Chapter 6, Rock and Romanticism, Palgrave Macmillan

Chapter 6 of Rock and Romanticism: Post-Punk, Goth, and Metal as Dark Romanticisms: “‘Little crimeworn histories’: Nick Cave and the Roots-Raves-Rehab Story of Rock Stardom” (pp. 101-120) by Mark McCutcheon, Professor of Literary Studies, Athabasca University. Check out his blog.

• Chapter summary
  • Mark A. McCutcheon shifts the locus of suffering to substance abuse in “‘Little crimeworn histories’: Nick Cave and the Roots-Raves-Rehab Story of Rock Stardom.” McCutcheon examines the commodification of the Romantic tropes of drug use and of the self-destructive artist using Nick Cave as a case study. The art/commerce opposition established within Romantic texts to emphasize the authenticity of the poet/artist has, according to McCutcheon, become a part of the commerce of the music industry in the form of a Roots-Rave-Rehab narrative that governs discourse about artists’ drug use and recovery. In other words, Romantic tropes have been appropriated to serve capitalist ends. McCutcheon’s chapter considers how Nick Cave both exploits and resists this appropriation using a number of strategies, including an exploitation and modification of the traditional Gothic/Romantic trope of the dead woman.
• Music
  • Nick Cave, “The Singer” (by Johnny Cash)
  • Johnny Cash, “The Mercy Seat” (by Nick Cave)
  • The Birthday Party, “King Ink”
  • Grinderman, “Get It On”
  • Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds featuring Kylie Minogue, “Where the wild roses grow”
  • Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds
    • “Deanna”
    • “Up Jumped the Devil“
    • “There She Goes, My Beautiful World”
    • “When I First Came to Town”
    • “The Mercy Seat”
    • “When I First Came to Town”
    • “The Mercy Seat”
    • “Watching Alice”
    • “City of Refuge”
    • “Sugar Sugar Sugar”
    • “New Morning”
    • “Song of Joy”
    • “Death Is Not The End”
    • “Henry Lee”
• Literature
  • Theodor Adorno, “On the Fetish-Character of Music and the Regression of Listening“
  • Mikhail Bahktin, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel“
  • Nick Cave, And the Ass Saw the Angel
  • Byron
    • Manfred
    • Childe Harold’s Pilgrimmage
    • Don Juan
  • Caroline Lamb
  • Thomas de Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
  • Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner“
  • Novalis
  • Goethe
  • The Faust myth
  • Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads
  • Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
  • Edgar Allan Poe, “The Philosophy of Composition”
• Get the iTunes playlist