NICK CAVE MEETS DR. SEUSS
Feb. 12th, 2016 07:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
panzer038
Dr. Seuss and Nick Cave? Two great tastes that taste great together? Sure. Why not? Nick Cave’s “Red Right Hand,” a single from his 1994 album Let Love in is one of his best-loved tunes and long an in-concert staple of his live shows. It can be heard opening and closing series one of Peaky Blinders, the soundtrack to all three of theScream movies, The X-Files and many other things (including, curiously, a Snoop Dogg documentary.). The “red right hand” referred to in the lyrics is an allusion to a stanza in Milton’s Paradise Lost (not the first time Cave has drawn inspiration from Milton’s epic verse):
“What if the breath that kindled those grim fires, / Awaked, should blow them into sevenfold rage, / And plunge us in the flames; or from above / Should intermitted vengeance arm again / His red right hand to plague us?” (Book II, 170-174)
And now the song’s sinister narrative has been Seussified by Deviant Art user DrFaustusAU... Cave’s lyrical wordplay is suitably Seussian, and it works brilliantly:
Take a little walk to the edge of town. Go across the tracks…
Where the viaduct looms, like a bird of doom, as it shifts and cracks…
Where secrets lie in the border fires, in the humming wires. Hey man, you know you’re never coming back…
Past the square. Past the bridge. Past the mills. Past the stacks…
On a gathering storm comes a tall handsome man in a dusty black coat with a red right hand…
He’ll wrap you in his arms, tell you that you’ve been a good boy…
He’ll rekindle all the dreams it took you a lifetime to destroy…
He’ll reach deep into the hole, heal your shrinking soul, but there won’t be a single thing that you can do…
He’s a god. He’s a man. He’s a ghost. He’s a guru…
They’re whispering his name through this disappearing land. But hidden in his coat is a red right hand
Below, the original promo video for “Right Red Hand” from 1994:
https://youtu.be/RrxePKps87k