On Nick Cave

Essay 4

I always liked Nick Cave—though it felt a bit mandatory where I’m from—, went to see him live, wept to The Weeping Song, fantasised to Hold On to Yourself, cringed at his Grinderman moustache, and acted outraged when they used his song in Harry Potter.

But when I watched 20,000 Days on Earth, the documentary, I realised Nick Cave has the best career in the world. He’s an epic hero for the post-gig-economy economy, and my entire generation should stop talking for a moment and harken. (Yes, I understand that artistic careers will work very differently in the future than they did in the music-label A&R era, so I’m using him as analogy broadly.)

Nick Cave has been making music since the early seventies, his teens. Today, he still makes music—and does a lot of other things he did in the seventies, like poetry and love and being loyal to bandmates. (Though he does not do heroin anymore.)

Since 1973, Nick Cave has been making roughly the same music, while getting better— more eloquent, more refined, conceptually richer, etc.—at it. Since 1973, the world’s musical taste has sometimes coincided with what he was doing, then his songs would become hits, and this happened just enough times to help Nick Cave stay Nick Cave for nearly 50 years.

To me this is what real integrity looks like, and all the Ancient Chinese sages would agree: integrity without stupidity, success without selling out. Doing your job, increasing your skills, knowing that the world will inevitably discover you, but it won’t always value you—that sometimes you’ll have time to withdraw and renew, restate the statement of your life, to go on.