VALENCIA. Let’s start with a great name. Let’s talk about one of the musicians with the greatest literary pedigree of recent decades: Nick Cave. Faith, hope and carnage, published in our country by the Sexto Piso publishing house, is not a compilation of poems, nor a novel, nor a biography. It is a profound intellectual exercise, but at the same time very clear and direct, in which the Australian artist manages to break down his creative processes without falling into excessively cryptic ramblings.
In this book, created from more than forty hours of conversations with the journalist and friend Sean O’Hagan, Cave not only reveals to us many keys related to his life and his work, but also finds the words to express how the internal conduits work that allow musicians to metabolize their pain and turn it into songs that later, I don’t know very well how. , mark the lives of millions of people. He tells us, in short, about how it is possible to enclose this amorphous magma of agitated, complex, and often contradictory feelings, in a handful of notes and verses.
The reflections focus especially on the composition and recording processes of their latest albums, Ghosteen (2019) and carnage (2021). These pages contain very interesting ideas about Cave’s relationship with faith – a term that he considers in a very broad sense – and mystery. The death of two of his children is very present, but the book does not get lost in futile laments. Grief, as he himself explains, is a kind of exalted state of spirit in which the person who suffers comes closest to understanding the fundamental essence of things.
Of course, Nick Cave dedicates a part of Faith, hope and carnage to his fellow travelers, especially the immeasurable Warren Ellis, his guardian angel during the most complicated period of his life, and also the essential architect of the evolution of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds towards more atmospheric, abstract and transcendental musical landscapes. We also quote Ellis to highly recommend the autobiography published by Alpha Decay in Spain, Nina Simone’s chewing gum. A gift for unconditional fans of this charming outsider and globetrotter who does not usually spend much in words or interviews. It is a book about his life, but above all it is a beautiful story about the heirloom concept in the context of love of music. All geniuses idolize other geniuses; That is why there is no essential difference, beyond the economic exchange value, between the Beethoven scores and letters that the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig obsessively collected and the gum chewed by Simone that Ellis “stole” in 1999 and kept at home for twenty years, stuck in a humble cloth.
Being a girl in a “boys’ world”
Let’s keep going. It is worth taking a look at the Basque publisher’s catalog Liburuakwhich this year has published, among many other titles, the autobiography of Brian Tristan (La Puente, California, 1959), better known as King Congo Powers (The Gun Club, Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds, The Cramps, Kid Congo and The Pink Monkey Birds) and the interesting testimony of Robin Green (Rhode Island, 1945) as female journalist at the epicenter of the North American counterculture of the 1970s. That is to say, a fascinating period, but more sexist (even) than the current one. The book is titled the only girland takes us by the hand from her complicated beginnings as the only editor of the music magazine Rolling Stone to her professional evolution as a successful television screenwriter and producer – she received three Emmy Awards and two Golden Globes for her work on the series Doctor in Alaska and The Sopranos-.
If we move the focus to Great Britain and the seventies, we find another highly recommended autobiography, in this case written by the guitarist of the punk group Seminar The Slits, Viv Albertine. In 2017, the Anagrama publishing house translated Clothes, music, boys, a book that talks about how Albertine and her bandmates learned to stay on stage overcoming insults and humiliation, but that also tells in first person how the first ugly aesthetic in the history of fashion was built or what the relationships were like. personal in the urban squatter context. “We were not glamorous, nor rich, nor intellectual, nor did we come from involved families,” warns the author, who begins the story during her years of rebellious adolescence and reaches the present moment, after overcoming cancer and resuming her musical career in lonely after two decades of silence. It is a lucid and sincere lesson, bare-chested, on how to assert oneself as an artist in a sexist world and how to reconcile her maturity with the need to continue expressing herself artistically.
Since we are talking about women making their way in hyper-masculine worlds, it is interesting to bring up two recent books by Spanish authors. One of them is The girls in front. The true story of the Riot Grrrl revolution (Contra, 2023), in which Sara Marus It takes us to the beginning of the nineties to review the trajectory of the musical and political movement born in Washington DC and Olympia, later spread to the rest of North America and ultimately to the rest of the Western world. A story starring pioneering bands like Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, L7 and many others.
We must also mention The devil came to me. Gender, drugs and rock and roll (Saigon Editorial, 2023), a hybrid between a sociological and autobiographical essay, in which the Valencian singer, guitarist and composer Monty Peiro (Gran Quivira, The Umbrellas, Everlastrings, The Backseats) reflects with great intelligence and irony on what it meant before and now to be a woman in the context of rock and roll and heavy metal and the world of traveling orchestras.
Dancing as political expression
Bruxist Collective It is a project that is very easy to fall in love with. They are young, romantic editors, with a rogue touch and an exquisite clinical eye both for detecting the untapped talent of emerging authors and for tracking down interesting titles that have not yet been published in the Spanish language. It is a small publishing house passionate about marginal characters and subcultural currents that tend to be forgotten in the gutter of history.
From its catalog we could highlight many titles related to music undergroundlike the portrait book Ecstasy & Wine, from the Madrid photographer Felipe Hernandezthe biography of Wayne County or the essay Right to party. The history of the DiY Sound Systemof Harry Harrison, which recently went on sale. This book returns us once again to the Do it Yourself movement in the nineties, but in this case focusing on the rave scene and free parties of electronic music in England. The author tries to contradict the thesis that dance culture is apolitical by portraying a generation that rebelled against a decade of Thatcherite policies by hanging out in warehouses, squats and remote corners of rural England. “Free parties were born and the DiY Sound System was there. This collective created in Nottingham in 1989 was one of the first house sound systems in the United Kingdom – the publisher explains -. It fused the anarchopunk rage of bands like Crass with the irresistible new electronic rhythm of acid house, thus filling the ideological void left by the implosion of the more commercial rave scene.”
This chain of recommendations in the form of a report could continue ad infinitum. Let us end, however, with a mention of the Valencian journalist and writer Rafa Cerverawhom we interviewed in Culturplaza a few months ago on the occasion of the publication of The Velvet Underground. The group that perverted rock music (La Cúpula Books, 2023). It is a detailed essay that could well be considered the (almost) definitive work on the New York band, because its more than 600 pages contain research and interviews carried out by the author over several decades. It is not only a book about the band led by Lou Reed, but a very broad observation, full of juicy anecdotes and details, about the cultural and historical context that gave rise to one of the most influential musical groups of all time.
