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I have an on-again, off-again compulsion to purchase albums by women purported to be important in music, according to books like Women in Rock and She's a Rebel. Therefore, when I found a copy of The Dreaming at a used record store some eight months ago, I succumbed to my drive and bought it. I had always eyed it in stores anyway, and enjoyed the picture of Bush preparing to open-mouth kiss a man while rolling her eyes as if she couldn't care less. I have since bought every one of her precious few releases and proudly call myself a "Love-Hound" who has, admittedly, spent way too much time on Gaffaweb, straining my eyes to read the small print of interviews with the enchantress herself. When I first heard Björk as a freshman in High School, I was ecstatic to discover a truly eccentric female artist making challenging music and playing by nobody's rules but her own. When I first heard Kate Bush, I thought, "Wow. She was using helicopters as percussion thirteen years before Björk introduced the sound of molten lava into the pop lexicon."
After my second listening, The Dreaming had me hooked (upon first listen, I nearly dismissed it as an insane collage pasted together from Modern Art Magazine photo spreads and texts from the moldering volumes of an aged English professor's library). It's been said again and again that Tori Amos tries like nobody's business to be Kate Bush. After hearing The Dreaming, I realized that the heavy cockney "Okay, remember" that opens "There Goes a Tenner" was probably a large contributing factor to Amos's decision to become a British citizen. College-radio's favorite redhead obviously spent her entire adolescence imitating Bush in her boudoir mirror and wishing really, really hard that she had Bush's knowledge of fantasy literature. I don't even know over what tomes you'd have to pore over in order to catch up with the level of lore stored in Bush's fantastical mind. The Dreaming explicitly evokes Alice in Wonderland, particularly the scene in which the Duchess's baby turns into a pig. But the album's final event, depicted in "Get out of my House" by the line "I change into the mule", followed by a shockingly guttural Bush and, subsequently, a chorus of male asses whinnying, "Yee-haw, yee-haw!", would have sent chills down even Charles Lutwidge Dodgson's spine. The photographs on Bush's album and single covers alone are enough to make you feel as if you've been slipped a bit of mushroom by a wily caterpillar (perhaps the cover of Bush's second album, Lionheart, on which she appears in a lion costume with the head removed, is the most succinct statement about the savagery and whimsy of which she is capable). The Dreaming's overall ambience is grotesquely surreal, full of bizarre events and characters much in the same vein as Genesis's masterwork The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway. Peter Gabriel was just as willing to sing about shaving hairy hearts as Bush is unintimidated by the prospect of a song about mowing down "tree-like" Aborigines with vans.
While weird dreamscapes are the backdrop of both Lamb Lies Down and The Dreaming, Bush layers a multitude of personalities over her scenes rather than sticking to one narrator. Frequently backed by heavy beating on tribal skins, she divides her time between moaning like a cat in heat, screeching like an owl and cooing and twittering like elderly Chinese opera singers and Bollywood chanteuses. The Dreaming is the musical equivalent of Tracey Ullman's short-lived cable series Tracey Takes On..., which featured Ullman as every character, from an Asian male cab driver to an Australian female tennis champ. Bush "takes on" the aforementioned Cockney robber in "There Goes a Tenner", Houdini's wife in "Houdini", and a hermetic French concierge in "Get Out of My House". A veritable one-woman musical, she has conversations with herself as different characters during several songs (for instance, the sultry lead vocals of "Suspended in Gaffa" playing off the chiding, whiny secondary vocals). The album's most notable recurring leitmotiv transforms itself, chameleon-like (via Bush's versatile vocal chords), from a traditional-sounding Scottish air (in "Night of the Swallow") to an old Cantonese refrain of the type found on the In the Mood for Love soundtrack (in "All the Love"). I can't help but be reminded of John Cage's 1958 recording of "Aria", wherein the singer, Cathy Berberian, was left to interpret colored dots and squiggles drawn by Cage on a blank sheet of paper as she saw fit. Thus, the diva became, in effect, the composer. Berberian decided to interpret the colors and symbols as different voices: blue dots mean a baby's voice, red spots are a vampy seductress's whisper, green squiggles are an Italian washerwoman's bellow, purple specks mean hiccoughs, and so forth (I'm going by memory here). The process seems something like mapping out chaos on a tight grid.
Kate Bush is not without her slavishly devoted followers, but I predict that the sect is about to get much bigger. She was ahead of her time, and people are catching up; Bush-mania looms on the horizon. However, you don't have to take my word for it. Mojo's February 2003 issue included a feature article on Bush in their "English Eccentric Weirdfest" segment. I've been hearing a cover, which I believe to be performed by Placebo, of "Running up that Hill (Deal with God)" fairly often on my local indie rock station. Outkast's Antwan "Big Boi" Patton frequently name-checks Bush in interviews, including ones in recent issues of both Entertainment Weekly and Rolling Stone, saying that he listened to her nearly constantly in middle school because "She's so f***ing dope and so underrated and off the radar." Justin Hawkins, lead singer of The Darkness, lamented of late, "Where are the Kate Bushes and Princes of today?" The next logical step is for TV's hippest writer/producer, Amy Sherman-Palladino, to write a scene in The Gilmore Girls wherein the titular duo sing "Suspended in Gaffa" at Karaoke. I wouldn't be surprised, and it's been a long time coming.
-- Sarah Silver
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