Nick Cave: Perhaps rock music needs to die, so that something powerful and subversive and truly monumental can rise up out of it

“Contemporary rock music no longer seems to have the fortitude to contend with enemies of the imagination, enemies of art – and in this present form perhaps rock music isn’t worth saving. The permafrost of puritanism could be the antidote for the weariness and nostalgia that grips it” - Nick Cave wrote in an answer to a fan who asked, on Cave’s website, the Red Hand Files, how he felt about “the current trend of connecting the shortcomings of an artist’s personal conduct and the art they create". Cave, describing modern rock music as “afflicted with a kind of tiredness and confusion and faint-heartedness”, suggested that “the new moral zealotry that is descending upon our culture could actually be a good thing”. In time, he wrote, he hoped that this “moralism”-induced cull might mean that a “wild, dangerous and radical form of music can tear its way through the ice, teeth bared, and rock’n’roll can get back to the business of transgression”, Guardian reports.