Worth reading not only Anwyn Crawford’s blistering takedown of Nick Cave, but also a few of the online responses so far, which range from make-my-point-for-me-why-don’t-you sexist kneejerkery (lots of this) to earnest and even grateful critical engagement.

The piece was a bomb: it went off - proving again the power of negation as a critical mode.

I think there’s a mis-step taken in identifying Cave’s attitudes towards women quite so directly with those of the narrative voices in his fiction (although I’ve not read the latter), and that the reasons given for doing so - that Cave doesn’t really “do” irony, and takes himself pretty seriously - are only convincing if ironic distance and sincere identification are the only two stances available. It’s evident that Cave enjoys the Lustmord narrative, and that disavowing this enjoyment and claiming an ironic distance from it is not what he’s about (it’s truly bizarre that at least one Cave fan thinks that Crawford doesn’t understand him because she doesn’t understand postmodernism). But it’s also evident that it’s a source of discomfort to him, and that his music (and perhaps the fiction also) stimulates a certain enjoyment partly in order to probe the discomfort it causes. That operation can be boring and navel-gazing, and Cave has added a great deal of superfluous material to the already voluminous Annals of Male Sexual Solipsism, but the problem isn’t really to do with whether the enjoyment (or the discomfort) is sincere or not, but to do with whether the interplay between enjoyment and discomfort is managed creatively or has been allowed to become just another well-established masturbatory routine.