Nick the Stripper

"Nick the Stripper" is possibly the most feverishly alive thing The Birthday Party ever recorded, which is a strange thing to say about music this deliberately grotesque. The riff is a kind of lurching carnival figure — not quite danceable but impossible to stay still through, insistent in the way only deeply strange rhythms can be. Howard's guitar has that signature corroded quality, simultaneously angular and slippery, while the rhythm section drives forward with the momentum of something that has abandoned brakes. Cave's vocal performance is theatrical in the extreme, adopting personas and shedding them mid-phrase, the voice moving between leering announcement and near-convulsive release. The subject — a figure who is simultaneously debased and exultant, stripped of dignity and somehow triumphant in that stripping — captures the band's consistent interest in transgression as liberation rather than condemnation. This is where their debt to the Stooges becomes clearest: the same commitment to using rock music as a vehicle for dismantling propriety until something raw and embarrassing and alive breaks through. It was a provocation aimed squarely at post-punk's tendency toward cool restraint. You'd play this when you want music that refuses to be tasteful, that insists on its own excess — before a night out or in the middle of one, anywhere the volume can be turned high enough to feel it physically.