Page - 96 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 06/02

96 | Natalie Fritz and Anna-Katharina Höpflinger www.jrfm.eu 2020, 6/2, 91–102 From reference to a new spirituality With our second example – the song “The Mercy Seat” by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds – we can look in greater detail at this intermedia interaction of music, text and image and the relationship to religion. The Australian artist Nick Cave grew up Anglican. His songs have often dealt with religious themes, especially in the 1980s. The song “The Mercy Seat”, performed by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds on the album Tender Prey (1988), is a striking example of this interrelation between religion and music. “I began to warm and chill / to objects and their fields / a ragged cup, a twisted mop / the face of Jesus in my soup.” These are the first sung lines of this song – preceded by a mumbled first-person account of how the singer landed on death row. The song deals with death and hope, sin and forgive- ness, and guilt and innocence, with many allusions to the Old Testament (e. g. Lev. 16:11–19; Lev. 24:19–21) and New Testament (e. g. Luke 2:6–8) on the eve of the singer’s execution by electrocution. The song’s music video jumps be- tween a black-and-white prison cell where Nick Cave, aka the first-person singer, explains the feelings of a “moribund” man (fig. 5) and the band per- formance, in colour and somewhat distanced, of the song’s chorus (fig. 6).6 This visual discrepancy between the two scenes reflects the many contra- dictory lines within the lyrics – the “mercy seat” may refer to the electric chair, used for executions, or to the throne of God, the place where mercy can be found. It also serves as a leitmotif of the band’s whole œuvre. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds constantly question humankind and humanity – even life itself – in their songs and often refer to one of the “providers of sense and orientation”, to religion and especially the Bible. As Cave sings in “The Mercy Seat”, “God is never far away”. “The Mercy Seat” is not the only place where the band analyses the world and human behaviour by referring either to the legitimacy of punishment in the Old Testament (as, for example, also in “I Let Love In”, 1994) or the prospect of hope, the crucial element of the New Testament (as also in “Sun Forest”, 2019). The fundamental questions the band – or mostly Cave – raises in its/his texts are too complex and in the end also too individual to answer in general terms, but the band frequently deals with this deficiency by integrating a critical reading of specific Christian narratives or symbols as possibilities for how to manage life. 6 For the full video see The Mercy Seat (Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, 1988), https://www. nickcave.com/videos/the-mercy-seat/ [accessed 2 August 2020].