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A review by amarofpatel
Faith, Hope and Carnage by Sean O'Hagan, Nick Cave
5.0
The mark of a book’s wisdom – in this book anyway – is the number of dog ears. Well, Nick Cave and Sean O’Hagan collaboration Faith, Hope & Carnage has flappy ends galore because it has provided meaningful thoughts and lightning-bolt revelations front to back.
The fruit of a series of lengthy phone conversations between 2020 and 2021, it examines Cave’s loci of inspiration, open-ended practice, personal theology (an approach to religion he describes as “spirituality with rigour”) and his incredible resolve like never before. And that’s saying something, given the length of his career and all the interviews he’s given.
Cave is probably one of the most generous, open and articulate public figures in music, an artist whose creations are always intimate and true reflections of his being. Considered, even poured over. And yet he sees his work as incomplete in a sense. As a vessel into which others pour meaning. “What I do is entirely relational,” he says, “actually transactional, and has no real validity unless it’s animated by others.” Wisdom, in this regard, is knowing how far we have to go as Anthony Bourdain noted.
Cave puts himself out there. It’s a compulsion. He was the distraught father who took to the stage in a series of public ‘inquisitions’ (Variety called it “group therapy”) without having many answers to his own grief. Cave also attempts to address the curiosities, frustrations, ills and injustices of society through his weekly liturgical Red Hand Files, which have “created a kind of ever-creeping transparency by slowly prising me open”, he explains. “They freed me from myself”.
I and thousands of others across the world have come to rely on this correspondence, this antiquated exchange, to make sense of a world that tips ever closer into chaos and conflict on multiple fronts (a “collective lunacy”, in Cave’s eyes). Though he is also happy to answer the comparatively banal (“Who would you like to win Love Island?”) and silly (“Have you ever met Nicolas Cage?”).
Read more: https://www.imakesense.org/blog/nick-cave-talks-faith-hope-carnage-with-sean-o-hagan
The fruit of a series of lengthy phone conversations between 2020 and 2021, it examines Cave’s loci of inspiration, open-ended practice, personal theology (an approach to religion he describes as “spirituality with rigour”) and his incredible resolve like never before. And that’s saying something, given the length of his career and all the interviews he’s given.
Cave is probably one of the most generous, open and articulate public figures in music, an artist whose creations are always intimate and true reflections of his being. Considered, even poured over. And yet he sees his work as incomplete in a sense. As a vessel into which others pour meaning. “What I do is entirely relational,” he says, “actually transactional, and has no real validity unless it’s animated by others.” Wisdom, in this regard, is knowing how far we have to go as Anthony Bourdain noted.
Cave puts himself out there. It’s a compulsion. He was the distraught father who took to the stage in a series of public ‘inquisitions’ (Variety called it “group therapy”) without having many answers to his own grief. Cave also attempts to address the curiosities, frustrations, ills and injustices of society through his weekly liturgical Red Hand Files, which have “created a kind of ever-creeping transparency by slowly prising me open”, he explains. “They freed me from myself”.
I and thousands of others across the world have come to rely on this correspondence, this antiquated exchange, to make sense of a world that tips ever closer into chaos and conflict on multiple fronts (a “collective lunacy”, in Cave’s eyes). Though he is also happy to answer the comparatively banal (“Who would you like to win Love Island?”) and silly (“Have you ever met Nicolas Cage?”).
Read more: https://www.imakesense.org/blog/nick-cave-talks-faith-hope-carnage-with-sean-o-hagan