THE MUSIC OF KATE BUSH
Bookish
THE MUSIC OF KATE BUSH
First, the droning—soft and constant, otherworldly. Next the drum-beat, dense and mumming; it sounds like thunder, it sounds like a heartbeat. Finally, the synth riff, clouds rolling across faraway hills. So begins ‘Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)’, the opening track of Kate Bush’s 1985 album, The Hounds of Love. A song that sounds like a dream; an album that sounds astral.
A great deal of Bush’s music possesses an oneirological quality. Both in terms of soundscape—Bush’s production is always vast and delphic, that feeling where the details of dream slip away as you awaken—and in terms of lyrics: Bush sings about her own experiences rarely, instead choosing to write from the perspective of characters. This propensity for plucking narratives out of what seems like thin-air lends her an oracle-like quality, which has been ridiculed as often as it has been celebrated. As Mararget Talbot writes in The New Yorker, “And yet—in part because she emerged into the public eye at just eighteen, and with ‘Wuthering Heights,’ surely the most literary and therefore one of the strangest hit singles in history—Bush struck some people as a wide-eyed sprite to whom music somehow happened, not an artist fully in command of her own ideas and craft.” The Hounds of Love has always struck me as both a refutation and an embrace of the characterisation Talbot describes.
On the one hand, the album is intricately constructed, made up of two halves. The first is the eponymous Hounds of Love (which, for the sake of clarity, I will be referring to as THoL to distinguish it from the album holistically). A collection of five discrete tracks, THoL contains some of the best pop songs ever written. The second half is a concept suite titled The Ninth Wave, seven interlocking tracks which form a cohesive narrative about a woman floating in water—Ophelia-like—half-drowned, half-lucid. The Hounds of Love was Bush’s follow-up to the critical and commercial failure The Dreaming (1982) which was—unjustly—maligned for being too clever, too writerly, and overproduced. If the strike against Bush was that she wasn’t in control of her music, then The Dreaming was viewed as her trying too hard to compensate. With The Hounds of Love Bush doubled down, went hermetic: she built her own 24-track studio, she used the Fairlight CMI synthesizer, and she wrote every song solo. People called her overproduced; she would see how overproduced she could become
And yet, for all her tinkering, the result is an album that feels like it happened to her—through her, as a conduit. I don’t write this to detract from her talent. Rather I mean it as a complement: from its opening moments—that aforementioned droning on ‘Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)’ to the bittersweet guitar plucking on ‘The Morning Fog’—Bush’s music feels something beyond the limits of human creation. Divine in the most traditional sense of the world.
I want to run with the idea of Bush’s music as something that happens to her for a moment longer, because it perhaps provides the best vocabulary for describing what makes her such a distinct creative voice now (often idolized and imitated but the current wave of anti-pop stars but never recreated). This description—lyrics and music that arrives to the creative fully formed, as if in a dream—has a close resemblance to the medieval literary form of the dream-vision. Both a literary trope and genre unto itself, the dream-vision saw a narrator recount a highly allegorical dream they “experienced”, which contains some kind of knowledge or revelation. Dante’s Inferno was a dream-vision. Chaucer’s poems were dream-visions. Percy Bysshe Shelley re-imagined the genre in ‘The Poet's Dream’. Then the Victorians reimagined the genre again, bending it towards the gothic. Alfred Tennyson famously played with the trope in his Arthurian poetry—which is among the many influences on The Hounds of Love.
Perhaps I’m reading too much into Bush’s referencing Tennyson. But it is hard, knowing Tennyson is a spice in The Hounds of Love’s creative stew, to not extrapolate it onto the album, onto Bush’s discography. What an elegant way to describe her music: modern dream-visions.
And if we understand this to be her style, then The Hounds of Love is her formal masterpiece. The album's halves can each be read as the other’s dream-vision. If we assume The Ninth Wave is reality, and the woman in the water is our dreamer, then the narrative sees her drifting in and out of consciousness as the water threatens to pull her under. On ‘And Dream of Sheep’ and ‘Under the Ice’ she’s barely holding on, but then on the (aptly titled) ‘Waking the Witch’ she is snapped awake as a man’s voice calls out to her. Who is he: a father, a brother, a husband, a friend? Or maybe he is a lover. Maybe he is, as I like to think, the lover from ‘Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)’. This would cast THoL’s five-track run as a series of interloping dream-visions she experiences while drowning. That each song focuses on a different kind of personal relationship—mothers in ‘Mother Stands for Comfort’, fathers in ‘Cloudbusting’, lovers in ‘Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)’ and ‘The Hounds of Love’—has clear meaning: what else would one see in their final, hallucinatory, moments then those closest to them?
But we can just as easily read The Ninth Wave as THoL’s dream-vision. Sonically this would make sense: The Ninth Wave’s production is more experimental, more dream-like, jumping from image to image, moment to moment, driven more by a feeling than any discernible logic. And although THoL lacks a unified narrative, there is nothing to say the characters from each song can’t all have had the same dream-vision. In fact, the notion of strangers from different times and places all sharing the same experience seems quintessentially Bush-ian. When we listen to her music are we not strangers invited to share in the experiences of strangers we have never met—who Bush, more than likely, has never met? Read this way The Hounds of Love becomes her thesis statement, an argument for music that is overproduced and writerly, full of interconnections; music that seems to have arrived as if in a dream; music that attempts to transcend those elements of the human experience that we think of as diffuse.
“Oh, come on, angel,” coos Bush in ‘Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)’, “Come on, come on, darling/Let’s exchange the experience.”
By Joshua Sorenson, an Australian writer whose criticism and fiction have appeared in literary journals such as Kill Your Darlings, Overland Journal, Voiceworks, and Going Down Swinging.
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