, boy does it work!

  3. I read the latest post on Nick Cave but haven’t yet read the Cash/Cave one that precedes it. It looks interesting and though I know little about the subject, I would argue that the emotion in Cave’s voice, along with his delivery, create a murder ballad experience which “moves” the listener to a greater degree than Cash does. To this end, I would also say that Cave provides an experience which makes the listener feel the deed.

    • As someone relatively new to Nick Cave, and beginning my exploration of him specifically in relation to murder ballads, I have to agree. I love Johnny Cash very much, and his approach to the murder ballad is awesome in its own right. But I recall thinking when first hearing his performances of some of these songs, “Wow, how can he sing those lyrics with such non-nonchalance?”

      It may be that Cash’s performance is ultimately rooted in the Appalachian tradition, the ‘knee to knee’ singing that relied on facial expression… See this description from Sheila Kay Adams about learning ballads from Berzilla Wallin for example…

      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4FJoHGB_o0&context=C35444b7ADOEgsToPDskJXGP0J2DUHoE3LGVWGWe_j

      That just doesn’t translate in music for the mass market, unless you get it into the video somehow (for example, the way Johnny looks in some of the scenes in the Delia’s Gone video!) Cave is coming from an entirely different place.

    • Thanks for the comments; I agree with both. Cash definitely creates a bond when he performs live (the credibility he seems to have at Folsom and San Quentin always astounds me…I may be wrong but I can’t see Cave ever being able to do that with such an audience, or any live audience). On the other hand, Cave tends to bring a few key things to most of his ballads that Cash does not, all of which definitely lead to “feeling the deed.” For example, he prolongs the “moment” of the murder itself, both through the narrative and the accompanying musical sounds (sounds of people crying, drums, other heavy instrumentation). He also allows a lot of moral complexity in through the complexity of his language and musical arrangement — I think it is hard for Cave to deal off-handedly with the kind of person that just goes and kills someone with little reasoning (he says as much). Cash can, and does.

      Anyway, that makes them both equally great, and equally scary in my view…

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