The Internet. The great game-changer and life-leveler of modern
existence, sticking the world to its wide web.
As the entire compendium of human knowledge (or at least the
illusion of such a compendium) becomes a click away, does the value of
knowledge itself go down? Why learn anything when you can Google it and forget
it? Why write anything when it has been written before and posted on Tumblr?
Why develop real human relationships when you have Facebook friends, when you
can IM or Skype those you never need to hug or shake germy hands with? There
are a hundred million porn sites to edify all sexual desires and fantasies, a
hundred million shopping sites to remove any need to stand in line, a hundred
million gaming, video streaming, and torrenting sites to provide centuries of
free entertainment, all for your personal convenience.
In a digital age where human personalities are willingly
stored on servers, where genetic code becomes HTML code, how can art hope to adjust?
By pushing on with a trembling Kierkegaardian faith in an
uncontainable, uncodable sublimity, according to Nick Cave’s fifteenth Bad
Seeds release. Cave has stated that Push
the Sky Away is meant to “question how we might recognize and assign weight
to what’s genuinely important” as the Internet floods us with gigabyte upon
gigabyte of random information.
On “We Real Cool,” Cave sarcastically sings of “Wikipedia’s
heaven,” where “the past is the past and it’s here to stay.” Similarly, “Higgs
Boson Blues” provides a “Desolation Row” style stream-of-consciousness intended
to reflect the Web’s postmodern pastiche, the hodgepodge erudition and pop
culture sputtering of the collective human scatterbrain. The extended ballad blends
speculative physics with the legend of bluesman Robert Johnson, the assassination
of Martin Luther King Jr. at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, and the escapades
of Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus across Africa.
Bleakly humorous at best, Cave’s ruminations feel gray
regardless of colorful word choice and subject material. Each low to mid-tempo song
is somber and dirge-like in tone. The heavy rocking of Grinderman and The
Birthday Party, bands Cave once energetically fronted, and the youthful punk yelping
of the Bad Seed’s early albums, are utterly absent from Push the Sky Away. A rainy day record conjuring Leonard Cohen at
his most viciously tortured, the album reaches with wispy fingers of doom,
promising rainier days to come, a “simulated rainy season” with no reprieve.
Cave writes with the grim literate dreaminess of a 21st century T.S. Eliot, associating the sea with fleeting, frustrated, fading
sexuality on “Water’s Edge” and “Mermaids.” His speaker succumbs to hypocrisy
and drowns in degradation on “Jubilee Street” and its self-conscious Sufjan
Stevens-inflected follow-up “Finishing Jubilee Street.” Elsewhere, the
chatspeak-titled album opener “We No Who U R” introduces a recurring image of flaming
trees that “burn with blackened hands” as it speaks of a graceless era where all
is known, the private made public domain. Cave is an old soul in a brave new
world, trudging through an unfeeling digital Waste Land devoid of authentic
connection.
Not all is hopeless, however. The albums ends with Cave “preaching
in a language that’s completely new,” urging listeners to follow the suggestion
of the record’s name and “push the sky away.” Championing self-overcoming, Cave
ultimately abandons his concerns with Internet realms in favor of real life’s
immediacy. Hiding melancholy love songs in sweeping works of social satire, he
chooses to be as heartfelt as he is relevant, as thoughtful as he is crafty. At
55 years old, the Australian singer-songwriter continues to evolve, adapt, and
reexamine his role as one of our planet’s most necessary artists.
In closing: This review has been brought to you by the
Internet. Now shutdown the computer, pick up Nick Cave’s record, and go live
life.
