Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds "Murder Ballads" [1996]

Good God, just kill me now. Look, Iggy Pop may be an asshole, but at least he never tried to sell himself as Edgar Allan Poe like Nick Cave does, and has ever since his lyrics became comprehensible. On "Murder Ballads," he sheds all pretense and growls into the mic the various ways he could kill you, or rather how his archly derived characterizations could. Figures he'd chicken out like that; I'm sure in real life Nick Cave violently extinguishes lives the way Jay-Z does: not at all. Certainly his intensity is real, but this may be more due to acute frustration at not having the slightest capacity to be able to sing. In that way he is like Iggy, though he's more dickheadedly selfish in that he'd rather vent his rage outwardly, like they did at Columbine, Oklahoma City, Virginia Tech, that Colorado movie theater, Newtown CT, the Boston Marathon… OK, you know what? Fuck Nick Cave and his bloodthirsty hard-on. We've got enough problems with actual psychopaths in this country carrying around dangerous weapons without having to know this guy's out there beating off to our horrors.