What it feels like

... to be the subject of a song?
Mat Snow, writer, subject of Scum by Nick Cave

I'd got to know Nick Cave when he fronted the Birthday Party and I was just starting to write for a living. He made great music, I wrote gushing reviews. In 1983 he and his then-girlfriend Anita stayed in my flat in Brixton when they needed a room and I needed rent money. When they moved out, we lost touch, until in 1986 I came to interview him for NME. Frosty in the extreme, he explained why.

The previous year I'd mentioned in print that I found his forthcoming album "disappointing". I was, he told me, "an arsehole". And he'd written a song that developed this theme. Weeks later, I bought for £1 a green seven-inch flexidisc called Scum off his merchandise stall at a Bad Seeds show at Camden's Electric Ballroom. "Miserable shitwringing turd," he snarled to a grindcore accompaniment, "fuckin' traitor, chronic masturbator, shitlicker, user, self-abuser," adding, almost superfluously, "my un-friend, I'm the type that holds a grudge."

It's a brilliant record, and if I have any complaints it is that Nick has squirrelled Scum away as a bonus CD track on his album Your Funeral, My Trial. Like Dylan's Mr Jones or Pope's Colley Cibber, I'd rather be memorialised as the spotlit object of a genius's scorn than a dusty discographical footnote. Still, my Cave-fan wife-to-be was mightily impressed when, on our first date, I unrolled the story (not for the first time). Seven years later Scum is "our song".

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v165/noodle_vague/Snape_Severus_Snape.gif

i think its great that one can inspire another to immortalise them in song, even if its only to hate.