Cultural Seeds: Essays on the Work of Nick Cave: Essays on the Work of Nick Cave (Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series) - Hardcover

'These readings range from the highly theorized to the personal, produced from immensely diverse intellectual positions, addressing the full range of their protean subject. They illuminate Cave's oeuvre in a complex and comprehensive critical light. This is, and will almost certainly remain, the most multi-faceted compilation in Nick Cave studies.' Bruce Johnson, Turku University, Finland, Macquarie University, Australia and Glasgow University, UK '[T]hese essays are a necessary start for a consideration of the abundantly provocative works of Nick Cave.' Popular Music

Nick Cave is now widely recognized as a songwriter, musician, novelist, screenwriter, curator, critic, actor and performer. From the band, The Boys Next Door (1976-1980), to the spoken-word recording, The Secret Life of the Love Song (1998), to the recently acclaimed screenplay of The Proposition (2005) and the Grinderman project (2008), Cave's career spans thirty years and has produced a comprehensive (and sometimes controversial) body of work that has shaped contemporary alternative culture. Despite intense media interest in Cave, there have been remarkably few comprehensive appraisals of his work, its significance and its impact on understandings of popular culture. In addressing this absence, the present volume is both timely and necessary. Cultural Seeds brings together an international range of scholars and practitioners, each of whom is uniquely placed to comment on an aspect of Cave's career. The essays collected here not only generate new ways of seeing and understanding Cave's contributions to contemporary culture, but set up a dialogue between fields all-too-often separated in the academy and in the media. Topics include Cave and the Presley myth; the aberrant masculinity projected by The Birthday Party; the postcolonial Australian-ness of his humour; his interventions in film and his erotics of the sacred. These essays offer compelling insights and provocative arguments about the fluidity of contemporary artistic practice.