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Showing posts with the label #WutheringHeights

How Kate Bush Saved Me from Being a “Normal Girl”

#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 mu

Kate Bush, The Dreaming : A Pitchfork Review

#KateBush # WutheringHeights # Lionheart # NeverforEver #TheDreaming In 1982, Kate Bush’s daring and dense fourth album marked her transformation into a fearless experimental artist who was legible, audibly very queer, and very obviously in love with pop music. In 1978, Kate Bush first hit the UK pop charts with “Wuthering Heights” off her romantic, ambitious progressive pop debut The Kick Inside. That same year, her more confident, somewhat disappointing follow-up Lionheart and 1980’s Never for Ever had a grip of charting singles that further grew her UK success without achieving mega-stardom—she barely cracked into American college rock. What is truly amazing between the first chapter of her career and the new one that began with 1982’s The Dreaming is how consistently Bush avoided the musical world around her, preferring to hone and blend her literary, film, and musical inspirations (Elton John, David Bowie, and Pink Floyd) into the idiosyncratic perfection that was 1985’s Ho