Babe, I’m On Fire. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. 2003. Mute.

 Just as Bob Dylan once recalibrated the rules of English folk romanticism to accommodate his definitive, wickedly surreal vision of media over-saturation in the age of American exceptionalism for 1965’s Desolation Row, Nick Cave now calls roll on twenty first century western archetypes whose lives coalesce around the crisis of a shared, distressing complaint. Compared with the dreamlike proceedings of the Dylan record, Cave sees the nightmare in our quotidian lives and frames it in eschatological detail. Released in 2003, when the conflagration that was rock and roll had already been reduced to a pile of smoldering embers, the Bad Seeds drench the mess in kerosene and kick it flying. The record’s co-producers, Nick Launay and the band, emphasize the riotous interplay among band mates, investing the quarter-hour long pop epic with a sense of careening motion, Martyn P Casey’s authoritative, redoubtable basslines guiding the song across rapidly shifting tectonics as the twin guitar hysteria of Blixa Bargeld (his final studio record with the Bad Seeds) and Mick Harvey explicates the overarching mood of madness and impending loss of control, punctuated by the shrill, continuously sounding alarm of Cave’s Hammond organ. No song from this century better captures the ill temper around the defeatist, self-immolating practices of twenty-first century American politics, from the Supreme Court, acting against the popular vote and installing George W Bush as the country’s forty-third sitting President in 2000 to Donald Trump’s doomed call for insurrection on January 6, 2021. Apocalyptic, funny, heart breaking and outrageously furious, Babe, I’m On Fire does all that we can ask of rock and roll. It even outpaces Dylan in a sustained long distance run at the height of his young genius.

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