Thus spoke swamyg

Why love songs must be sad - A Nick Cave perspective

The following is a copy/paste of a Nick Cave essay from here

I was invited to actually teach a group of adult students about songwriting. But first they wanted me to give a public lecture. The subject I chose was the love song, and in doing it - I mean, standing up in front of a crowd of people and teaching, lecturing - I was filled with a host of conflicting feelings. The strongest, most insistent of these was one of abject horror. Horror, because my late father was an English literature teacher at the high school I attended back in Australia - you know, where the sun shines. I have very clear memories of being about 12 and sitting in a classroom watching my father, who would be standing, up here, where I am standing, and thinking to myself, gloomily and miserably - for, in the main, I was a gloomy and miserable child - “It doesn’t really matter what I do with my life as long as I don’t end up like my father.” Now, at 41, it would appear there is virtually no action I can take that does not draw me closer to him, that does not make me more like him. At 41, I have become my father, and here I am, ladies and gentlemen, teaching.

Looking back over the past 20 years, a certain clarity prevails. Amidst the madness and the mayhem, it would seem I have been banging on one particular drum. I see that my artistic life has centred around an attempt to articulate an almost palpable sense of loss that laid claim to my life. A great gaping hole was blasted out of my world by the unexpected death of my father when I was 19. The way I learned to fill this hole, this void, was to write. My father taught me this as if to prepare me for his own passing. Writing allowed me direct access to my imagination, to inspiration and, ultimately, to God.

I found that, through the use of language, I was writing God into existence. Language became the blanket that I threw over the invisible man, which gave him shape and form. The actualisation of God through the medium of the love song remains my prime motivation as an artist. I found that language became a poultice to the wounds incurred by the death of my father. Language became a salve to longing.

The loss of my father created in my life a vacuum, a space in which my words began to float and collect and find their purpose. WH Auden said, “the so-called traumatic experience is not an accident, but the opportunity for which the child has been patiently waiting - had it not occurred, it would have found another - in order that its life became a serious matter”. The death of my father was this “traumatic experience” that left the hole for God to fill. How beautiful the notion that we create our own personal catastrophes and that it is the creative forces within us that are instrumental in doing this. Here, our creative impulses lie in ambush at the side of our lives, ready to leap forth and kick holes in it - holes through which inspiration can rise. We each have our need to create, and sorrow itself is a creative act.

Though the love song comes in many guises - songs of exaltation and praise, of rage and of despair, erotic songs, songs of abandonment and loss - they all address God, for it is the haunted premise of longing that the true love song inhabits. It is a howl in the void for love and for comfort, and it lives on the lips of the child crying for his mother. It is the song of the lover in need of their loved one, the raving of the lunatic supplicant petitioning his God. It is the cry of one chained to the earth and craving flight, a flight into inspiration and imagination and divinity. The love song is the sound of our endeavours to become God-like, to rise up and above the earth-bound and the mediocre. I believe the love song to be a sad song. It is the noise of sorrow itself.

We all experience within us what the Portuguese call “saudade”, an inexplicable longing, an unnamed and enigmatic yearning of the soul, and it is this feeling that lives in the realms of imagination and inspiration, and is the breeding ground for the sad song, for the love song. Saudade is the desire to be transported from darkness into light, to be touched by the hand of that which is not of this world. The love song is the light of God, deep down, blasting up though our wounds.

In his brilliant lecture, The Theory And Function Of Duende, Frederico Garcia Lorca attempts to shed some light on the eerie and inexplicable sadness that lives at the heart of certain works of art. “All that has dark sounds has ‘duende’,” he says, “that mysterious power that everyone feels but no philosopher can explain.” Contemporary rock music seems less inclined to have at its soul, restless and quivering, the sadness that Lorca talks about. Excitement, often, anger, sometimes - but true sadness, rarely. Bob Dylan has always had it. Leonard Cohen deals specifically with it. It pursues Van Morrison like a black dog and, though he tries to, he cannot escape it. Tom Waits and Neil Young can summon it. My friends The Dirty 3 have it by the bucketload. But, all in all, it would appear that the duende is too fragile to survive the compulsive modernity of the music industry. In the hysterical technocracy of modern music, sorrow is sent to the back of the class, where it sits, pissing its pants in mortal terror. Duende, needs space to breathe. Melancholy hates haste and floats in silence. I feel sorry for sadness, as we jump all over it, denying its voice and muscling it into the outer reaches. No wonder sorrow doesn’t smile much. No wonder sadness is so sad.

All love songs must contain “duende”, because the love song is never simply happy. It must first embrace the potential for pain. Those songs that speak of love, without having within their lines an ache or a sigh, are not love songs at all, but rather hate songs disguised as love songs, and are not to be trusted. These songs deny us our human-ness and our God-given right to be sad, and the airwaves are littered with them. The love song must resonate with the whispers of sorrow and the echoes of grief. The writer who refuses to explore the darker reaches of the heart will never be able to write convincingly about the wonder, magic and joy of love, for just as goodness cannot be trusted unless it has breathed the same air as evil, so within the fabric of the love song, within its melody, its lyric, one must sense an acknowledgement of its capacity for suffering.

The Egregore of Facebook

I often feel the urge to visit facebook even though I know there will be nothing interesting there except lame updates about farmville and inane links. But still I check it out atleast 4 times a day. I think the egregore of facebook has grown very strong with its close to 300 million user base. It’s time not to feed this beast anymore. From now on, its going to be less and less of it. It will be a conscious move. I suggest the same to anyone who’s reading it. We must stop the beast before it consumes us.