Born To Be Loved

This reminds me of all the wretched boys I’ve known who want so badly to be loved but just don’t know how. Girls too. Some people just can’t find their way. Then some of us have the self-indulgent fantasy that we’re going to take care of them and love them and fix them all better. Except that it can’t be done, and they’re only going to hurt you and infect you with their crazy. Lucinda knows all about it. She’ll always be there to sympathize with both sides. As much as it’s possible to learn from anything besides your own mistakes, I’ve learned a lot from her. To paraphrase some old book, unhappy families are more interesting than happy ones. That goes for love affairs. Happy loving couples, you just want to smack those sick-sickly smiles right off of them. Smug bastards. But hearing about someone else’s broken heart is a comfort to your own. Is that why we cherish our depressing music over our happy music?

Get Ready For Love

I thought you didn’t believe in an interventionist God. Oh well, even Nick Cave is allowed to change his mind. This has to be the most terrifying gospel song ever. For it is a gospel song, and if it’s not about God, then I can’t image what Cave was thinking. Religion exactly hasn’t been one of his fascinations, but faith and yearning always were. When Nick Cave fist showed up with The Birthday Party, looking and sounding like a half-drowned rat-baby, no one expected him to live very long, let alone mature into the most spiritually sophisticated songwriter since Leonard Cohen. Yet here he is, plumbing the depths of the profane with one hand (as deeply as ever), and reaching for the sacred with the other. I don’t know if Cave just finds the Biblical inspiring in a literary sense or if he’s earnestly considering the possibility of an interventionist deity. Either way, in true form, he paints no benign Redeemer. God is frightening, and Nick Cave makes for an equally frightening prophet. What kind of love does this  God promise?