'Jubilee Street' by Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds

in #writing6 years ago

It has been years since I first listened to Push the Sky Away by Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds, but I found myself thinking about one song, in particular, 'Jubilee Street', a lot recently.
Ignoring how perfectly brilliant the lyrics are tied to the rest of the song, there is a certain impressive maturity about how Nick Cave addresses violence towards women. If we look at Nick Cave's past adventures into this realm, we can see it has never been trivial or cheaply done. Murder Ballads goes around the murder of women (and men) in a beautifully sensitive manner: "They call me the Wild Rose, but my name was Elisa Day" reads "They put me in some sort of sexual pedestal but I was an actual human being". However, "Jubilee Street" steps up the whole game by dissecting the male psyche in the world of prostitution, without condescendingly glamorizing the industry.

In my own personal reading of these lyrics, it is about the client's guilt and suppressed awareness of the pain and destruction he's imposing on Bee's (the prostitute) life. How he uses her and absorbs what little life she has left to then walk away and ignore whatever else may be happening to her, or what drove her to where she is now, "She had a history, but she had no past".
He goes to her with lust and guilt and he offers - rather, forces- both on her, until one day she is no longer there. She and her little black book are gone, "the curtains are shut and the furniture is gone", leaving him alone and free of his guilt. Not because what he's done has been erased, but because it is invisible to him now. The "problem" is gone and he feels beyond recrimination because he is alone, representing the lack of empathic range men like this usually have.

'Jubilee Street' is about closing one's eyes to other people's reality, so that we may use them and discard them and feel no remorse or attachment when they're gone. Or at least, that's how I see it.

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