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