Panties! I felt weird even writing that! It's a decidedly uncomfortable word to speak as a dude, which is why Nick Cave has spoken out in defence of his use of the P-word in his Wild God track "O Wow O Wow (How Wonderful She Is)."
The piano love song begins with the lines, "She rises in advance of her panties / I can confirm that God actually exists."
In a fan letter on Cave's Red Hand Files website, Neil from the UK wrote, "Sorry if it sounds harsh, but I've never had a single line pause an album like that before. I've listened to the album many weeks now, and that line don't shift, so I'm asking, did it give you pause? Were you actually happy with it? Should 'panties' ever be in a song lyric? Idk, but the line leaves me hitting the skip button."
Cave responded that "several other people" have written him to share their discomfort with the line, while one album review singled it out as his "worst line" ever. Cave noted that the line was written about his ex, Anita Lane, and that he was so pleased with the "simple, silly, happy verse" that he took the rest of the day off after writing it.
He wrote that the lyric has a "sweet, goofy naivety. For me, it recalls a time when innocent love could be such. The discomfort of the 'panties' line is, in a way, the point — it represents a kind of freedom or unburdening, a way to exist outside the constraints of good writing or good taste or good behaviour and become something emergent and disorderly." He added that he believes Anita — who died in 2021 — also liked the line.
Believe it or not, "O Wow O Wow (How Wonderful She Is)" isn't the first time Cave has sung the word "panties." His 2004 track "Babe, You Turn Me On" includes the line, "I put one hand on your round ripe heart / And the other down your panties."