Sadness Is Delicious

Repost: Song of the Year 2007: “No Pussy Blues” by Grinderman

Since Paper Thin Walls proved too thin in 2008, I've decided to repost some of the reviews I wrote for them. This one's about Grinderman’s "No Pussy Blues," my song of the year in 2007. It was mentioned in Best Music Writing 2008 in the section, “Other Notable Music Writing of 2007.” If you want to hear the song, click this link to watch the video (or watch it at the bottom).

GRINDERMAN -
“No Pussy Blues”
from Grinderman (Anti-)
by KORY GROW

This is not just another song about some geezer being denied his sexual druthers, it’s a bittersweet declaration of age, masculinity, frustration and, well yeah, not getting any. Yes, Nick Cave, now aged 50, has become a mustachioed dirty old man (dig that Fu Manchu). Thinking about sex is his preoccupation. He’s compulsively doodled women’s nether regions on anything he can find for ages (see his King Ink books). The 7”’s for both Grinderman’s “Get It On” and “(I Don’t Need You To) Set Me Free” contained his illustrations, etched into side B, and wittily, “No Pussy Blues” did not, instead featuring the emasculated Rhesus monkey also gracing the album’s cover. It’s true he and his Grindermen―electric bouzouki player Warren Ellis, bassist Martyn P. Casey and percussionist Jim Sclavunos―likely have done and will do anything for a little lovin’.

Casting himself as a haggard Rodney Dangerfield, Nick Cave revels in rejection with the same excitement that inspired a 15-minute yarn in 2003 in the opposite direction―“Babe, I’m On Fire.” Whereas that song’s linchpin was an infectious chorus with a seemingly never-ending list of one-liners―this is a wounded-animal Beefheart squall; Cave’s previous shock techniques are no longer effective (hence the “Damn!” exclamation point he looses between “no pussy blues” blurts at the end) and he’s only left of his own devices. This is Nick Cave―the quirky guy who loves W.H. Auden and collects locks of ladies’ hair (this is fact) and lives down the street, baring all, just like how you or anyone collects comic books and reads Hot Rod magazine. As he’s said in interviews, this is an everyman. But moreover, this is the cry of the helplessly tortured everyman. Anyone whose been laid off as a result of George W. Bush’s (the biggest cockblock of all) and Tony Blair’s foolhardy conquests. Anyone living in fear of suicide bombers. Anyone whose wife makes them watch Project Runway instead of football (or vice-versa). Anyone who was gifted Led Zep reunion tickets only to find out the purchaser is the only valid entrant. Anyone who’s shown up too late to meet Mr. T at the mall (anyone whose life is Homer Simpson’s). Every man, woman, child, super-intelligent gorilla―Everyone! This is your song!

In turn, this song has inspired sort of a world pussy-pleading shockwave. Who, really, hasn’t followed some temptation, only to be denied? The first song released from Grinderman, it quickly became blogger fodder (because who gets less action than the terminally online, err, alone?). Snoop Dogg expressed his fondness for the song on Late Night With Conan O’Brien. And of course, this song predicted―well, kind of―French mime Marcel Marceau’s death (on Nick Cave’s 50th birthday, no less!) this year with the lyric, “I felt like Marcel Marceau must feel when she said that she just never wanted to.”

It’s no secret why it’s so universal―it’s on most people’s minds. And that’s part of Cave’s problem. According to a 1994 Kinsey report, 54 percent of men think about sex every day or several times a day (that’s only 19 percent of women). Men’s sexual fantasies tend to be more explicit than women’s, and men tend to be more concerned about whether his partner is enjoying her/himself than they do their own pleasure. Also, just less than half the married couples polled have sex on a monthly basis, and only seven percent have it more than four times a week. Statistically speaking, she just doesn’t want to.

Cave’s struggles with the opposite sex―objectifying or glorifying them, depending on the day―have inspired his songs since he began playing music. Just a quarter century ago, Cave was “Nick The Stripper,” or at least that was a character he sang about with his band the Birthday Party, “a fat little insect… [that] dances on all fours.” “From Her To Eternity,” Cave’s first “hit” with his Bad Seeds explicitly dealt with his need to possess the girl who lived in the apartment above him―but if he does, “to possess her is, therefore, not to desire her.” Although he recast himself as somewhat of a modern romantic for the two decades leading up to Grinderman, his innate need to beguile women never ceased. Just this year, he practically gave a girl a lapdance while doing his best Beyoncé, singing “Bootylicious,” though in fairness it was for charity.

As if to demonstrate the psychology of his frustration, the lyrics suspiciously follow the five stages of loss outlined in Swiss psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s model of grief―usually it’s applied to death or divorce, but isn’t the death of Cave’s sex life worthy, too? This four-minute song begins with a typewriter pounding away (perhaps the song really is fiction), and after Cave’s speech about performing, he says, “I must above all things love myself.” This is probably the most important lyric in all of “No Pussy Blues.” Not only does it imply Cave’s denial (Kübler-Ross’s first stage) that he has problems getting laid, but it reinforces his inflated ego and foreshadows the masturbation that will console his tears later. His denial continues as he sucks in his gut to be met with rejection. Then, stage two, the bargaining begins as he indulges humility (for the first time), fixing up her house and doing her dishes. The third stage is anger, highlighted by colorful bouts of misogyny (“I petted her revolting little chihuahua”; “I called her my little ho”) and the fourth is depression (drinking a liter[!] of cognac, the Marcel Marceau quip). His power, significance and virility―the delusions he began with onstage―have been replaced with submission, inconsequence and puerile whining. The final stage, of course, is acceptance, which is when he admits, “I got the no pussy blues.” While the song appears to be a macho comedy, it’s actually quite depressing at its core. Thankfully it doesn’t end in rape, like many Cave songs have in the past.

Musically, too, Grinderman represents a new middle-age for Cave, the songwriter. Now half a century old, he’s letting go of the bombast he’s clung to for the past two decades, which is most noticeable on “No Pussy Blues.” For his past few releases, he had confined himself to his study, working a 9 to 5 on the Bad Seeds’ macabre cabaret ditties. He wrote this album with the other musicians in person, playing guitar for the first time; the lyrics are simply off-the-cuff jokes he made for the band’s other three aging, hairy men (dig up a recent picture to see Ellis’s new mountain-man beard and the towering Sclavunos’s own bib). The tales are so funny because they’re truth and pain (Cave’s rejection) working together. Naturally, the album’s other songs have the same dark humor. Deep into his “words of wisdom,” “Get It On,” Cave sings, “He drank panther piss/And fucked the girls you’re married to.” Then there’s “Depth Charge Ethel,” about whom he says, “People come and bathe in her lake/And I do, but lately it’s gotten out of hand.” This acerbic misogyny are the words of a man who’s gotten his fair share through the years, which only rankles him more on “No Pussy Blues.” On the song, the bass plays a mostly static line throughout―not a I-IV-V7 or a I-vi-ii-V7, like most blues―and when Cave jumps on the wah-wah for a static-laden guitar attack, it’s clear these particular blues run deeper than muddy water. If longtime Cave associate (dude produced the Birthday Party’s “Release The Bats” single) and Grinderman producer Nick Launay did anything, it was merely pressing record.

This isn’t some revamped Birthday Party cakewalk, either, as so many other critics have asserted. Granted this is the first time Cave has played with a “band” since then, but “No Pussy Blues” seems cut from a different stone, as judging from Prayers On Fire and Junkyard’s gritty caterwauls Cave sounded like he had no troubles scoring after a show. Grinderman is also his first full-time band that doesn’t feature a member of the Birthday Party, and it in no way resembles his alma mater’s tortured art-punk. Nor does it resemble the dark Leonard Cohen/Paul McCartney-like singer-songwriter romanticism of songs like “Straight To You,” “I Let Love In” or (his “Let It Be”) “Into My Arms” that have enticed so many ladies and guys to hop in the sheets. No. This is the sound of a man who cannot take it anymore. Denied, defied and defiled. And too old and wise to turn his back in the event she does say, “Yes.” She’s got him where she wants him (and it’s probably there he should stay).

Grinderman’s Nick Cave and Jim Sclavunos on “No Pussy Blues”

Your lyrics seem more preoccupied with sex this time. Did this come from playing as a group?
Cave: I don’t know about you, Jim, and if this is the place to be discussing this sort of thing, but what the fuck? When you’re younger, you walk down the street and your eyes, they’re drawn towards a beautiful young girl. But the older you get, the more free-roaming your [eyes] become. So that grandmas…
Sclavunos: The possibilities become manifold. But on the other hand, you have to restrain yourself because you’re in a relationship, so there’s all these tantalizing possibilities, but they’re all completely off limits.

Where does “No Pussy Blues” come in then?
Sclavunos: Everybody’s been in those shoes at one point or another, younger and old. I think some people take it as a young man’s song and some people take it as the song for [the] everyman.
Cave: I was lookin’ at TV… and everybody on TV looked like they were getting it. And then I was going onto the street and everyone on the street looked like they weren’t. So I mean “pussy” in the broadest sense of the word. In all the things you can consume that might make you happy. And so, I thought I’d write this song for the everyman.
Sclavunos: And girls like it, too. We’ve gotten a very good response from ladies. They want to comfort us. They reach out to us. [Cave scowls]

You look incredulous.
Cave: He’s been on the internet again. [Laughs]