Nick Cave has spent four decades writing songs about sin, grief and God, and he has finally found a devil worth naming. In Issue #381 of The Red Hand Files, he gives Suno a title fit for a murder ballad: “the Great Cancellator.”
The occasion was a double bill of reader letters. Nuno from Porto asked whether we can still separate the art from the artist, while Catherine from Bristol asked whether Cave is an AI “doomer or boomer.”
Cave’s long-held answer to Nuno was no, since art and artist are “as inseparable as the waves from the sea they rise from.” Then came the twist, delivered with the timing of a man who knows exactly where the knife goes.
Song generators, he argues, have upended the whole debate. The artist “can be removed from the equation altogether, like so much dross.”
That is the sharpest reframing of the AI argument we have read all year. The old cancel culture fight was about which artists deserve an audience, and Suno answers by making the artist optional (problem solved, in the bleakest way imaginable).
His description of the platform reads like a charge sheet. Suno, he writes, “has never loved or laughed or grieved” yet still “produces an imitation of the soul.”
The kicker is the speed. Cave notes it does this “in fifteen seconds flat,” and calls the result “an affront to any songwriter who has lived and struggled in this world and earned the right to create a song.”
To Catherine, he admits he does not know whether AI will save or end the world. On music, though, he does not hedge an inch.
“Song generator platforms are, in my view, indicators of this nascent technology’s demonic potential to hollow out human endeavour and sever our connection to the divine,” Cave writes.
“They mock creation itself by rendering humanity unnecessary, taking the fruits of human striving and reducing them to mere products,” he adds. “It is, perhaps, our final, most soul-destroying humiliation.”
Strong words, but hardly a sudden conversion. Back in January 2023, when a fan sent him a ChatGPT song “in the style of Nick Cave,” he called it “replication as travesty” in Issue #218.
That letter ended with the bluntest music review of the decade: “This song sucks.” He also offered the line that still sits at the heart of the human case, “Data doesn’t suffer.”
What has changed in three years is the scale. In 2023 he was swatting away novelty lyrics, and now he is staring down a company selling paid plans while fighting artists in court.
We have tracked that fight closely, including Suno’s push to plug into ChatGPT and Claude while asking a court to treat artist names as tags. Cave’s letter is the moral case that sits underneath the legal one.
He saves his driest blow for the censors. For anyone keen to purge problematic artists, he says, these platforms are “cause for celebration,” since they “promise to rid the world of artists altogether.”
Plenty of musicians have grumbled about AI, but few have the pulpit or the prose to make it land like this. Cave has written the scripture for the resistance, and the tech industry will struggle to generate a reply with half its soul.
