Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds is a famous and still-active rock band known for its diverse but distinct music styles and gothic storylines. From 1980s to the present days, Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds has been continuously building its own universe and style of narratives through music blurring the lines of a variety of genres, such as punk, post-punk, gothic, blues, soul and folk.

The stories told by the bad seeds’ lyrics, tainted naturally with the typical characteristics of those genres, attain a unique balance through juxtapositions of the sacred and the profane, the death and rebirth, the killing and the romance, the painfully genuine mercy and the merciless universal sufferings. The classic Nick Cave lexicon contains the trademark combinations of “fuck”, “murder”, “jesus” and “love”.

As is described by Nick Cave himself, his lyricism centers around contradictory, opposing and conflicting elements, yet each of the bad seeds’ albums is also incredibly cohesive, thus giving me the curiosity to illustrate the progression of lyricism in the bad seeds’ timeline. The project aims to investigate the evolution of the band Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds. I intend to visualize these juxtapositions and themes through categorical and numerical measures, based mainly on text analysis of the lyrics data I scraped.

One of their iconic albums is Murder Ballads, released in 1996. It is regarded as one of the most character-driven, bloody and brutal albums. It certainly contributed largely to the wordcount of profanities.

Nick Cave describes, “It actually started as a joke, in a way, because the idea of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds dedicating an entire album to murder titillated us in some way, because it was so obvious.”

The entire album is dedicated to murders. Each track tells a story of various deaths.

one dot represents the death of one person. while in The Curse Of Millhaven, unkown number of children and an entrie village were killed.

* hover to see the names of each victim

Apart from the unkown deaths, the most popular ways of deaths in this album are stabbed by a knife and shot by a gun.

Both the instrumental and Nick Cave's vioce create the horrifying soundscape of murders.

Each victim has their own backstory. This is the victims categorized by their character in the story.

Most tracks are based on or inspired by traditional ballads, legends or novellas. The bad seeds' lyrical world is often set around the gloomy time period of the 1900s.

The lexicon of the bad seeds’ lyrics transgress the borders of life and death, good and evil, past and present. It is not surprising to find the most used words are very polarized in nature. Nick Cave does quite enjoy the folk-ish rambling of “babe”, even more then his obsession with murder and biblical references.

Using the python package LyricsGenius by John W. Miller, I scraped all of the bad seeds' lyrics from Genius and did word frequency analysis.

*hover to see the exact number of word count

Using the python package Afinn created by Finn Nielsen, I computed a sentiment score for the lyrics of each of the bad seeds’ albums, in an effort to map out the progression of the lyrics’ intensities.

After guitarist Blixa Bargeld left before the making of Nocturama, the creative center gravitated more towards Nick Cave and Warren Ellis. The bad seeds gradually progress into a more cathartic, yet still conflicting theme.

* the more positive the score is, the more positive the general emotion is within this album, and vice versa