Sound And Vision: John Hillcoat
In the article series Sound and Vision we take a look at music videos from notable directors. This week: the works Nick Cave and John Hillcoat made together.
John Hillcoat has made a lot of music videos, for artists as stylistically diverse as Elvis Costello (for the award-winning video for Veronica), Depeche Mode, Siouxsee and the Banshees, Muse and... Maroon 5. But his most fruitful collaboration has been with Nick Cave. Nick Cave showed up in Hillcoat's debut feature, prison drama Ghosts...of the Civil Dead, which was also co-written by the singer. Cave would also later pen the great historical crimes The Proposition and Lawless for the director. Hillcoat in return directed many music videos for Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds and Cave-side project Grinderman.
The curious thing about the music videos in their totality is that their vibe totally fits the albums that they are made for, for better or worse. The Good Son was a Cave-album that expanded his typical post-punk rock sound to include a lighter tone, even flirting with crooning. The Ship Song, the first music video Hillcoat made for Cave, shows this lighter side, with Cave doing his best crooner impression while playing piano with a bunch of kids (see below). His music videos for Henry's Dream (Jack the Ripper and I Had a Dream Joe) return to a darker, grittier Cave, with neon-soaked and black and whiter performance videos, that are all about the texture, and have just the barest hint of a violent narrative. Just like the album proper.
The music videos for Let Love In's Loverman and Do You Love Me (also below) follow the crazed neon-light hues of the album cover, placing the action in shady bars and psychiatric hospitals. They hint narratively at the concept of the album, of all consuming love being close to murderous psychosis. The narrative lines get thicker, but this is not yet John Hillcoat playing around with storytelling in his Cave-videos.
For No More Shall We Part Nick Cave really started to lean into the melodramatic qualities of his voice, in a good way. But the music video to As I Sat Sadly By Her Side (also below) is overbearing with its visuals. It ekes out the melodrama from the lyrics, and pushes it over the top, by using symbolic stock footage that is overwrought, kitsch and on the nose. Having Nick Cave sing about violence and evil while Hitler shows up in the background is not necessarily subtle. The music video for Fifteen Feet of Pure White Snow is more fun, a stylistic pastiche of soviet kitsch, but it nonetheless shows Hillcoat and Cave's kitschy side yet again, just like the album.
The problems really start with Nocturama, both for Cave and Hillcoat. Often considered the absolute nadir of Cave's career, the same goes for the two music videos Hillcoat directed for them. Bring It On is a weird version of Cave doing pop, with Chris Bailey as a guest vocalist. Cave goes pop is interpreted with flashy disco lights, and lots of twerking dancers. They aim for youthfulness but land on 'midlife crisis'. Things get indefensive and awful with Babe I'm On Fire, which is offensive on a whole nother level (also below). In it, Cave and the Bad Seeds sing about a variety of characters, which they embody jokingly in the music video. "A frog and a dog sitting on the log" is not a problem, but when you embody "a homosexual with a persistent cough"' by cosplaying as someone with Kaposi sarcoma leisures, it gets icky. It gets downright racist, transphobic and sexist when Cave and his band members don blackface, yellowface, brownface and crossdress in a variety of contexts that feel gutpunchingly condescending. For a grueling 15 minutes, even. Identity and the suffering of minorities are not fodder for a jokey frat-bro costume party. Nick Cave and friends act like it is.
The same problems show up in his music videos for Grinderman's Heathen Child, where several gods and religious figureheads, including hinduist and buddhist cultural touchstones, are played by Cave and several actors. But as the tone there is more subdued, more surreal, and less irreverent, he gets away with it. Irreverence is the name for the music video to No Pussy Blues too, which like the band it is for, side-project Grinderman, is horny, sleazy and animalistic. It is a good video, which sadly seems all but scraped from the archives and only is findable in questionable bootleg-quality. The music for Grinderman's Evil leans into the animalistic too, for the first time not showing any footage of Nick Cave or a performance of him in the video itself. Grinderman expanded the palate for what a Nick Cave music video could be, just like the band expanded the sound of what a Nick Cave-project could be.
Finally the music video for Jubilee Street (also below), from Push the Sky Away, sees Hillcoat stepping further into a Caveless realm with a fully story-driven video, the first time he did that for the Bad Seeds. The excellent, haunting video portrays the narrative of the song, about a guy who goes to a sex worker and has an almost religious experience before things turn probably violent. The music video only hints at the narrative, which like the song is opaque about the true nature of the story. Push the Sky Away saw Cave experimenting with more story-driven song structures, expanding his lyrical obsessions in weirder and more filmic corners. That Hillcoat follows suit, really emphasizing the light and mise and scene to approach the feeling of orgasmic or religious ecstasy, is fitting. It's Hillcoats and Cave's finest hour.
Nick Cave and Hillcoat strengthen each other, as a director and musician pairing. That means that when they hit on a style or vibe for the project, they fully embrace it to its extreme. In some cases, like Jubilee Street or Loverman, the results are great. In other cases, we get truly awful stuff like Babe I'm On Fire. Their relationship seems to be symbiotic, in the same way that Nick Cave brings out the best and worst in Andrew Dominik or Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard (who certainly will show up in a future Sound and Vision). Cave is an amazing artist who seems to magnify the qualities of his music videos directors, and vice versa. Sometimes that magnification highlights pure beauty, other times it makes you want to unsee something. But it rarely leaves you indifferent.
