Some might have taken offense when Salvador Dalí began illustrating the Bible in 1963. The notorious Surrealist “went to jail for his artworks as a young man,” writes Jackson Arn writes at Artsy, but he “lived long enough to lend his legendary panache to Hollywood movies and Alka-Seltzer commercials.” Along the way, he gained a reputation for having a rather vicious character. George Orwell, reviewing Dalí’s autobiography, described him as “disgusting” for his fanatical harassment and abuse of other people. But, Orwell went on, “Dalí is a draughtsman of very exceptional gifts. He is also, to judge by the minuteness and the sureness of his drawings, a very hard worker…. He has fifty times more talent than most of the people who would denounce his morals and jeer at his paintings.”
Dalí hardly needed the defense of his morals or his paintings, nor might he have wanted it. That was the wrong sort of attention. But maybe he himself was surprised by a later career turn as an illustrator of respectable “Great Books”—including not only Judeo-Christian scripture, but also Don Quixote, Macbeth, The Divine Comedy, Alice in Wonderland, and much more.
The artist who seemed to have nothing but contempt for traditional canons approached these projects with the skill and professionalism Orwell couldn’t help but admire, as well as subtleties and understated tonal shifts we might not have associated with his work.
These are not his first religious subjects; he had always referenced big scenes and broad themes in Catholicism. But the illustrations represent a deeper engagement with the primary text—105 paintings in all, each based on select passages from the Latin Vulgate Bible. Published by Rizzoli in 1969, Biblia Sacra (The Sacred Bible) was commissioned by Dalí’s friend, Dr. Guiseppe Albareto, a devout Catholic whose intention “for this massive undertaking,” writes the Lockport St. Gallery, “was to bring the artist back to his religious roots.” Whatever effect that might have had, Dalí approaches the project with the same diligence evident in his other illustrations—he takes artistic risks while making a sincere effort to stay close to the spirit of the text. If he did this work for the money, he earned it.
Dalí’s illustrations “aren’t some kind of subversive prank,” writes Arn. “The luminous watercolors he produced for the Bible are, in the main, earnest renderings of their sacred subjects.” Perhaps the book illustrations have attracted so little attention from art historians because they lack the sensationalism and outrage Dalí aggressively cultivated in his public persona. Maybe these paintings, as German gallerist Holger Kempkens puts it, show “something of a spiritual side of Dalí.” Or maybe they just add to a bigger picture that shows what he could do with narratives not of his own making, but which he clearly respected and found challenging and stimulating. These qualities apply to many parts of the Bible as well as to great literary epics, including those based on the Bible, like John Milton’s Paradise Lost, which Dalí illustrated in a series of surprisingly spare, elegant etchings.
Some two decades before The Jetsons brought their animated vision of the future to the small screen, the cinemagazine Pathetone Weekly ran a featurette in which the “most famous” fashion designers in the U.S. predicted what the well-dressed woman would find herself wearing in the year 2000.
Cantilevered heels, multifunctional garments to go from office to evening wear in mere seconds, tech integrations, dresses made of aluminum and transparent net…
As one commenter on YouTube astutely observed, “Madonna wore most of these before we even reached 2000.”
As is to be expected, these futuristic fashions exhibited the flattering bias cut that we in 2019 associate with the period in which they were envisioned.
Gisele Bündchen, the top supermodel of 2000, could certainly hold her own against her glamorous 1939 counterparts, but the same cannot be said of the trucker hats, low slung jeans, velour track suits and denim everything that truly defined the look of the millennium.
The biggest loser of the year AD 2000, as envisioned by those famous designers of 1939, is the American male, whose drapey harem pants, Prince Valiant ‘do, and ill advised facial hair make George Jetson look like like Clark Gable.
The poor guy does deserve some cool points for wearing a phone, though. (It’s like they had a crystal ball!)
And his radio may well prefigure the iPod, which made its debut in 2001.
Because pockets were presumed to be going the way of the dodo (and skirts for women), a utility belt holds his keys, change, and “candy for cuties.”
This last item is surely an unnecessary burden, given the narrative emphasis on the female clothing designs’ man-catching prowess.
(Imagine the 21st-century feminine disappointment when their electric headlights revealed what they’d reeled in.)
Perhaps the most useful innovation to come from this exercise is the “electric belt to adapt the body to climactic changes.”
Don’t tell 1939, but I think we’re gonna need a bigger belt.
As to the identities of the famous designers and the delightfully chatty (“Ooh, swish!”narrator), they seem to have been lost to the ages. Readers, if you have any intel, please advise.
What triggered the worst impulses of the Internet last week?
The world’s first photo of a black hole, which proved the presence of troll life here on earth, and confirms that female scientists, through no fault of their own, have a much longer way to go, baby.
If you want a taste, sort the comments on the two year old TED Talk, above, so they’re ordered “newest first.”
Katie Bouman, soon-to-be assistant professor of computing and mathematical sciences at the California Institute of Technology, was a PhD candidate at MIT two years ago, when she taped the talk, but she could’ve passed for a nervous high schooler competing in the National Science Bowl finals, in clothes borrowed from Aunt Judy, who works at the bank.
The focus of her studies were the ways in which emerging computational methods could help expand the boundaries of interdisciplinary imaging.
Prior to last week, I’m not sure how well I could have parsed the focus of her work had she not taken the time to help less STEM-inclined viewers such as myself wrap our heads around her highly technical, then-wholly-theoretical subject.
What I know about black holes could still fit in a thimble, and in truth, my excitement about one being photographed for the first time pales in comparison to my excitement about Game of Thrones returning to the airwaves.
I’ve always been very one-sided about science and when I was younger I concentrated almost all my effort on it. I didn’t have time to learn and I didn’t have much patience with what’s called the humanities, even though in the university there were humanities that you had to take. I tried my best to avoid somehow learning anything and working at it. It was only afterwards, when I got older, that I got more relaxed, that I’ve spread out a little bit. I’ve learned to draw and I read a little bit, but I’m really still a very one-sided person and I don’t know a great deal. I have a limited intelligence and I use it in a particular direction.
I’m pretty sure my lack of passion for science is not tied to my gender. Some of my best friends are guys who feel the same. (Some of them don’t like team sports either.)
But I couldn’t help but experience a wee thrill that this young woman, a science nerd who admittedly could’ve used a few theater nerd tips regarding relaxation and public speaking, realized her dream—an honest to goodness photo of a black hole just like the one she talked about in her TED Talk, “How to take a picture of a black hole.”
Bouman and the 200+ colleagues she acknowledges and thanks at every opportunity, achieved their goal, not with an earth-sized camera but rather a network of linked telescopes, much as she had described two years earlier, when she invoked disco balls, Mick Jagger, oranges, selfies, and a jigsaw puzzle in an effort to help people like me understand.
Look at that sucker (or, more accurately, its shadow!) That thing’s 500 million trillion kilometers from Earth!
I’ll bet a lot of elementary science teachers, be they male, female, or non-binary, are going to make science fun by having their students draw pictures of the picture of the black hole.
If we could go back (or forward) in time, I can almost guarantee that mine would be among the best because while I didn’t “get” science (or gym), I was a total art star with the crayons.
Then, crafty as Lord Petyr Baelish when presentation time rolled around, I would partner with a girl like Katie Bouman, who could explain the science with winning vigor. She genuinely seems to embrace the idea that it “takes a village,” and that one’s fellow villagers should be credited whenever possible.
(How did I draw the black hole, you ask? Honestly, it’s not that much harder than drawing a doughnut. Now back to Katie!)
Alas, her professional warmth failed to register with legions of Internet trolls who began sliming her shortly after a colleague at MIT shared a beaming snapshot of her, taken, presumably, with a regular old phone as the black hole made its debut. That pic cemented her accidental status as the face of this project.
Note to the trolls—it wasn’t a dang selfie.
“I’m so glad that everyone is as excited as we are and people are finding our story inspirational,’’ Bouman toldThe New York Times. “However, the spotlight should be on the team and no individual person. Focusing on one person like this helps no one, including me.”
Although Bouman was a junior team member, she and other grad students made major contributions. She directed the verification of images, the selection of imaging parameters, and authored an imaging algorithm that researchers used in the creation of three scripted code pipelines from which the instantly-famous picture was cobbled together.
One of the insights Katie brought to our imaging group is that there are natural images. Just think about the photos you take with your camera phone—they have certain properties.… If you know what one pixel is, you have a good guess as to what the pixel is next to it.
Part of the reason that some posters found Bouman immediately suspicious had to do with her gender. Famously, a number of prominent men like disgraced former CERN physicist Alessandro Strumia have argued that women aren’t being discriminated against in science — they simply don’t like it, or don’t have the aptitude for it. That argument fortifies a notion that women don’t belong in science, or can’t really be doing the work. So women like Bouman must be fakes, this warped line of thinking goes…
Even I, whose 7th grade science teacher tempered a bad grade on my report card by saying my interest in theater would likely serve me much better than anything I might eek from her class, know that just as many girls and women excel at science, technology, engineering, and math as excel in the arts. (Sometimes they excel at both!)
(And power to every little boy with his sights set on nursing, teaching, or ballet!)
(How many black holes have the haters photographed recently?)
Griggs continues:
Saying that she was part of a larger team doesn’t diminish her work, or minimize her involvement in what is already a history-making project. Highlighting the achievements of a brilliant, enthusiastic scientist does not diminish the contributions of the other 214 people who worked on the project, either. But what it is doing is showing a different model for a scientist than the one most of us grew up with. That might mean a lot to some kids — maybe kids who look like her — making them excited about studying the wonders of the Universe.
Google has commemorated the 100th anniversary of the birth of the Bauhaus school with a nice animated doodle. They write:
Both a school for the arts and a school of thought, the Bauhaus was founded by architect Walter Gropius exactly 100 years ago in Weimar, Germany, gathering many of Europe’s most brilliant artists and designers with the aim of training a new generation of creatives to reinvent the world. Today’s animated Doodle celebrates the legacy of this institution and the worldwide movement it began, which transformed the arts by applying the principle “form follows function.”
Gropius envisioned the Bauhaus—whose name means “house of building”—as a merger of craftsmanship, the “fine” arts, and modern technology. His iconic Bauhaus Building in Dessau was a forerunner of the influential “International Style,” but the impact of the Bauhaus’s ideas and practices reached far beyond architecture. Students of the Bauhaus received interdisciplinary instruction in carpentry, metal, pottery, stained glass, wall painting, weaving, graphics, and typography, learning to infuse even the simplest functional objects (like the ones seen in today’s Doodle) with the highest artistic aspirations.
Steering away from luxury and toward industrial mass production, the Bauhaus attracted a stellar faculty including painters Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee, photographer and sculptor László Moholy-Nagy, graphic designer Herbert Bayer, industrial designer Marianne Brandt, and Marcel Breuer, whose Model B3 tubular chair changed furniture design forever.
Though the Bauhaus officially disbanded on August 10, 1933, its students returned to 29 countries, founding the New Bauhaus in Chicago, Black Mountain College in North Carolina, and White City in Tel Aviv. Bauhaus affiliates also took leadership positions at the Illinois Institute of Technology, the Harvard School of Architecture, and the Museum of Modern Art. Through all of these institutions, and the work created in their spirit, the ideas of the Bauhaus live on.
Find more anniversary celebrations in the Relateds below.
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For all of the indispensable purposes music has served over thousands of years of human history, at no time before the age of mass produced recorded music was it ever a collectible commodity—something we could own, believing it was made just for us, even when it reached millions of other people. Music has, of course, continued to play a significant communal role, and in some ways maybe even a stronger one in the age of global mass media.
Yet the experience of listening to music has also become, over the course of the past century, an unprecedentedly private affair. Whether you grew up with LPs, tapes, CDs, or streaming digital, you know what it’s like to have a collection of songs that seem like they were written just for you, summing up your life in some uncanny way: songs that feel like emotional refuges, welcoming some displaced part of yourself.
These are songs Nick Cave calls “hiding songs,” and the leader the Bad Seeds and, formerly, The Birthday Party and Grinderman, has written his share for many of his fans; many of the same fans who write him with deep personal questions, hoping to connect. On his blog The Red Hand Files, Cave posts the letters that most move him and offers candid responses generously threading the conversation through his songwriting and musical influences.
In a post from January, when asked to create a list of his “favourite pieces of music,” Cave revealed ten of his own “hiding songs,” but not before explaining them with a quote from his poem, “The Sick Bag Song.”
Leonard Cohen will sing, and the boy will suddenly breathe as if for the first time, and fall inside the laughing man’s voice and hide.
He will realise that not only are these songs sacred, they are ‘hiding songs’ that deal exclusively in darkness, obfuscation, concealment and secrecy. He will realise that for him the purpose of these songs was to shut off the sun, to draw a long shadow down and protect him from the corrosive glare of the world.
Cohen, unsurprisingly, tops the list. Cave may be an old-fashioned songwriter—preserving some of the best impulses of his literary heroes—but he is also an adept hand at the list, a shorthand form that buries its emotions in parenthetical commentary. When it comes to hiding songs, songs about “concealment and secrecy,” maybe there isn’t much more to say.
Maybe we’d like juicy personal details. What was going on in Cave’s life when Karen Dalton’s “Katie Cruel” gave him a place to hide? What about Neil Young’s downbeat “On the Beach” or Nina Simone’s aching “Plain Gold Ring” (hear him cover it live at the top) or Big Star’s incredibly depressing “Holocaust”? We may never know, and we may never need to. Surely we each have such a list of songs that speak to us alone, of feelings only we can understand.
For an artist like Cave, however, the private experience of recorded music has a very public dimension. The songs he lists, he writes, “are the essential pillars that hold up the structure of my artistic world.” The only question left may be, what songs were all these artists hiding in when they wrote the songs below? Hear all of Cave’s “hiding songs,” with a bonus eleventh, “Mother of Earth,” his favorite Gun Club song, by fan request.
Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986), one of the great writers to come out of Argentina, went blind when he was only 55 years old. As unsettling as it must have been, it wasn’t particularly a surprise. He once told The New York Times, “I knew I would go blind, because my father, my paternal grandmother, my great-grandfather, they had all gone blind.”
Above, you can see a self portrait that Borges drew in the basement of the famous Strand Bookstore in New York City. According to the Times, he did this “using one finger to guide the pen he was holding with his other hand.” After making the sketch, Borges entered the main part of the bookstore and started “listening to the room, the stacks, the books,” and made the remarkable observation “You have as many books as we have in our national library.”
If you’ve ever been to The Strand, you know how many books it holds. Indeed, the store boasts of being “New York City’s legendary home of 18 Miles of new, used and rare books.” My guess is that Argentina’s national library might have a few more volumes than that. But who is really counting?
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in March 2014.
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Here’s a rare recording of the German writer Thomas Mann, author of Buddenbrooks and The Magic Mountain, explaining what he sees as the real reason behind the systematic spreading of anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany.
It’s from an NBC radio address Mann gave on March 9, 1940, while he was living in California. Mann had gone into exile from Germany in 1933, shortly after Adolf Hitler was elected chancellor and began seizing dictatorial powers. The author had been an outspoken critic of the Nazi party since its emergence in the early twenties.
In 1930, a year after he received the Nobel Prize in Literature, Mann gave a high-profile “Address to the Germans: An Appeal to Reason,” in which he denounced the Nazis as barbarians. A Christian man married to a Jewish woman, Mann often spoke against the Nazi’s anti-Semitism, which he saw as part of a larger assault on the Mediterranean underpinnings of Western Civilization. In the radio address, Mann says:
The anti-semitism of today, the efficient though artificial anti-Semitism of our technical age, is no object in itself. It is nothing but a wrench to unscrew, bit by bit, the whole machinery of our civilization. Or, to use an up-to-date simile, Anti-Semitism is like a hand grenade tossed over the wall to work havoc and confusion in the camp of democracy. That is its real and main purpose.
Later in the speech, Mann argues that the Nazi attack on the Jews is “but a starting signal for a general drive against the foundations of Christianity, that humanitarian creed for which we are forever indebted to the people of the Holy Writ, originated in the old Mediterranean world. What we are witnessing today is nothing else than the ever recurrent revolt of unconquered pagan instincts, protesting against the restrictions imposed by the Ten Commandments.”
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Note: An earlier version of this post appeared in our site in June 2013.
Nobody pays much mind to advertising, at least the haphazard kind of advertising that clutters the space around us. But here in the 21st century, when both that space and the ads that appear throughout it are as likely to be digital as physical, we might take a moment to look back at how the practice of putting up notices to sell things began. In the English language, it goes back to at least to the mid-fifteenth century — specifically, to the year 1476, when Britain’s first printer William Caxton produced not just a manual for priests called Sarum Pie (or the Ordinale ad usum Sarum), but easily postable, playing card-sized advertisements for the book as well.
“This piece of paper, of which two copies survive, is regarded as the earliest surviving printed advertisement in the English language,” writes Erik Kwakkel at medievalbooks. It states that Sarum Pie “is printed in the same letter type as the advertisement (‘enpryntid after the forme of this present lettre,’ line 3). Even without having seen the new book, its key feature, the type, can thus already be assessed.” This pioneering advertisement also “reassures potential clients that the text of the handbook is ‘truly correct’ (line 4) and that it can be acquired cheaply (‘he shal have them good chepe,’ lines 5–6). Both features will have been welcomed by priests, the target audience, who needed their textual tools to be flawless and did not have much money to spend on them.”
Kwakkel also gets into other notable features of this deceptively simple-looking production, including “the precise location of Caxton’s shop,” a warning in Latin urging readers not to remove the notice (“showing that it was put on display somewhere,” perhaps a church porch), and even the type. In both the advertisement and Sarum Pie itself, “the letter shapes lack ‘sharpness:’ frequently ‘blobs’ and small hairlines appear as letters, while an individual letter usually has a variety of appearances when looked at in detail,” possibly an attempt by the printer to create “a more ‘genuine’ – i.e. traditional, ‘manuscript’ – look.”
It would have been important back then to make printed books look hand-copied, since not so long before, all books were hand-copied by definition. With the first Gutenberg Bible still less than half a century old, early printers had to make sure their relatively inexpensive books didn’t look like low-quality substitutes for the “real thing”; hence the assurances about both the type and the price in the text of Caxton’s advertisement. That the origin of advertising turns out to be closely connected with religion may come as a surprise — though given the fact that the print revolution itself began with a Bible, a product that in either physical or digital form now practically sells itself, it may not be that big a surprise.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Frank Zappa called them the “Mothers of Prevention,” the group of wives married to members of Congress who decided in the mid-80s to go to war against rock lyrics and whip up some good ol’ conservative hysteria.
Vox’s Earworm series, now back for a second season, tackles this moment in a time that would have little ramification before the design-ugly “Parental Advisory: Explicit Content” sticker.
(Just an aside: I know their headline is click-baity, but really? Heavy metal and Satan gave us this sticker? More like Tipper Gore and their family’s presidential ambitions gave us it. Oy.)
Anyway, Gore’s Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) gave us a list of the “Filthy Fifteen,” including songs like Sheena Easton’s “Sugar Walls” and Madonna’s “Dress You Up,” which either contained lyrics “promoting” violence, sexual references, drug and alcohol, and Satan’s favorite, the “occult.”
Estelle Caswell explores that last category and dives into the increasing popularity during the ‘80s of heavy metal music, which was often invoking Satan in its lyrics, or creating occult-like atmospheres in its production.
This campy, horrorshow culture ran right into the growing power of conservative Christians and evangelical preachers who made a *lot* of money whipping up “Satanic Panic” among their national flock. They listened to rock records backwards, believing they heard subliminal messages.
Of course, none of this would have gone much further than churches if it wasn’t for the major networks turning a nothing story into headlines–the Vox video reminds us how complicit Ted Koppel, Barbara Walters, Geraldo Rivera, et al were in promoting it. They also looked at the rising teenage suicide rate and used heavy metal as a scapegoat, instead of–as the video explains–family breakups, drug abuse, economic uncertainty, and increasing access to guns.
The warning label itself appeared in 1990, just as rap was taking off and a new lyrical boogeyman appeared. Digital media and file sharing, along with YouTube and other sites, muted this kind of censorship. And parents, in the end, still need to do the job over what their children see or don’t.
However, censorship is back, but there are no Washington Wives acting as scolds. Now it is the whims of capital, as in the collapse of Tumblr, or it is a faulty algorithm that censors old master paintings filled with nudity, just as guilty as porn, that are our new decency guardians. Where are those congressional hearings?
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
Want to know how the economy works? It “works like a simple machine,” according to Ray Dalio, who explains its mechanisms in the 30-minute video above. The presentation is “simple but not simplistic,” says the site Economic Principles, a research arm of Dalio’s company Bridgewater Associates. The lesson packs in most of the major boldfaced concepts in the average overpriced college economics textbook, “such as credit, interest, rates, leveraging, and deleveraging.” And it does so in that most engaging means of learning things online, an animated video, narrated by an expert.
All that’s well and good, but can we really understand such a volatile beast as “the economy”—an abstraction that sometimes seems like a cruelly rigged game and sometimes like a not-particularly-benevolent (to most people) deity—in only half an hour? Should we trust Dalio to summarize its complexity? The billionaire hedge-fund manager did, he tells us, manage “to anticipate and to sidestep the global financial crisis.” And he has made quite an impression on people like Forbes Senior Contributor Carmine Gallo with his “7,500-word LinkedIn article titled ‘Why and How Capitalism Needs to be Reformed.’”
In that piece, the “voracious learner who studies narrative and communication… turns an enormously complex subject into a simple, compelling narrative.” He also makes it clear right in the title that by “the economy” he means a capitalist economy. It’s a point largely taken for granted in the animated explainer but an important one nonetheless given the underlying assumptions of the theory. Serious critiques of capitalism seem much harder to condense because they’re tasked with unpacking all those assumptions.
Marx’s Das Kapital spans three volumes, though he only lived to publish the first one, itself a monster of a read. Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century is maybe a little breezier, at 696 pages (though if you let The Economist read it for you, they can sum it up in four paragraphs). By contrast, Dalio offers a comprehensive primer in brief for those of us who skipped that macroeconomics course, or who never got the chance to sign up for one. But elsewhere he has matched capitalism’s biggest critics with his own best-selling book Principles: Life and Work, a huge and highly-praised look at economic crises of debt, gross inequality, stagnant wages, etc. See him describe the book, in five minutes, on 60 Minutes, just above.
Capitalism’s best-known critics, even those who want to see the current system swapped out for a more equitable, sustainable model, have known they must begin by learning how the current system works, or how it doesn’t. Dalio himself isn’t setting out to build a worker’s paradise or to make financiers like himself obsolete, but he does have some trenchant thoughts on capitalism’s failures—and they are many, in his estimation. Still, he believes he knows how it can be reformed “to produce better outcomes.” Learn more in his compellingly-written essay here.
This wall I built around you Is made out of stone-lies O little girl the truth would be An axe in thee
—Nick Cave, “Say Goodbye to the Little Girl Tree”
Nick Cave has been many things in his long, fascinating career—lewd punk-country crooner for the assaultive Birthday Party, prophetic troubadour and Biblical balladeer, founder of the gritty, sleazy Grinderman, novelist and poet of the darker realms of human experience. He has been many things, but sentimental has rarely been one of them, though he can be quite tender and vulnerable. These qualities stand as some of the many reasons I trust Cave to make a list of love songs worth a damn. Not only has he written some of the finest tunes about heartbreak, betrayal, regret, and desire but he has done so with an attitude of reverence for influences like Leonard Cohen and Nina Simone, artists with their own complicated relationships with love.
Earlier this year, Cave revealed to readers of his blog The Red Hand Files a selection of his “hiding songs”—music that “I can pull over myself,” he wrote, “like a child might pull the bed covers over their head, when the blaze of the world becomes too intense.”
The list includes Dylan’s “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” and Simone’s heartbreakingly somber “Plain Gold Ring.” When Cave is hiding, it ain’t in a happy place, but then sad songs usually give us the greatest comfort. Maybe they also offer the best way we have to understand love, “this strange, inscrutable feeling that tears away at us, all our lives,” Cave writes in answer to two of his fans from Australia and Brazil. He leaves them, and us, his list of top ten love songs below.
01. “To Love Somebody” – Bee Gees
02. “My Father” – Nina Simone
03. “I Threw It All Away” – Bob Dylan
04. “Comfort You” – Van Morrison
05. “Angel of the Morning” – Merrilee Rush & The Turnabouts
06. “Nights in White Satin” – The Moody Blues
07. “Where’s the Playground Susie?” – Glen Campbell
08. “Something on Your Mind” – Karen Dalton
09. “Always on My Mind” – Elvis Presley
10. “Superstar” – Carpenters
“Maybe some songs are the embodiment of love itself and that’s why they move us so deeply.” No one needs to tell us: love is never easy, and hardly ever just a feeling of euphoria. Like every emotion and experience, it has its melancholy shadows, and the best love songs capture this in their lyrics, chord progressions, etc. The ten love songs Cave chose—“simple, plainspoken, incendiary devices that bomb the heart to pieces”—are all classics from the sixties and seventies, decades he draws from liberally in his “hiding songs” playlist.
He favors artists with big personalities, country and folk leanings, and oftentimes a more commercial sound than his own. Nonetheless, those familiar with his music will hear the influence of Elvis, Van Morrison, and maybe even the Bee Gees on his work with the Bad Seeds. He has a new album coming, the follow-up to 2016’s harrowing Skeleton Tree. While we wait to hear what his wife calls “his Fever Songs,” listen to his top ten love songs here.
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