joe posts

I didn’t get Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’s Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! right away – The first few times I thought it sounded completely off. Then I remembered I felt that way about pretty much every Bad Seeds album. It was “Moonland,” “Night of the Lotus Eaters,” and then “We Call Upon The Author” that quickly turned me around – the lyrics in the latter are hilarious and awesome:

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We Call Upon The Author

What we once thought we had
We didn’t
And what we have now
Will never be that way again
So we call upon the author to explain

Our myxomatoid kids spraddle the streets
We’ve shunned them from the greasy-grind
The poor little things, they look so sad and old
As they mount us from behind
I ask them to desist and to refrain
And then we call upon the author to explain

Rosary clutched in his hand
He died with tubes up his nose
And a cabal of angels with finger cymbals
Chanted his name in code
We shook our fists at the punishing rain
And we call upon the author to explain

He said everything is messed up ’round here
Everything is banal and jejune
There is a planetary conspiracy
Against the likes of you and me
In this idiot constituency of the moon
Well he knew exactly who to blame
And we call upon the author to explain

Prolix! Prolix!

Nothing a pair of scissors can’t fix!

Well, I go guru-ing down the street
Young people gather ’round my feet
And they ask me things
But I don’t know where to start
They ignite the powder-trails
Straight to my father’s heart
And once again I call upon the author to explain

Who is this great burdensome slavering dog-thing
That mediocres my every thought?
I feel like a vacuum cleaner; a complete sucker
It’s fucked up and he is a fucker
But what an enormous and encyclopaedic brain
I call upon the author to explain

Well rampant discrimination
Mass poverty
Third world debt
Infectious disease
Global inequality
And deepening socio-economic divisions
Well, it does in your brain
And we call upon the author to explain

Now hang on, my friend Doug is tapping on the window
“Hey Doug, how you been?”
[...]
Brings me back a book on Holocaust poetry
Complete with pictures
Then tells me to get ready for the rain
And we call upon the author to explain

I say prolix! Prolix!

Something a pair of scissors can fix!

Bukowski was a jerk
Berryman was best
He wrote like wet papier mache
Ah but he went the Hemingway
Weirdly on wings
And with maximum pain
We call upon the author to explain

Down in my bolthole I see they’ve published another volume of unreconstructed rubbish
“Well the waves, the waves, were soldiers moving.”
Well, thank you. Thank you! Thank you!
And again I call upon the author to explain
Yeah, we call upon the author to explain

Prolix! Prolix!

There’s nothing a pair of scissors can’t fix!

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