Nick Cave: ‘Perhaps rock music needs to die for a while’
Responding to a fan letter about censoring musicians accused of misconduct, Cave suggested ‘dissolute behaviour’ is key to rock’s identity
He is seen as one of rock‘n’roll’s last defenders: showman, icon, innovator. But the musician Nick Cave has cast aspersions on the beleaguered genre’s future as it faces a post-#MeToo reckoning with its legacy of bad behaviour.
A fan wrote to Cave’s website, the Red Hand Files, to ask how he felt about “the current trend of connecting the shortcomings of an artist’s personal conduct and the art they create and using that criteria to determine if said works are corrupted and therefore to be relegated to the dustbins or not?”