Abattoir Blues — Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds

#365Songs: May 28th

When I rant, I’m the angsty curmudgeon, the campus preacher who never tires of a cause, the arbiter of endless injustices, that guy in the back of the bar a few whiskeys deep who fell in love with his own voice. When I’m silent, I’m tired, complicit, at odds with my inner rage, a masked man playing the apathetic character hoping to appease those who feel they’re better off tuning out a darkening world. I’m not a natural sheep, not easy to herd, and that saves me from apocalyptic apathy, awakens me before I can fully fade away.

Over the years, I’ve found harbor with countless causes, challenging the conformists, the bigots, the closed-minded, the zealots and excessively privileged. Take the last week, for example, during which I’ve written six-going-on-seven completely unique ways the world’s about to end: Civil war, Nuclear holocaust, a Black Mirror-style AI robot takeover, grief’s shattering loneliness, paranoid leaders hitting the red button too soon, trying to outdrive the inevitable end chasing you down a futile highway, and now this, the way we’re being herded towards the slaughterhouse.

The sun is high up in the sky and I’m in my car
Drifting down into the abattoir
Do you see what I see, dear?
The air grows heavy
I listen to your breath
Entwined together in this culture of death
Do you see what I see, dear?

Somehow I still have hope, buried within me. It’s how I cope with a world gone mad. What’s the point otherwise, what’s the value in being the cattle following the cattle following the call straight into the end of life?

We live in times when the “never again” crowd is perpetrating the “except this time” message even as they classify fellow Jews who protest a clear genocide as “anti-semitic.” We live in times when a Fascist insurrectionist with 91 felony counts declares that he’ll deport natural born US citizens to… somewhere… if they’re not pro-Israel, even as he heils Hitler in campaign speeches. We live in times when a first generation Indian immigrant signs a missile bound for a refugee camp with the words, “Finish Them,” as if it’s a scene from the Karate Kid. And that’s just today. The world has gone mad, and we’re complacent, apathetic, waiting for the bomb to drop, tired and sore and ‘oh well it is what is’ing’ from our bar stools, porches, and couches. Just waiting for the world to finally end.

Slide on over here, let me give you a squeeze
To avert this unholy evolutionary trajectory
Can you hear what I hear, babe?
Does it make you feel afraid?

Where do we go from here if we don’t keep screaming, if we don’t fight harder, if we don’t at least fucking try to stop trending events? I’m captured daily by all that’s still left to save. Is it too late? Are we too far gone?

Everything’s dissolving, babe, according to plan (oh yeah)
The sky is on fire, the dead are heaped across the land (oh yeah)
I went to bed last night and my moral code got jammed (oh yeah)
I woke up this morning with a frappucino in my hand (oh yeah)

Nick Cave has experienced unimaginable loss: one 15-year-old son experimented with LSD and fell off a cliff, and the other, a schizophrenic, died unexpectedly at age 31. Public losses, mourned through song, alongside fans who held him up. Never shy, Cave has published broadly about faith.

He wrote, “Although I’ve never been an atheist, there are periods when I struggled with the whole thing. As someone who uses words, you need to be able to justify your belief with language, I’d have arguments and the atheist always won because he’d go back to logic. Belief in God is illogical, it’s absurd. There’s no debate. I feel it intuitively, it comes from the heart, a magical place. But I still I fluctuate from day to day. Sometimes I feel very close to the notion of God, other times I don’t. I used to see that as a failure. Now I see it as a strength, especially compared to the more fanatical notions of what God is. I think doubt is an essential part of belief.”

I kissed you once
I kissed you again
My heart it tumbled like the stock exchange
Do you feel what I feel, dear?
Mass extinction, darling, hypocrisy
These things are not good for me
Do you see what I see, dear?
The line the God throws down to you and me
Makes a pleasing geometry
Shall we leave this place now, dear?
Is there some way out of here?

In a 2022 interview with the New York Times about his losses, Cave said, “When we talk about empathetic art, we’re talking about understanding the nature of ourselves as human beings. That understanding — even that understanding of the worser aspects of our nature — is a virtue. There’s beauty in that, and beauty in itself has a moral value.”

What an accomplishment it is to maintain faith, any faith at all, in light of so much trauma. To be clear, I don’t agree with everything Cave says and thinks. He’s a bit too forgiving of terrible people, argues against “Wokeness” and “Cancel Culture,” believes a bit too deeply in defending the right to say and do shitty things. But there are few who speak with more insight, more wisdom, more unexpected optimism in light of the darkness moments.

I wake with the sparrows and I hurry off to work (oh yeah)
The need for validation, babe, gone completely berserk (oh yeah)
I wanted to be your Superman but I turned out such a jerk

About “Abattoir Blues,” off of his 2004 album by the same name, he says, “it’s the apocalypse that’s happened or is happening incrementally, gradually. Or it’s metaphoric.” That’s sort of how I see our modern times, gradual ending rather than all at once, a closing in, the way all things all at once seem to be breaking around us. I, too, have the “abattoir blues,” and sometimes it feels like my shoes are stuck in thick mud, each step forward a little more difficult than the one before it. Every news story, a catastrophe, a genocide, a privileged man let free. Every step that slows us down is one step closer to the end, and for now, at least, I’ll happily go back to being the angsty curmudgeon, the campus preacher, the whiskey-breathed word-flinging ranting madman who’s screaming to wake up, look around, fight for what remains before there’s nothing left at all.

When the world ends, and perhaps it will all too soon, I hope you’re alongside me still dreaming of what could be. That’s the only faith I know.

I got the abattoir blues
I got the abattoir blues
I got the abattoir blues
Right down to my shoes (abbatoir blues)
Down to my shoes (abbatoir blues)
(Abbatoir blues)
(Abbatoir blues)
(Abbatoir blues)
(Abbatoir blues)

~

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