Today Kate Bush is 56 years old. Next month she will
undertake a 22 date live performance residency in London, extending into
October, called Before the Dawn. Brave girl. Tickets for the shows sold out within 15 minutes. Prices are allegedly moving well upwards of £1,000. I suppose everyone knows
it will probably be the last live show hurrah for Bush, who is a major celebrity in
Britain.
She never attained that kind of status here, though with
news like the above getting copy she might yet. Nothing impresses Americans
like selling out and driving up prices. Nothing matters unless it’s in demand
and demand means nothing if people don’t put their money where their mouth is.
Some might say the rampant materialism of the U.S. is a sickness. I prefer to
see it as business as usual.
Anyway, what song to present as tribute to the unique gifts
of Kate Bush? Could choose “Wuthering Heights” which she wrote as a teenager,
released—finally—the year she turned 20, and it held #1 in the UK for 4 weeks.
First self-penned song by a woman to hit the top of the charts. You can see how
that would make someone a celebrity, especially someone so young and quirky as
Kate. The song dramatizes the position of Cathy from Emily Brontë’s novel. The subject
matter of Bush’s songs do tend to the unusual.
I’ve already posted about a song from The Dreaming (1982), my favorite album of hers and the one that
gives her high “art rock” cred. Since Kate’s only a year older than me, I assume
she grew up aware of some of the same prog rock artists I listened to in my
teens. She’s a bit of an offshoot of that kind of music—with collaborations
over her career that include David Gilmour of Pink Floyd, Gary Brooker of
Procol Harum and of course Peter Gabriel, formerly of Genesis. There’s a roll
call right there of some of the musical acts I mean. The Dreaming moves beyond all those worthies, and throw Bowie and
whoever else you want into the list too. It’s the one, and the least in sales.
Caviar to the general, y’know?
I considered a song from Hounds
of Love (1985), which was her biggest success in the U.S. up to that point.
“Running Up That Hill” is probably one of her best-known songs, along with “Cloudbusting”
and “Hounds of Love”—all from that album and all featured at times on MTV back
in the day. If Kate had toured in the U.S. to promote that record, I have no
doubt she would’ve become a much bigger celebrity here too. I respect her for
not doing that—in the sense that keeping aloof from the U.S. music industry and
press seems a much saner way to go about things. If you don’t need ‘em, don’t
join ‘em.
The Sensual World
was released in 1989, and I’ve picked today’s song from that. It was one of the
singles and has a video. Kate did a number of artsy, high production videos, mainly
because she has training in dance and movement and likes to be seen doing that—if
not live. Still, I’m generally underwhelmed by video production and I won’t say
anything except that hers present an opportunity to see her, and that’s well
worth it. With this album, the main run of Kate Bush albums ends as she was, in
some ways, a distinctly Seventies-Eighties type of artist. Or maybe it’s just a
way of saying that the Kate we loved best was under thirty.
In 1993, at 35, she put out The Red Shoes, one of those fully empowered kinds of
records. Doesn’t have to prove anything. Has a vividness that makes it better
than Sensual World, in some ways. But
it came to seem a coda, particularly as The
Whole Story (a career compilation) had been released earlier. In 2005 she
came back with Aerial, an album (double CD) that
seemed to draw from Hounds of Love to
its present in its textures and its mix of somewhat more personal themes and
her usual odd interests. “How to Be Invisible” seemed only too germane for an
artist who had been out of sight, and mostly out of mind, for 12 years.
In 2011 came The
Director’s Cut, which reworked songs from the 1989-1993 period as if, quite
rightly, that era was deemed not so good on its own merits (I’ve posted on “Flower
of the Mountain” in this series). 50
Words for Snow, in 2011, had a quality that one might hope she will pursue
in the future: take a theme and make an album, or a song cycle or collection.
Kate Bush has always had a sui generis tendency. She’s one of a kind and each
of her albums is a different occasion. The time between them helps in that
regard. One doesn’t expect “continuity” so much as consistency. That her albums have,
though of course what we’ve lost, with the loss of the Kate in her twenties and
thirties, is that piercingly high vocal register. Those fortunate enough to
have tickets to her London shows will be treated to seeing how she reinvents
her repertoire in her mid-fifties. A good age for taking stock, hmm?
So, enough about her. Now about me. “Love and Anger” is one
of the songs I like best on The Sensual
World because it’s not so arcane that I have no idea what she’s going on
about, and it’s got the great vocal overlays that I love so much and features
an intriguing line: “Living in the gap between past and future.” That’s an
important gap to live in, isn’t it? It’s called “the present” but everyone is
rather vague on how big that gap is. It’s only a moment of consciousness, if
that. And the more you see “the past” as a long continuity (as I tend to do),
and “the future” as an unworkable unknown, that gap is all you’ve got. Or
rather: that gap is the place where you use the past to affect the future, but
it’s also the place where “the future” becomes “the past,” like immediately and
incrementally.
And since the song is about “love and anger”—and something “so
deep you don’t think you can speak about it to anyone”—it certainly had its place
in the early Nineties, for me. More so than the more contemporary songs on The
Red Shoes. It’s all about feeling something deeply and not wanting to tell
anyone about it. Or not yet. Not unrequited love, rather what Paul Westerberg
calls “love untold.” And the dream of that love is figured by Kate as “two
strings speak in sympathy” and “building a house of the future together.” It’s
a positive song, full of a yearning optimism. Which is nice.
There’s also those background voices that keep chiming on “what
would we do without you,” nicely synched to the drum track, giving
us a feeling much like a goad. In that sense it’s a prickly song (which is, I
guess, where the anger comes in) with those propulsive drums. It seems to want the addressee (whom I take to
be the singer herself) to take control of a situation, not simply languish with
oughta, coulda, shoulda. “Waiting for a moment that will never happen.”
“Don’t ever think that you can’t change the past and the
future,” she says. And that’s quite a gauntlet the little lady tosses down
there. Change what has already happened, change what hasn’t happened yet. But
changing the past changes the future, doesn’t it? And arriving at a different future than the
past seemed to lead to changes what the past means or maybe even highlights a
different past. There is a way out of this. Thanks, Ariadne!
It could take me all my life
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