Nick Cave explains ‘fondness’ for Kanye West’s music despite antisemitic outbursts

Nick Cave has defended his “fondness” for Kanye West’s music in light of the singer’s recent explosive anti-semitic outbursts.

The Bad Seeds icon recently appeared on the BBC’s Desert Island Discs and disclosed that he would like the rapper’s 2013 Yeezus track ‘I Am A God’ to be played at his funeral.

Responding after Kanye recently sold t-shirts with swastikas on his website and posted a series of anti-semitic messages online, Cave said his behaviour was “unacceptable,” but that he is “reluctant to invalidate the best of us in an attempt to punish the worst”.

A fan asked on The Red Hand Files blog: “How the hell can you listen to the song without seeing the scum of a human being that Kanye has become?”

Cave’s response began: “Numerous letters have come in expressing, in no uncertain terms, disapproval of my fondness for Kanye West’s music.

“A lot of time and energy has been spent explaining the evil of Nazism, the harm of antisemitism, why it is wrong to sell t-shirts emblazoned with swastikas and why it is unacceptable to coerce one’s girlfriend into standing naked on the red carpet at the Grammys. On that matter, it seems, we can all find some common ground. I agree.”

He went on: “The idea of an artist being divorced from their art is absurd. An artist and their art are fundamentally intertwined because art is the essence of the artist made manifest. The artist’s work proclaims, ‘This is me. I am here. This is what I am.’ However, the great gift of art is the potential for the artist to excavate their interior chaos and transform it into something sublime. This is what Kanye does. This is what I strive to do, and this is the enterprise undertaken by all genuine artists. The remarkable utility of art lies in its audacity to transfigure our corrupted state and create something beautiful.”

But Cave stated he believes it is possible for “broken and flawed people” to “achieve staggering things – beautiful, brilliant, inspiring, wild and audacious things.”

He explained: “We are all broken, flawed, and suffering human beings, each a disaster in our own right, each with the capacity to cause great harm, each brimming with misguided notions, perhaps the most deluded of which is the belief that we are somehow exclusively and morally superior to everyone else. Many of you might be thinking, ‘Well, speak for yourself! I’m not like Kanye! I could never behave like that!’ Yet, given the circumstances, we humans are capable of anything.

“To be human is to be flawed, yet it is also to possess the potential to achieve staggering things – beautiful, brilliant, inspiring, wild and audacious things; things to be cherished, despite our complex and compromised natures.”

He further explained that he always looks “to seek the beauty wherever it presents itself”. Cave said: “As sickening as anti-Semitism is – in its sadly always-present, ever-morphing forms – I endeavour to seek beauty wherever it presents itself. In doing so, I am reluctant to invalidate the best of us in an attempt to punish the worse. I don’t think we can afford that luxury.”

Praising ‘I Am A God’ on Desert Island Discs, he said: “This became, weirdly enough, a kind of family song. My kids love it, Susie [his wife] loves it, I love it. It’s an extremely playful, extremely dark, complex song where on the one hand, Kanye is presenting himself as a god, and then towards the end of the song, he’s screaming in terror.

“It’s an unbelievably deep song, in my view. This is a song that I value on a personal level, and actually I just think is a complete, amazing work of art.”

Cave previously hailed the ‘Stronger’ hitmaker “the greatest artist on Earth”. He told fans on his blog in 2020: “Making art is a form of madness – we slip deep within our own singular vision and become lost to it.

“There is no musician on Earth that is as committed to their own derangement as Kanye, and in this respect, at this point in time, he is our greatest artist.”