Emerging, like some hideous butterfly, from the Bowie-damaged new wave chrysalis of the Boys Next Door, the Birthday Party were the most abandoned, sensorily-deranged Dionysian rock'n'rollers since the Stooges. But although Nick Cave's self-confesed urtex was
Funhouse, his grandiose delivery and baroque lyrics were actually closer to Iggy's own model, Jim Morrison. Like Jimbo, Cave had literary ambitions that eventually blossomed in his Southern-Gothic novel
And the Ass Saw the Angel. Abjection-- the base materiality of fleshy existence-- figures vividly in Cave's lyrics for
Prayers on Fire and
Junkyard,
as a source of both voluptuous allure and skin-crawling revulsion. On
Prayers, Tracy Pew's scabrous bass is the obscenely throbbing heart of the band's itchy, twitchy music of disequilibrium and malaise; he provides both motor and melody in the lust-stricken baccahanal "Zoo-Music Girl", the Artaud-meets-Screamin'-Jay-Hawkins paroxysms of "A Dead Song," and the spasming swamp-funk of "King Ink"
Both hailed and criticized for its bleakness and its basically brutal treatment of women, Naked is an intensely powerful and disturbing mot...
76. THE CONTOURS: First I Look At The Purse/ Searching For A Girl (1965) "Why waste time looking at the waistline?," asks this so...
Elvis Costello is cursed by being almost too smart. This at once makes for elegant, extravagant ironies in his best work--most arrestingly,...
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