When Nick Cave’s teenage son, Arthur, died in July last year after plunging from a chalk cliff in Brighton, England, the media reported on the tragedy with wildly varying degrees of sensitivity. Cave, his wife, Susie, and Arthur’s twin brother, Earl, were instantly transported to a place of unimaginable hurt.
Though recording of Skeleton Tree, the 16th Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds album, had started late in 2014, Cave's loss inevitably coloured the direction of the record.
"Oh the urge to kill someone was basically overwhelming / I had such hard blues down there in the supermarket queues," Cave sings gravely on Magneto, one of the album's standout tracks.
On Skeleton Tree, grief is the dark engine of an extraordinary and hugely moving collaboration.
Unsurprisingly, given its singular awfulness, child mortality has few other precedents in song.
In 1991, Eric Clapton wrote about pain and loss over losing his son Conor in Tears in Heaven.
The most profound and harrowing listening experience of them all, perhaps, is classical composer Gustav Mahler's Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Death of Children).
Written between 1901 and 1904, it sets five poems by German poet Friedrich Rückert to music.
As with Cave's Skeleton Tree, Kindertotenlieder deals with the psychological torment of loss, and is especially heart-rending because Mahler and Rückert knew of what they spoke. Rückert's two children died of scarlet fever, while eight of Mahler's 14 siblings died while children.
When Mahler completed Kindertotenlieder, shortly after the birth of his second daughter, Maria, his wife Alma felt "it was tempting providence". Sadly, she was proved right – Maria died of scarlet fever at the age of 4.
Of course, this was in a time when infant-mortality rates were much higher.
For the more fortunate among us, the natural order of things is that children outlive their parents.
[ In pictures: Celebrities who lost children too soon ]
Consequently, popular music has many more songs honouring deceased mothers and fathers than lost children.
The 1988 Mike & The Mechanics hit The Living Years struck a chord with many listeners.
The song, which addresses a son’s regret over unresolved conflict with his deceased father, was based on the true experience of one of its writers, Scotsman B A Robertson.
Kate's Bush's sublime and hushed piano ballad A Coral Room (from the 2005 album, Aerial) stands as a hugely touching nod to her late mother, Hannah.
When Bush sings of a little brown milk jug she inherits becoming a receptacle for her mother’s memory, then it falls, it is a simple and perfect metaphor for evanescence.
On 1998's Electro-Shock Blues, perhaps the masterpiece of "grief pop", Eels – aka Mark Oliver Everett – addresses both his mother's terminal lung cancer and the suicide of his sister, Elizabeth.
The heart-rending songs include Going To Your Funeral Part 1 and The Medication Is Wearing Off.
Given the strange and long-established appeal of melancholic music, it is perhaps unsurprising that there have also been many hits about fictional bereavements. Indeed, in the late 1950s and early ’60s, this dark art even constituted a recognised subgenre known as the “teenage tragedy song”.
Particularly fine examples include the Shangri-Las 1964 hit Leader Of The Pack, in which a girl loses her boyfriend in a motorcycle accident, and The Everly Brothers' heavenly ballad Ebony Eyes, in which the object of the narrator's affection dies in a plane crash. Perhaps these and other songs built upon fictional losses – including 1969's Honey, by Bobby Goldsboro; and 1978's Forever Autumn by Justin Hayward, from Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds concept album based on the classic HG Wells sci-fi novel – allow listeners to touch base with death in "safe" surroundings.
Yet for all their melodrama and shameless heart-tugging, even compositions based on imagined loss can take on real emotional heft when the listener has been bereaved in real-life.
What's clear is that music remains a natural and extremely helpful channel for coping with loss – one of the things that can help "get us through", or at least assist in releasing pent-up emotions. Not for nothing are songs such as Robbie Williams's Angels and the Celine Dion hit My Heart Will Go On still hugely popular at funeral services – interestingly, both evoke the idea of faith in some kind of continued existence for the departed.
Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, death as explored in popular song has been particularly prominent in rap and hip-hop – and not only because of turf-war fatalities or musicians aligned with the Black Lives Matter movement protesting against the shootings of black men by American law enforcers.
Dr Dre and Mary J Blige's collaboration on 2001's brilliant The Message featured Dre shedding tears over the murder of his younger brother, Tyree, while Puffy's ubiquitous I'll Be Missing You famously paid tribute to the late Biggie Smalls.
Brooklyn-born rapper Nas, aka Nasir bin Olu Dara Jones, meanwhile, gave us Dance, a moving hip-hop lament for his mother.
“I miss you more each second I breathe” sings Nas of Anne Jones, who died of cancer in 2002. “You will always live through me.”
And, like so many deceased souls, through the music.
artslife@thenational.ae
