#I think seeing the new testament through a tragic lens really helped me See it a lot more

[noknowshame]

hello- on your jesus birthday post you said The Child Is The Price. What does that mean?

Okay THIS one I will answer. this is a reference to Roberte Icke's adaptation of Aeschylus' tragic play(s), The Oresteia. simplifying as much as possible, the story begins by following Agamemnon, the leader of the Greek army during the Trojan War. the winds he needs to sail his army to Troy have not been blowing, and Agamemnon receives a prophecy/instruction on what is needed in order to return the winds. the prophecy states "The Child is the Price". this phrase is repeated throughout the play, and what it is asking him to do is make a human sacrifice of his young daughter, Iphigenia. eventually, he goes through with it, and the winds do indeed return.

In the original plays by Aeschylus, the actual death of Iphigenia has already happened and is referenced as something the audience should already know all about. Icke chooses to add an act to the play that allows us to linger on that decision much longer. As a whole, the play deals heavily with themes of the nature of sacrifice, narrative inevitability, and cycles of guilt and violence.

When I was drafting my... infamous christmas post, I was trying to think of the story of the birth of jesus like a greek tragedy, involving very similar themes. factually, in a textual sense, jesus is the sacrifice. his death is the price paid for - according to christianity - absolution. and what I was attempting to point out is that we spend so much time celebrating jesus' birth as this wondrous arrival of the savior that we don't stop to meditate on exactly how bloodily that saving is going to play out. it's the exact same thing: The Child is the Price.

As a last note, many many many people have told me in the tags that me saying "Mary did you know? that your womb was also a grave?" is stupid because "all babies are born to die, Jesus isn't special" ...but there is a Very important difference I'd like to point. yes, all babies will die eventually. but NOT all babies are born to die. Jesus was. it was God's plan from the start for him to horrifically die on the cross, and it was inevitable as soon as Mary agreed to give birth to him. I feel that is an important part of the story. The Child is the Price.

(...anyway go read Robert Icke Oresteia and also watch Jesus Christ Superstar (1973) while you're at it)

[onestowatch]

Chloe Lilac Is Sick of You Romanticizing Mental Illness [Q&A]

Chloe Lilac is a force to be reckoned with. At only 17-years-old, she has toured alongside Rejji Snow, Charlotte Lawrence, and Sasha Sloan and proved to be so much more than just a brilliant singer and songwriter. An advocate for female empowerment, Lilac has established herself as a strong and powerful voice of the future and her debut EP, Manic Pixie Dream, is a testament to her eloquent ability to speak through music. Beautifully written and produced, the EP paints the songstress’ life story and the journey she has endured to get to where she is. Strong, courageous and downright honest, Manic Pixie Dream illustrates society through her youthful eyes and the generation she has found herself inherently apart of.

Get to know Lilac through the lens of addiction, mental illness, and female camaraderie in our Q&A below:

OTW: What was your journey to where you are now in the music scene?

Lilac: It was great! It was really stupid. I made a lot of stupid decisions. When I was eight, I was in a rock band with my friends and in one of those band programs. So I started writing songs around eight and learning how to play guitar and stuff. And when I was around twelve, I started producing all my own stuff. It was really fun, technology man... I feel like it was really accessible to me because of Garageband on my mom’s Macbook. Then when I was 13, I started street performing trying to get discovered, so I would go around Union Square, and I got to know those areas really well. And when I was 14, I hit high school and I was like, “Fuck this, I hate it,” so I started like sneaking out on week nights when my parents would go to sleep. And with my busking money, I got Bluetooth headphones, and I would produce in class.

I got kicked out of that school, and I had gone to that school my whole life, so it was really painful for me. And I lost all my friends so my only friend was music. I basically went through this really dark place in my life where I started using all the time, and I got really bad in terms of my mental health. My anxiety just got completely out of control because I was bullied really badly in that school and then I was isolated because I was homeschooled after that. I couldn’t function in a school environment so I was half trying to get myself together. And the way I worked with it was just through doing music so I was uploading stuff on Soundcloud every two weeks.

I was fortunate enough to get discovered by my current A&R when I was around 14, and he really helped me sober up and get my act together and put me in the studio with a lot of really talented producers and really forced me to take a hard look at myself and get my life together. I’ve come a really long way since, and I’m really grateful for the opportunity. I try to help out as many up-and-coming artists like myself, as I can. One of my passions is helping other people with music.

OTW: Do you still produce?

Lilac: I still co-produce a lot of my own stuff but I’m not super great at it. I get the bones down and send it to someone who really knows what they are doing. But I really like it and I take a lot of joy in being part of the production process. I don’t think there are a lot of female producers out there. I try to teach young women, I give them free classes on production.

OTW: What influenced the songs that are on Manic Pixie Dream?

Lilac: My EP is mainly about being a young person in New York City and being a young woman growing up. I’m 17 so I’m still coming of age, but I started writing that EP when I was 14. It’s all just about being young and how hard and difficult it was for me growing up and how removed my generation is from vulnerability, and how scared everyone is to grow up. And how hard it is being a young woman and in general, how painful it was to realize how objectified I am and how inherently misogynistic our society is. I had a lot of rage for a really long time about it as I started to come into my own and I realized if I work through it with music, that will help. So if I can help a young woman who feels the same way out there with my EP, that’s what matters to me the most. If I can help anyone just get through the struggles of being human and coming of age.

OTW: What song do you think speaks the most to you?

Lilac: Definitely “Jesus.” I wrote that one when I was 14. It was maybe the first or third session I ever did professionally. It’s been in my back pocket for a minute now. But that song sounds like a love song, but it’s really about my process becoming sober and realizing how messed up I was. 14 was a huge age to me; it felt like a lifetime in one year so it was a letter to myself and being like, “Alright I have all these problems with addiction.” Whenever I perform it, I really feel it, and it seems like it's the song that speaks the most to other people too. That is really special to me. I love that it touches other people, it’s open to interpretation. That’s what is beautiful about music. It might not be about addiction to someone else, it might be about an ex or their mom.

OTW: How does it feel to look back at that period of your life?

Lilac: I don’t know how I’m alive. I don’t know how I fucking survived through that shit but you know, it’s fine. I’m good now. It feels like it was a lifetime ago, but I’m also just incredibly grateful that I got through that, and it’s made me such a strong person, and it’s made me really understanding of other people and their struggles and also of my journey getting sober. As a young person, it’s pretty rare to work on yourself at this age. It was like a huge wave was in front of me but the wave was how much shit I had to do to work on myself. It does feel like a lifetime ago, but it was only because I’ve really worked on myself and been through so much since then.

OTW: What advice would you give to somebody who might in that place right now and struggling to come up for air?

Lilac: There is nothing wrong with asking for help. It doesn’t make you weak; in fact, vulnerability is power. You really have to look inward to fix yourself, other people aren’t going to fix you. You can’t look for the answers in other people, the answers are all within yourself. That’s what I did a lot… looked for answers in drugs and friends and boys, not like sex, I was way too young for that but I’d chase after these boys and they wouldn't give a fuck. It was all me running away from my problems.

It might really hurt, but the beautiful part about it is that at least you get to feel it and it’s human, and you will learn how to deal with it. Therapy is great, and it doesn’t mean you're a crazy person. If you’re open to it, if you’re struggling with drugs or addiction, I think it’s really important for people to try out Al-Anon or AA and see what it does for them. Everyone has an addiction, it just depends on what it is and trying out one meeting could be really beneficial.

There is nothing wrong with being human, and I feel like in this technological age, it is so frowned upon to feel. I love my generation so much; we’re a generation of activists and love and acceptance, but there is this other side of it that is really romanticizing mental illness and drugs. We have rappers dying all over the place, dropping like fucking flies all the time from drug addiction, and it’s so hard to watch. My favorite musicians are just dropping off the face of the Earth, and it’s setting this really dark example for my generation in music.

OTW: How does society’s obsession with romanticizing the wrong things impact your music?   

Lilac: It's so instilled that vulnerability and being human is a negative thing when it's the most beautiful thing we have. What are we if we don’t have connection and love in our life? What do we have? We’re just apes on a floating rock. It’s bullshit. People are so scared of their own emotions. People are so scared of connection and like genuine connection and vulnerability, and it is tragic for me to watch because that’s what I crave the most. People are so scared of emotions. My music might be too intense sometimes, but I think intense is good. And I like writing fun songs too but my favorite songs are ones that really connect with people. I really like my music to capture moments and feelings rather than a surface thing. 

“Summer,” I would say, is my most surface song but it’s still an experience. I feel like you're on the journey with me. It’s all about being young in New York and making friends for the first time. Last summer was this electric amazing summer for me, and I wanted to capture it in my music, whereas “Jesus” takes you to this really dark place in my life. That’s what I love to do with my music, take people on the journey with me, and if they can sympathize with that, that’s great. I love it and apparently people can too.

OTW: What is your writing process like?

Lilac: I feel a lot. And the thing that inspires me the most is really intense emotion and intense stuff. So whether it’s happiness or sadness, it doesn’t matter; it’s intense. So if I feel really strongly about something, I’ll write about it. It doesn't come all the time and sometimes it does, which is great. Writer's block isn’t a stranger to me. If someone is reading this and is having writer’s block, it will end.

People get really freaked out that they are going to have writer's block forever but it ends. You have to keep writing. You have to power through, and you’ll come out with a great song one day. I get inspired by other artists too, like Childish Gambino; he’s my biggest inspiration. Lana Del Rey is one of my biggest writing influences. Honestly, Shel Silverstein. I fuck with him. It’s super cool that he’s a children’s poet but his stuff is really deep. David Bowie, obviously. The process is coming up with a really good chord progression. If the chord progression is good, the song comes immediately.

OTW: How would you describe the scene you are in now?

Lilac: Instagram is everything, it’s huge. We’re DIY kids so we love making art. I love making art. I’m a very artistic person. I draw a lot and I paint a lot. My friends are all artists of some degree. But I’m really a part of the DIY movement which is about genuine art and appreciating that and trying to keep that alive in this age of everything being plastic and fake and generated on Instagram. My friends and I will throw punk shows with our Garageband friends, and we will go out and do stupid shit. We are all incredibly motivated people, like a lot of my friends are young professionals and are thriving in their industries as 17-year-olds, which is so inspiring. All my best friends are really doing big shit out here, not just in the music industry. And it’s all young women! My friends are all super progressive people and from all different walks of life. That’s a great part of New York, it’s a huge melting pot of everyone everywhere.

OTW: What is one piece of advice you would give to every girl out there?

Lilac: Be nice to other girls. It’s really important. I hate it when I’m literally just on the street and a girl glares at me because I am another girl. That is the most painful thing for me. Stop feeling like you are in competition with other women. We are all here being oppressed, actively. Let’s band together. Female companionship is one of the most beautiful things in the world. A woman and another woman being homies is the best thing ever so don’t close yourself off to it because you feel threatened by something that is enforced by the patriarchy. Women should not have to feel like they are in competition with each other because there is no competition, we’re all beautiful and amazing. Be nice to other women and be nice to younger women and older women, don’t be ageist about it. Just be nice to people and that will get you so far. It just makes you feel so good.

OTW: If you were a crayon in a crayon box, what color would you describe yourself?

Lilac: Probably lilac. I’ve identified with that color my whole life. It’s definitely not my favorite color. I’ve just always identified with it because it's a fun color but there’s also depth to it. It’s not warm and it’s not cool, it’s right in between. My favorite color is pink though cause I’m a basic bitch. I love a warm pink but not hot pink, a salmon.

OTW: Who are your Ones To Watch?

Lilac: Isaac Dunbar, Leyla Blue, Mia Gladstone, Ren, Maud. I’d say those are my top picks, I fucking love those heads, they’re all pretty close friends of mine. I love being friends with other artists because they know what’s up. Also, Christian Leave and Ryan Woods, they both make really good music. Those are my homies.

[upalldown]

Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds - Ghosteen

Seventheenth studio album from the alternative rock band self-produced by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis is the final part of a trilogy of albums following Push the Sky Away (2013) and Skeleton Tree (2016)

10/13

The 2016 documentary One More Time With Feeling is, first and foremost, a film about a person getting back to work after an event of unimaginable trauma. In this case, that person is Nick Cave, the work is the recording of the album ‘Skeleton Tree’, and the event of unimaginable trauma is the horrific accidental death of Cave’s 15-year-old son Arthur in July 2015. “It was not an act of courage or anything” Cave later told the journalist Chris Heath, “it was just that I didn’t know what the fuck else to be doing. All I knew is that what I do is work, and that kind of continues. I think I knew, fundamentally, that if I lay down, I would never get up again.” Throughout his career, and certainly since he quit drugs in the late 1990s, Cave has got up five days a week, put on a suit, headed to the office and worked.

Something else, though, was going on with One More Time with Feeling. Why did he put himself through the experience of having the director Andrew Dominik document the very worst time of his life? Some suspected a ruse to avoid promotional interviews – this is folly, had Cave retreated from interviews for the rest of his life, absolutely everyone would have understood. No, something in Cave as a person – and as an artist – was changing, and it manifested itself in an urge to share and a compulsion towards the communal. To change in significant ways is not an uncommon reaction to grief and trauma, and Cave has been lucid about the “elastic band” or trauma, continually binding him and his family to that atrocious day in 2015. The film was the first sign of this change, and the second was the tour that followed Skeleton Tree. Watching those shows, the provocation towards the audience that typified Cave’s performing career became something else entirely – combativeness melted into communion. This continued with the launch of the Red Hand Files – a mailing list in which fans send questions to Cave and Cave selects those he wishes to answer (with answers ranging from the flippant to the forensic and heartbreaking). And then too, across 2018 and 2019, we had the ‘Conversations with Nick Cave’ events where fans were encouraged to, in Cave’s words, “ask me anything.” “Nothing can go wrong” Cave observed of the high-wire spontaneity of those fan events, “because everything has gone wrong.”

And so, announced via the Red Hand Files just a fortnight before release, we have Ghosteen, a double album. Cave has gone back to the office, he’s put the suit back on, and he’s knuckled down – recording the album across last year and this in Los Angeles, Brighton and Berlin. “The songs on the first album are the children” explained Cave in the album’s promotional materials, “the songs on the second album are their parents”. The two albums are stylistically distinct – the first are songs, the second are spoken-word poems over electronica soundscapes – but I don’t think that’s what Cave means when he refers to the ‘children’ and ‘parent’ relationship. We’ve no idea of course, but given that the same image of Jesus lying in his mother’s arms reoccurs on both of the albums would suggest the poems acting as creative spur for the songs.

For obvious and understandable reasons, the extent to which Skeleton Tree represented a stylistic break with Cave’s back catalogue went underdiscussed – it sounded like a creative breakthrough, and on the evidence of Ghosteen Cave is treating it as exactly that. Why was that record such a stylistic departure from the Bad Seeds’ previous work? For one thing, Warren Ellis’ electronics that had crept into 2013’s stunning Push the Sky Away were suddenly front and centre – the main meal. Similarly, Cave’s lyrics deviated heavily from his traditional maximalist Southern gothic conquests. In their place came something more elliptical, closer to modernist writing in their fragmentation and eschewing of narrative. It’s testament to Cave’s pedigree and discipline as a writer that he can flit from one mode to the other and produce work of such quality (that’s what you get for heading to the office every day).

At times, Ghosteen appears almost in dialogue with its predecessor, and this is no bad thing. Opener ‘Spinning Song’ seems to have itself spun from a line on Skeleton Tree – “the song, the song, the song it spins since nineteen eighty-four.” The gorgeous, revelatory Ellis backing vocals seen on ‘Girl in Amber’ are replicated all across this album, to beautiful effect.

As the vast bulk of Skeleton Tree was written prior to Cave’s tragic loss, it’s on Ghosteen that we have the first real document of Cave the writer working through pain and grief. There’s an embarrassment of riches here, and emotional gut punches land hard and fast from the outset. He writes on ‘Sun Forest’ of “a man mad with grief”, of “everybody hanging from a tree” – it’s an astonishingly vivid portrait of the fever that grief can be. I don’t often cry at music – just one of those things, doesn’t seem to happen – but on two separate occasions, at two different points on the record, I found myself in tears. Filling the void of loss and of grief is, though, nothing new in Cave’s work. Cave’s father, who introduced him to literature, died when Cave was just nineteen. “I see that my artistic life” he explained in 2001 “has centered around an attempt to articulate an almost palpable sense of loss which laid claim to my life.” I’ve long agreed with the writer John Doran’s point that a helpful way to understand Cave’s writing is to “picture a youngish Nick Cave unable to subdue the voice of his beloved father…asking ‘is this really good enough Nick?’”

Writing in the Red Hand Files, Cave explained that following Arthur’s passing, “we all needed to draw ourselves back to a state of wonder. My way was to write myself there.” Ghosteen begins to make much more sense in this context – the lyrics are dense with imagination. Cave as fantasy writer, striving for the victory of wonder and the imagination over the horror of things as they are. This fits, too, with the album’s artwork resembling something from blockbuster fantasy cinema – mythology and kitsch in blinding technicolor. The most striking expression of Cave’s push towards wonder is the recurrent motif of horses (also present on the artwork). Horses are mentioned repeatedly across the album, and appear as a lens through which Cave jousts with his views on wonder and creativity. “We are all so sick and tired of seeing things as they are / horses are just horses and their manes aren’t full of fire / and the fields are just fields and there ain’t no Lord.” Better, this seems to ask, to find the wonder in the horses than to give in and be resigned to the purely literal. “We all rose up from our wonder” he croons on ‘Night Raid’, “we will never admit defeat.”

God on this record, as is always the case in Cave’s work, is very much in the house. Jesus lies in his mother’s arms, priests run through chapels, Jesus freaks are out on the street. It’s no surprise though that Christian imagery pulsates harder than it has done in Cave’s writing for decades here at the point when he is most concerned with wonder – Cave has long linked the religious impulse with the creative one. In his 1996 lecture ‘the Flesh Made Word’, Cave explained that “Christ shows us that the creative imagination has the power to combat all enemies, that we are protected by the flow of our own inspiration.” That other messiah, Elvis, also makes a cameo on ‘Spinning Song’ – where 1985’s ‘Tupelo’ saw Cave depicting the creation myth of Elvis’ birth, here it’s the bloated anti-hero who ‘crashes onto a stage in Vegas’, Elvis of the later years, the fall from grace(land). Falling and rising happens a lot on this record, “a spiral of children climbs up to the sun” on ‘Sun Forest’, whilst on ‘Waiting For You’ bodies become “anchors”, bodies falling “that never asked to be free“. I don’t want to dwell on quite what it is that Cave evokes here.

The closest sisters to Ghosteen are Cohen’s You Want it Darker and Scott Walker’s Tilt – like both of those artists, Cave is in the small pantheon of songwriters who can claim genuinely revelatory late periods. Warren Ellis’ electronics – picking up not just from Skeleton Tree but from the film soundtrack work on which he and Cave have been moonlighting – here are at their most dominant and at their most astonishingly beautiful. The arrangements are often sparse and percussion is barely existent, occasionally pattering in and out of view absent-mindedly (one wonders if Jim Scalvanos got proficient at chess during the recording). Where once the Bad Seeds were marked by their bombast, now their sound is as elusive as Cave’s writing can become – Ellis’ synthesizers glow and swell, and occasionally like on ‘Galleon Ship’ they wail like the top notes of anxiety. It underlines the extent to which this is music made by someone in the aftermath of the unspeakable. On Skeleton Tree Cave’s voice was a often a rasp, pushed to breaking point and for very obvious reasons sounding under strain – these cracks were, of course, how the light got in, but it’s a delight to listen to Cave on this record delivering a career-best vocal performance. The weathered baritone is more powerful than ever, and the most affecting moments on the album see Cave creasing – making itself small – into a tortured falsetto.

Of the three ‘parent’ songs, the strongest is ‘Hollywood’. Ellis’ electronics here are at their most malevolent, and Cave alternates between vocal registers to suggest two different stories being told – one of Kisa, forced to bury her child, and one of another person (Cave?) fleeing to Hollywood after a tragedy (Cave has spoken in interviews of considering relocating to Los Angeles, Brighton carrying too many memories). There’s absolutely nothing redemptive about this album – why would there be? – but one moment offers hints about what comes in place of redemption, which is a roadmap through the worst of it. “I think my friends have gathered here for me” sings Cave on the gorgeous ‘Ghosteen Speaks’, as his friends the Bad Seeds chime a celestial choir around him, “I think they’re here for me.” It’s all we can ever ask from anyone.

On One More Time With Feeling Cave railed against the empty platitudes that surround the language of grief – on the album’s title track, he’s found something succinct and beautiful to say about grief, and I’ll leave the last word to Cave, back in the office, working through pain. “There’s nothing wrong / with loving something you can’t hold in your hand.”

https://www.loudandquiet.com/reviews/nick-cave-the-bad-seeds-ghosteen/