The men who are great today are so marginalized they're almost by definition weird. Nick Cave, for instance. He's my idol. I saw him two years ago with his buzz-saw hard-rock band, Grinderman, and it was one of the best things I've ever seen, so funny and so scary and so—and this is the important thing—shameless. He's our Jim Morrison, totally unembarrassed about reaching for the godhead and yet dirtier than Morrison ever dreamed of being, and simultaneously responsible for some of the most beautiful music I've ever heard and music that's so perverse even I have to steel myself to listen to it. A giant, I say—not to mention a guy who never wears anything but a suit. Because he's a musician, you might think him marginalized—but marginalized doesn't mean marginal. It means weird. In the best way. In the life-giving way, even when he's compiling a list of God's offenses. One afternoon, in Romania on a business trip, I sat with some beautiful Romanian women watching a video of Nick Cave singing his song "Mermaids" with a children's choir. It's a song about God and mermaids, not to mention a song that rhymes catch and snatch in the first stanza—and he sings it with a children's choir! And the women I watched it with, these beautiful young women, had tears in their eyes. His songs might be classified as either "sacred or profane" or "sacred and profane," and that tells you how indispensably weird he is.

—Tom Junod

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