ABSTRACT - C.

Girodet
Nick Cave and the American Southern Gothic: Hybridising the Tune

Australian singer-songwriter Nick Cave has established himself as a versatile

musician with an abiding taste for the gothic tropes of violence and the taboo, as well as an
aesthetics of the extremes.
Eluding categorisation, Cave’s idiosyncratic musicscape is haunted by the ghosts of
gothic geographical and cultural landscapes, notably by the American Deep South. This
cross-cultural hybridisation imparts Cave’s musical text with distinct American folk music
overtones, whilst providing his lyrical scope with a Southern Gothic thematic palette of
transgression, insanity and the barbaric. Moreover, Cave’s encounter with the Deep South
exposes his music to the literary tradition of the Southern Gothic, thus paving the way for a
generic crossover from popular music to literature.

As part of a contribution to the IGA Conference, I propose to analyse how Cave, in

his 1990’s musical works, uses the Gothic South and its traditions as a site for inter-generic
experimentation and cultural hybridisation. In particular, I shall examine how the musician
draws upon a literary genre, the Southern Gothic, to broaden and hybridise his own
musicscape with peculiar cultural and literary inflections. I shall demonstrate how, in
appropriating staple Southern Gothic narrative structures and devices, Cave blurs the generic
boundaries between music and literature, and effectively blazes his own transcultural trail into
literary orality. Cave’s foray into the American South thus delineates a liminal gothic space,
which relies upon a dynamic of conflating geographies, themes, and stylistic features, thus
testifying to the core malleability of Gothic.