Nick Cave

Nick Cave is, without a doubt, Australia's greatest gift to music. Ever. I wish I had written the following rant, but I infact found it in the comments section of this article.

Zeta says:

01:07pm | 16/12/10

Taste in music is subjective, but in my quest for mathematic excellence I’ve compiled a simple standard for which all excellent music can be judged - can you dance to it? can you make love to it? can you wear a trenchcoat while walking through a dystopic cyberpunk landscape to it? Is it Bowie? Assuming all good music adheres to at least one of these key metrics you can know what is good and what is bad. We call this game ‘Ziggy’s Gambit’.

In pure mathematical terms we establish Bowie as the greatest recording artist of all time. From there, all artists are established at a game theoretical ‘distance’ from Bowie at -1 -2 -3 -4 etc or for those bands that acheive greatest in areas Bowie did not, such as filthy UK dubstep outfits, or anti-masonic outsider country and western acts, +1 +2 etc etc.

Where Bowie equals Z, Nick Cave is therefore Z+3/X (where X is the number of times you’ve been in a bar fight while Stagger Lee is playing on the juke box) - Y (where Y is the number of times you’ve listened to Cave after breaking up with your girlfriend) to the power of How Many School Shootings Were Inspired By Nick Cave (answer is 2).

Thus Nick Cave is good. You can’t argue with the maths.

Ziggy’s Gambit can also calculate which David Bowie incarnation was superior by Z being the metaphysical notion of Bowie and X being the Bowie aspect you wish to compare. The answer, alarmingly, continues you to be the Thin White Duke. Controversial? But the maths don’t lie. The equilibrium point is actually Spaceboy, from the Hello Spaceboy album.

Whoever this Zeta person is, his comments are always hilarious and well researched. Hence me having to quote it here for posterity.