Love Quote by Nick Cave

Nick Cave is doing something rarer than a rock testimonial: he’s separating the myth of rock from its landfill. The opening is all ignition - "exciting", "revolutionary", a form that "changed people" and "changed their hearts". That’s not nostalgia talking; it’s a claim about music as a moral technology, a force that re-tunes desire and identity. Cave has spent decades writing songs where conversion and corrosion sit in the same verse, so he knows exactly why rock once felt like a door kicked off its hinges.

Then he throws in the corrective: "But yeah". Two words that puncture the sermon. It’s the shrug of someone who’s lived inside the genre long enough to see the ratio of transcendence to filler. The subtext is a rebuke to rock’s self-flattering canon, the idea that guitars automatically equal authenticity. Cave insists the revolution wasn’t the sound itself; it was the moment when certain sounds met certain social conditions and gave people permission to become different versions of themselves.

Calling out "rubbish" isn’t contrarianism; it’s an argument for standards. Rock’s legacy, he implies, is undermined by its own mass production - by the way rebellion gets packaged, repeated, and sold back as attitude. Cave’s intent is both affectionate and prosecutorial: keep the belief that music can change hearts, but don’t confuse that faith with genre loyalty. Revolutions, even loud ones, still produce a lot of debris.