“Singer Nick Cave has addressed praising a song by Kanye West – an artist he is known to admire – following the latest controversies surrounding the rapper (Picture: Getty) Nick Cave has defended his ‘fondness’ for Kanye West’s music, despite his latest antisemitic rampage. The 67-year-old musician recently revealed he would like the problematic rapper’s”, — write: metro.co.uk
Singer Nick Cave has addressed praising a song by Kanye West – an artist he is known to admire – following the latest controversies surrounding the rapper (Picture: Getty) Nick Cave has defended his ‘fondness’ for Kanye West’s music, despite his latest antisemitic rampage.
The 67-year-old musician recently revealed he would like the problematic rapper’s 2013 song I Am God played at his funeral after he named the Yeezus track as one of his favourite songs on the BBC’s Desert Island Discs.
He described it as an ‘unbelievably deep song’ and an ‘amazing work of art’, sharing that it resonates with his whole family.
However, that hasn’t gone down well with some fans and the Mercy Seat singer has now explained that while West’s behaviour – including selling T-shirts with swastikas and making a series of offensive antisemitic comments – has been ‘unacceptable’, he is ‘reluctant to invalidate the best of us in an attempt to punish the worst’.
Cave began by clarifying that he does not believe it’s possible to separate the artist from their art.
A fan asked him on his The Red Hand Files blog: ‘How the hell can you listen to the song without seeing the scum of a human being that Kanye has become?’
Kanye, also known as Ye, brought his wife to the Grammys in a sheer dress and has tried to sell T-shirts with swastikas on them while making antisemitic comments on X (Picture: Bellocqimages/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images) 
Prior to Ye’s latest stunts, Cave had discussed his love for the song I Am God on Desert Island Discs (Picture: Samir Hussein/WireImage As well as the 47-year-old hip-hop star’s blatant racism, the goth rocker mentioned the discourse surrounding West’s wife Bianca Censori wearing a completely see-through dress which showed her naked body on the Grammys red carpet recently and confirmed that he agrees it’s ‘wrong’.
Cave started his response: ‘Numerous letters have come in expressing, in no uncertain terms, disapproval of my fondness for Kanye West’s music.
‘A lot of time and energy has been spent explaining the evil of Nazism, the harm of antisemitism, why it is wrong to sell T-shirts emblazoned with swastikas and why it is unacceptable to coerce one’s girlfriend into standing naked on the red carpet at the Grammys. On that matter, it seems, we can all find some common ground. I agree.’
He made it clear that he did not approve of any of the rapper’s recent behaviour (Picture: Jon Kopaloff/WireImage) However, he then went on to lay out his main argument.
‘The idea of an artist being divorced from their art is absurd. An artist and their art are fundamentally intertwined because art is the essence of the artist made manifest. The artist’s work proclaims, “This is me. I am here. This is what I am”,’ argued Cave, who added that ‘the great gift of art is the potential for the artist to excavate their interior chaos and transform it into something sublime’.
He continued: ‘This is what Kanye does. This is what I strive to do, and this is the enterprise undertaken by all genuine artists. The remarkable utility of art lies in its audacity to transfigure our corrupted state and create something beautiful.’
Bad Seeds star Cave also insisted that it’s still possible for ‘broken and flawed people’ to ‘achieve staggering things – beautiful, brilliant, inspiring, wild and audacious things’.
Cave argued that separating the art from the artist is ‘absurd’ (Picture: Mariano Regidor/Redferns) The Australian-born musician went on: ‘We are all broken, flawed, and suffering human beings, each a disaster in our own right, each with the capacity to cause great harm, each brimming with misguided notions, perhaps the most deluded of which is the belief that we are somehow exclusively and morally superior to everyone else.
‘Many of you might be thinking, “Well, speak for yourself! I’m not like Kanye! I could never behave like that!” Yet, given the circumstances, we humans are capable of anything. To be human is to be flawed, yet it is also to possess the potential to achieve staggering things – beautiful, brilliant, inspiring, wild and audacious things; things to be cherished, despite our complex and compromised natures.’
Cave added that, ‘as sickening as antisemitism is’, he always looks ‘to seek the beauty wherever it presents itself’.
West has previously been called ‘the greatest artist’ by Cave, who revealed his whole family enjoy the track I Am God (Picture: Getty) *The below music video contains explicit lyrics*
‘In doing so, I am reluctant to invalidate the best of us in an attempt to punish the worse. I don’t think we can afford that luxury.’
Sharing his love for Ye’s song on Desert Island Discs in January, he said: ‘This became, weirdly enough, a kind of family song. My kids love it, Susie [his wife] loves it, I love it. It’s an extremely playful, extremely dark, complex song where on the one hand, Kanye is presenting himself as a god, and then towards the end of the song, he’s screaming in terror.’
Praising it as ‘an unbelievably deep song’, Cave added: ‘This is a song that I value on a personal level, and actually I just think is a complete, amazing work of art.’
Cave previously hailed the Stronger hitmaker ‘the greatest artist’ on the planet.
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