The Romantic Agony of Nick Cave’s Love Song: Romanticising Rock Music

Over the course of his forty-five-year music career, Australian singer-songwriter Nick Cave has been widely perceived as a baffling shape-shifter on the independent rock scene, on account of his extreme musical shifts and broad artistic palette spanning post-punk rock, blues rock ballads, garage rock, piano-led hymnals and more recently, looser meditative electronic music. Notwithstanding its stylistic diversity, Cave’s song-world presents two abiding features: a fascination with darkness and a propensity for intertextuality. As part of his aesthetic mingling, Cave the self-identified “literary musician” thus cross-pollinates rock music with a flurry of artistic influences such as Southern Gothic, hymnals, traditional folk-blues ballads, and indeed Romanticism, notably in his love-songs. The purpose of this article is to probe the scope of Cavian dark Romanticism in the seminal love-song albums Boatman’s Call (1997) and No More Shall We Part (2001), as well as in Murder Ballads (1996). In particular, the focus will be on Cave’s treatment of the love motif as eroticised pain and longing, as aestheticised violence, and as a path to the sublime. The paradoxical principle of pleasure in pain underpinning Cave’s love-songs evokes “Romantic Agony,” an aesthetics of counterpleasure which literary theorist Mario Praz identified as a Romantic structuring principle disseminating across media. Positing Cave’s dark love song as an idiosyncratic form of “Romantic Agony,” this research aims to demonstrate that in using the imprint of Romanticism as an aesthetic source, Cave brings forth a fresh musical idiom of Romantic Agony, whilst weaving it enduringly into the fabric of his songwriting.