#KateBush #TheKickInside #ThisWomansWork #WutheringHeights
I first encountered Kate Bush when I was about 17. I was part of the dance program at my school, and our teacher, the much beloved Mr. M., had the most sophisticated taste in music. Sinéad O’Connor, Ani DiFranco, Imogen Heap, and Meshell Ndegeocello scored our warm-ups and across-the-floors, the throbbing bassline of “If That’s Your Boyfriend (He Wasn’t Last Night)” rattling the studio’s chandelier; and at our annual dance concert, a two-night-only affair at a theatre on the Upper West Side, a crowd of sixth graders would twirl around to Bulgarian folk music and Sigur Rós. If I’d joined the company in a bid to belong—to disappear into a synchronized corps—its soundtrack had, over time, yielded an equal and opposite reaction. Without a doubt, my developing taste for alternative-Euro-art-rock was only making me more weird.
Kate Bush, who celebrates her 61st birthday today, was another one of Mr. M.’s beguiling muses; he’d named a piece in one of our concerts after a song on Hounds of Love, the English singer-songwriter’s fifth studio album, and choreographed another to 1993’s “The Red Shoes,” her propulsive paean to the Powell and Pressburger classic. When, during one rehearsal, he switched on the stirring piano ballad “This Woman’s Work,” from 1989, I recognized the song right away (I knew the cover by Maxwell), but not the voice.
A bit of digging eventually led me to The Kick Inside, Kate Bush’s auspicious 1978 debut and, after a few listens, one of my favorite things I’d ever heard. Released when she was only 19, the record sowed the seeds of a career both intensely inspired and utterly authentic; one that would transcend the boundaries of genre—and the conventions of popular songwriting—to assemble a body of work unashamed of its off-kilter genius. Today, she counts among her fans artists as varied as St. Vincent, Charli XCX, and Big Boi (who has expounded the virtues of “Running Up That Hill” at length).
It all began with her smash-hit single, 1977’s “Wuthering Heights,” which takes as its subjects Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff of the eponymous Emily Brontë novel. “Heathcliff,” the infectious chorus goes, “It's me, I’m Cathy, I've come home, I’m—so co-o-o-old / Let me in through your wind-o-o-ow.” (Over a decade later, Bush would revisit Anglo-Irish literature in “The Sensual World,” using bits of Molly Bloom’s soliloquy in Ulysses.) From the outset, Bush determined that the strength of her imagination—paired with an iron-clad resolve to see it through—would be central to her art. Although inspired by a TV adaptation (namely, the moment in the 1967 miniseries when Heathcliff is visited by Catherine’s ghost), Kate Bush didn’t sit down to write “Wuthering Heights” until she’d read the entire book. “I needed to get the mood properly,” she explained to Denis Tuohy in 1978.
It’s a bonkers concept for a song—especially one that would sit atop the U.K. charts for a month straight, replacing ABBA’s “Take a Chance on Me”—with the most incredible pseudo-operatic vocals (and a perfectly bizarre music video) to match; but that’s not even my favorite track on The Kick Inside. Where an immediate obsession with “Wuthering Heights” bore the useful reminder that weird (and bookish!) could be pretty wonderful, the rest of that album, which ran the gamut from absolute bangers (see: “The Saxophone Song,” which more than delivers on the promise of its title, and “Strange Phenomena”) to moments of pure poetry (see: “The Man with the Child in His Eyes”), made an ever stronger case for the young Kate Bush as one of music’s foremost expositors of female sensuality.
There was something unquestionably dreamy about the songstress: Beyond her long, black hair and lithe figure—she was a student of both dance and mime—her meandering melodies and fondness for a soft focus gave her oeuvre an otherworldly quality, buttressed over the years by albums like The Dreaming (1982) and Aerial (2005). Still, there existed from the start a deeply corporeal side to her work, too, manifested in songs that addressed all areas of the sexual experience. (The Kick Inside’s title track, for instance, is about incest.) The raw desire powering songs like “Feel It” and “L’Amour Looks Something Like You” would evolve, quite naturally, into odes to pregnancy and motherhood; works like 1980’s hypnotic “Breathing,” about a fetus anticipating nuclear war (“Nobody writes songs like that,” the author Neil Gaiman said in 2014. “It’s utterly political, and it’s utterly female.”)
Strictly speaking, “This Woman’s Work” is about a breech birth (Bush penned it for the 1988 John Hughe film She’s Having a Baby), but more recently, the song has been reclaimed as an anthem to female perseverance, and one can understand why. I can see myself in the dance studio now, tired, anxious, but feeling more and more myself all the time. “I know you've got a little life in you yet,” Kate was singing urgently over the speakers, and I could feel it. “I know you've got a lot of strength left.”
By Marley Marius -vogue.com
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