Fifteen Feet of Pure White Snow

You gotta keep challenging yourself

gotta help yourself
gotta save yourself, save yourself 'cause there's no one who'd do it for you.

The only person who's supposed not to button up his shirts is Nicholas and since someone somewhere was too lazy to make women's shirt which actually could be buttoned up I had to add all those buttons myself, so I did.

God has given you but one heart.

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Fifteen Feet of Pure White Snow (play) (a-song-meaning-debate-to-read-beforehand)

Mona and Mary, Michael, Mark, Matthew and John are all long gone, for a communist regime is never particularly fond of religion and suppresses it (and so it's getting dark). The neighbour is your enemy, for he might turn you in (anytime and for anything, even falsely, most likely out of cowardice). There's not much food, there's not much clothes, there's not much at all in the shop, so there's nothing for you to steal. You are paralyzed by the lack of feeling, because you are constantly being told that everything's fine and that you ought to be happy, but you are not. (Even though) many people around sort of are, just because they have been told so and because they don't have to care about anything, really. But you do care and you are alone, going mad and asking if there's anybody else feeling the same? Or if they don't see that they are under fifteen feet of pure white snow? And many of them don't see. And since the surface looks all right, there's just pure white snow, pure and fine, the people outside don't have a clue what's going on underneath. So there's no one to save you, you have to save yourself, you have to help yourself. Raise your hands up to the sky (and turn to God?), or raise your hands up to the sky (and get through the fifteen feet of pure white snow and get out of there?), or raise your hands up to the sky (because that's the least you can do?), or whatever. (Over-interpretation starting now.)

As much as I don't believe there's single truth in anything, as much as I actually enjoy multiple interpretations and overlays, and as much as I believe in the complexity of human mind in general, where there are many different things going on in one moment (not to mention the mind of Nick Cave), I can't see any cocaine in the song anymore. Nevertheless, I can imagine that when writing it, he was aware of and probably even enjoyed the fact that people would automatically connect it to drugs (not willing to or lacking the background needed to go beyond that) (buried under fifteen feet of pure white snow maybe, oh the irony). 

Anyway, if not the lyrics itself, the video is surely enough of a proof. The inscription at the beginning, the interior, the portraits hanging on the wall, the clothes the people are wearing and the sort-of-organized-dancing giving more than enough hints (which if you are not quite able to decipher, you should consider yourself lucky).

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And some people say it's just rock and roll
but it gets you right down to your soul (and you gotta keep pushing it).