Hearing "Red Right Hand" Anew

During my evening dog walks in the quarantine quiet, I’ve been enjoying doing some deep listening to songs: thinking about the poetry, the themes, the mechanics, and my historical relationship to the song. Recently, I listened to Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds’ recording of “Red Right Hand” (1996) in this manner and, to my surprise, heard it in an entirely new way. My imagination had always held the seducer described in the song to be sinewy, handsome, and Byronic like Stephen King’s Randall Flagg from The Stand. But a new thought came to me:

The seducer can also be the intentionally-rumpled, cynical, ill-tailored, faux-populist, manipulative, unpolished, yuckster-huckster Trump archetype as well.

In the climax of the song, the narrator warns us:

You’ll see him in your nightmares
You’ll see him in your dreams
He’ll appear out of nowhere but
He ain’t what he seems
You’ll see him in your head
On the TV screen
Hey buddy, I’m warning
You to turn it off
He’s a ghost, he’s a god
He’s a man, he’s a guru
You’re one microscopic cog
In his catastrophic plan
Designed and directed by
His red right hand

To me, Cave has so perfectly ingested English poetry so that he’s able to call back to and interweave a rich poetic legacy in his writing.¹ He seems to be so at home that he could well have been a contemporary of Browning or Shelley. But if there’s a looming eminence to his authorial voice it is John Milton: titanic, brooding, and doomed. I suppose I had always imagined the seducer as a proxy for a Miltonian Lucifer described thusly in Book I of Paradise Lost:

…round he throws his baleful eyes
That witness’d huge affliction and dismay
Mixt with obdurate pride and stedfast hate:
At once as far as Angels kenn he views
The dismal Situation waste and wilde,
A Dungeon horrible, on all sides round
As one great Furnace flam’d, yet from those flames
No light, but rather darkness visible

And it was the design of the fallen Star of the Morning, the proud, beautiful, prideful and doomed seducer who walks among to turn us away from righteousness by offering us tiny, venal, individually-tailored comforts to turn our collective will toward forwarding his “catastrophic plan.”

As the debate over whether the US House would take action against a member who had promulgated rank falsehoods, called Sandy Hook a fake flag operation, and had personally verbally assaulted a boy that had the unimaginable good luck to survive it, I heard the song’s lyrics anew.

I now heard:

Take a little walk to the edge of town
And go across the tracks

As an invitation to a mental attitude where the Big Lies (“largest turnout ever,” “won 2016 by a landslide”) were agreed to.

And in the wastes of a rusted post-industrial society the seducer comes:

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

And he seduces not by grand gesture, but by tiny ego-fluffing acts, pushing the one drug that, unlike oxycontin, you can’t buy:

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

And once you’re in his thrall, the seducer teaches you to love the material wealth you’ve suffered so long without. His methods are knee-jerk obvious:

You don’t have no money?
He’ll get you some
You don’t have no car?
He’ll get you one

And he, only he, understands you, your rage, your fury, your desperation in a way that only he could because he’s the only one deep enough to get you:

You don’t have no self-respect
You feel like an insect
Well don’t you worry buddy
‘Cause here he comes

The poetry of the song works brilliantly because we as listeners are preoccupied by the intimate conversion of the latest disciple in the opening 75% of the song, but it’s only at the end that the narrator opens the frame to ask: what happens when many, each seduced by small, intimate ego affirmations, are aggregated?

You’re one microscopic cog
In his catastrophic plan
Designed and directed by
His red right hand

Footnotes

As a testament to his influence, my beautiful bride approached the altar of our union to a string-quartet version of Cave’s “The Ship Song.”

Come sail your ships around me
And burn your bridges down
We make a little history, baby
Every time you come around