[Video] Grinderman - "No Pussy Blues"

While most aging rockers tend to accidentally slip into perversion, addiction, and eventually self-parody, Nick Cave has decided instead to think outside the box, grow an awful looking goatee and take all three head-on in his new project: Grinderman.

"My face is finished, my body's gone.
And I can't help but think standing up here in all this applause and gazing down at all the young and the beautiful.
With their questioning eyes.
That I must above all things love myself."

Thanks to that opening, what would have been a paean to post-pubescent frustration instead (intentionally) casts Cave and his cohorts as The Dirty Old Men leering from the stage. Cave plays the part of the massively egotistical front man, and the band plays what is perhaps the most simple sounding rock and roll song ever.

Focus your attention on the mad (balding) man with the microphone and the guitar, it says.

The name "Grinderman" evokes both a pathetic organ grinder, spinning the handle on his box to play simple tunes for small bits of cash, or an alternate universe pornographic superhero. That duality is probably exactly what they were going for. It's easy to watch this video and see it as four old guys trying to look cool by playing to young folks, but then it ends with animal on human sex and you realize that Cave, Sclavunos, Ellis and Casey have been at this "fucking with people" thing for a long time.

And who doesn't like the sound of an amplified violin coming through a wah pedal?

No Pussy Blues

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