Butter And Nick Cave

Pop culture and the meaning of life. Mini-essays written and illustrated by grimy, human hands.

Humanity’s urge for the spiritual appears in the strangest places: for example, a corporate presentation about butter. This particular butter apparently embodies “a near-mystical sense of oneness.” The point is that creatives (e.g. me) are inspired to manifest commercials of religious significance.

Nick Cave does not make butter commercials, perhaps because he’s an honest-to-Jesus artist. Though if art doesn’t work out, perhaps he should give butter-based eulogies a shot. I think he’d be good at them. After all, Nick Cave writes songs that surrender to the mystery, to that which is greater than ourselves. In Cave’s case, this requires adopting an explicitly spiritual mode (though he prefers the more definite word “religious.”)

In the sublime Faith, Hope and Carnage (2022), a record of Cave’s creative process, he says: “You have to operate, at least some of the time, in the world of mystery, beneath that great and terrifying cloud of artistic unknowing. The creative impulse, to me, is a form of bafflement, and often feels dissonant and unsettling. It chips away at your own cherished truths about things, pushes against your own sense of what is acceptable. It’s the guiding force that leads you to where it wants to go. It’s not the other way around. You’re not leading it.”

The soul pulsing at the centre of this is improvisation. “Improvisation is essentially an act of acute vulnerability. But it is also a path to creative freedom, to wild adventure, in which the things of true value can often emerge through musical misunderstandings.”

But does Nick Cave taste delicious on toast?

He does not.

Or maybe he does. It’s unlikely we’ll find out.