Nick Cave’s “Tupelo”

Australian musician, composer & author Nick Cave created music throughout the late 1970s into the 1990s, fueled by his re-imaginings of old blues music, work songs and spirituals, creating fictional narratives that mimicked the experience of being African American. These included songs like “A Box for Black Paul”; a song about the demise of Cave’s old band disguised as commentary on a Black man’s funeral. Or “Blind Lemon Jefferson”, which sees Cave turn the named influential blues musician into a sad caricature. Reviews of his music across any one of his different bands are often baffling to say the least, and serve as examples of fetishizing the music’s Black origins. “ ‘I remember a review of the Birthday Party which suggested, in a veiled slur, that we had obviously listened to a lot of Aboriginal music.’” (Autoluminescent; documentary, 2011) This sort of “othering” of the influences from which bands like Cave’s drew from, dates back to the so-called “blues revival” of the 1960s.

Jack Hamilton, who’s book Just Around Midnight: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination (Harvard University Press, 2016) touches the surface of this othering, explains: Throughout the early-to-mid-’60s, the amount of weird racial whistles being used in description of the [Rolling] Stones in both the mainstream (…) press is pretty stunning. Their proximity to black music is really harped on by the fear-mongering pieces about the Stones.”