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Articles on Nick Cave

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Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds at Primavera Sound Festival on June 1 2018. Shutterstock/ChristianBertrand

Musical plagiarism: why it can be admirable to steal

To quote Nick Cave, “Plagiarism is an ugly word for what, in rock and roll, is a natural and necessary … tendency … and that is to steal”.
Nick Cave performing with The Bad Seeds in Budapest in June. His song lyrics, with those often melancholy, churchy organ chords, are dripping in references to what might be called sacredness. Zoltan Balogh/EPA

Friday essay: popular music’s search for the sacred in a secular world

The enquiry into sacredness is not over, it’s just beginning for the 21st century, and in wildly disparate modes and places. In music, Nick Cave, Hozier and Dr G. Yunupingu have led the way.
Songwriters such as Nick Cave (pictured) and the late Yolngu star Gurrumul have often drawn on the scriptures in their work. Paul Bergen/EPA

Why our declining biblical literacy matters

In less than two generations, the proportion of Australians who never pick up a Bible has leapt to seven out of ten. But a robust biblical literacy can help us decode creative works and understand the past.

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