Grinderman is the First Great Band of the Anthropocene Epoch

First published on the Huffington Post on 08/17/2010


“All of a sudden it seems impossible to escape the basic idea that we humans live on a planet that we can’t control,” say The Friends of The Pleistocene. “Eventually and inevitably geologic time spills into human time and into our human world: volcanic eruptions disrupt travel; landslides propel modern houses into the geologic layer of an inland sea that existed 10,000 years ago; earthquakes displace millions of people; an uncapped well gushes liquid geologic time into the Gulf of Mexico … When it comes to living in relation to the speed and rhythms of geologic time, we contemporary humans are only beginning to figure out how to rebut our own hubris.”

During the twentieth century, Joseph Campbell connected myths across cultures and through time. The day-to-day lives of human beings change vastly through time, he said, but the human condition and the stages of life are constant, and we can gain insights by putting ancient stories into context in our time. He died in 1987. He couldn’t predict the defining mythology of the twenty first century, but he said that astronauts had shown us photographic proof that we lived interconnected lives on the planet earth and warned that our technology was not going to save us. He encouraged us to look to artists, who are heroes who live lives of self-discovery and clear paths through new territories for us to follow. “The hero’s journey is not to deny reason,” he told Bill Moyers in The Power of Myth. “To the contrary, by overcoming the dark passions, the hero symbolizes our ability to control the irrational savage within us.”



At the end of the nineteenth century, a predatory mysticism exploited the incorporeal advances in science — the x-ray, recorded and projected sound, electricity — and created a fad for contacting the spirit world. The recorded sound industry was pioneered by a company whose logo was an image of a dog sitting on a cofﬁn listening to a machine playing a recording of his dead master’s voice. At the turn of the twenty-first century, two robots, Spirit and Opportunity — reminiscent of Sony’s robot dog Aibo — were listening for the voices of the dead on Mars. On their website in early 2008, the Bad Seeds sat at a table in a Victorian drawing room, around an antique ouija board, and Nick, a medium in a jewelled turban, made a show of contacting the spirit world. In one session he conjured up an image of a skeleton on a sheet. In another session the table moved up into the air, seemingly of its own accord. The message the spirit world kept sending was the title of the album, DIG!!! LAZARUS, DIG!!!

The first Grinderman album in 2007 began to absorb the implications of the Anthropocene Epoch, that the human impact on the earth’s natural systems is so vast that we might be headed for a cataclysmic breakdown where our civilization is swept away, and we’ll be lucky if we survive. The restorative myth for this epoch is the Grinderman song “Go Tell The Women.” It has the spiritual authority of a funked-up folk song. It’s a summary of the dark delusions of humankind over the last couple of centuries, with scientific progress and ingenuity, mathematics, genetics, evolution explained, but also self-righteous wars and selfishness revealed, and weakness, too, trying to think up grand schemes to maintain a dominion over nature, but being bored, restless and willing to walk away if everything explodes. But, at the end of the song when we hear a sound effect suggesting “six billion people, going down,” a sweet voice urges us to “come on back to the fray.”

The crucial Bad Seeds album, the one that quite possibly sparked the formation of Grinderman, was Nocturama from 2003. A nocturama is a zoo environment where light and dark are artificially reversed so that nocturnal creatures will be active during zoo visiting hours. The title song wasn’t on the album, but it became available later on a collection of B-Sides and Rarities. The song “Nocturama” is a rough sketch of ideas that would be developed through other projects: perhaps the “silent tiger” is a metaphor for the loss of biodiversity, the “ailing ape” might be us, the “penguin face down in water” a reference to the effects of global warming, the “forgotten llserelaama” a pun on seeming impotence of resolutely nonviolent figures in the twentieth century.

The movie The Proposition, which Nick wrote for John Hillcoat, presents the folly of the Industrial Revolution’s fervor for dominion over nature, with Captain Stanley determined to tame the brutal Australian environment and his wife tending a rose garden in a sere landscape, and a bounty hunter wonders about the ethical implications of the theory of evolution — if we’re descended from apes does it give us license to act like animals? There was a monkey on the cover of the first Grinderman album.



In Nocturama, Nick expanded the allegory of artificially manipulating light and darkness to suggest we’d turned the whole world into a nocturama, literally and spiritually.


The sucker punch realization of the Anthropocene Epoch is that at the moment that we comprehend how much impact we’ve had on the earth, we see how damaging this has been and that the damage may be irreversible. There’s no hope that things will get better.

“In the face of the evidence of climate disruption, clinging to hopefulness becomes a means of forestalling the truth,” Clive Hamilton writes in Requiem for a Species. “Sooner or later we must respond and that means allowing ourselves to enter a phase of desolation and hopelessness, in short, to grieve. Climate disruption will require that we change not only how we live but how we conceive of our selves; to recognize and confront a gap between our inner lives — including our habits and supposition about how the world will evolve – and the sharply divergent reality that climate science now presents to us.”

Nocturama is the simplest and sweetest and most heartwarming of the Bad Seeds albums. It addresses our fear of darkness and warns against being drawn towards false light, being guided instead by a personal sense of responsibility. Nick draws from the Gospel of Thomas, which quotes Jesus as saying: “There is light within a person of light and it lights up the whole universe. If he does not shine, he is darkness.” It’s a humane, quiet album in which love is celebrated and thrives because of the acknowledging of human flaws, dark secrets held in our hearts, and the mistakes we’ve made. It renders everyday situations with an ordinary beauty. “Bring It On” is a love song in which a man encourages a woman to tell him everything that would usually drive him away and it will only make him love her more. It’s a duet with Chris Bailey from the Saints, who has a powerful soul singer’s voice. Like all of Nick’s songs it has multiple perspectives: It could also be a dialogue between humankind and God, between a child and a parent, between friends, or enemies.

The songs create and appreciate honesty, constancy and forgiveness. They promise, and deliver, unconditional love and loyalty. They catch fire in the heart, like the word of God catches fire in all of humanity on the album’s closing song, “Babe, I’m on Fire,” another reference to the Gospel of Thomas in which Jesus talks about the word of God being a fire within the hearts of humankind. In The Road, the boy also asks if people he encounters are carrying the fire.




The album concluded with “More News From Nowhere” a retelling of the Odyssey that reflects how the myth speaks to our time as story of homecoming, putting the battles and trials of the journey into perspective and reconnecting with family. In 1996 Robert Fagles published a translation of the Odyssey that a colleague said had the swagger of a Sergio Leone or Sam Peckinpah movie. He died in 2008, the year that DIG!!! LAZARUS, DIG!!! was released. “He said he couldn’t decide which of the epics was his favorite,” his New York Times obituary reported. “Some days were Iliadic, he said — you felt you were in a war — and some were more like the Odyssey, when all you wanted to do was go home.”

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