CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 6/8/2024

"Next-level otherness" in Pride Month staff pick 'Nick Cave: Forothermore'

Soundsuit (2008) is from Nick Cave: Forothermore, a staff favorite year-round, but also an essential volume in our Pride Month Staff Picks booklist. “In a sense, the dysmorphic physical forms of Cave’s pretty monsters resist a want for racial or gendered assignation,” Romi Crawford writes. “The Soundsuits might therefore be interpreted in terms not unlike those used to describe the status of the Black dandy, who, as Monica L. Miller explains, ‘brought along with him a destabilization of other categories of identity; he was essentially nothing but mixed, a product of interracial relations, a sliding point on the spectrum of gender and sexuality.’ Cave’s objects welcome a state of, and a space for, alternate or next-level otherness, instantiating secure pockets and emplacements that secure gender and racial autonomy and inventiveness.”