I Love Life! I Love Life! I Love Life!
Kate Bush’s Surprise Heaviness
It’s been a minute, huh? Does anyone actually care about this thing?
I think I’m working on something long. Long essay, not longer than that. The piece is germinating from a seed consisting of Drug Church’s new album Prude, and Pat Kindlon’s lyricism in general, the Book of Ecclesiastes, and maybe some other media representations of existential surrender like The Tender Bar and a few personal anecdotes.
Meantime, I have to write something because this newsletter thing still exists, and I’d like it to keep existing.
I’m reading the biography Under The Ivy: The Life and Music of Kate Bush by Graeme Thomson and thus listening to a lot of Bush’s music.
For certain, I absorbed the cultural psychosis that was “Running Up That Hill” during the Stranger Things: Season 4 release.
But I’ll counter my full-blown meme-music absorption with my love of the Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush duet “Don’t Give Up” on Gabriel’s album So.
I’m long a Peter Gabriel fan. Particularly for his voice, which isn’t miraculous, but it’s warm like coffee a minute and thirty seconds from brewing it. Strained sometimes, but I’ve written before about how I like vocal performances that at least sound like anyone could get close to the same performance. Accessible. A fair weight of grit.
The chorus on Track 1 of So, “Red Rain”, is a toasted-voice masterpiece.
Bush sings the choruses on “Don’t Give Up” and her introduction is, if Gabriel is a little more earthen, totally celestial. There’s a few overdubs, so it sounds like at least 3-4 Kate Bush’s are singing.
For someone who persistently lives at a precipice (like just one giant cut that gets filled with salt when I open the front door), the lyrics are especially emotional.
Side note: “Heroes” on Gabriel’s album Scratch My Back is similarly eruptive. The acceleration to the climactic third verse when he sings “I … I CAN REMEMBER” is one of those “damn dude, you gotta get your head right if that song doesn’t feel like somebody just held you at gun point and said ‘cry for every second you couldn’t.’”
Alright, so where I think I was at was how Kate Bush’s choruses and verse on “Don’t Give Up” were my formal introduction to her as an artist for whom I had some curiosity.
The version of Under The Ivy I have is a reprint from Omnibus Press and features a cover with a medium close-up of Bush with her hands just behind her ears, pushing her hair forward looking off to the side—altogether creating a portrait of a woman who seems self-contained, indifferent, kind of scared, but undoubtedly magnetic.
It’s part of their Omnibus Remastered series on the last 50 years of music publishing, a series from which I also snagged A New Day Yesterday: UK Progressive Rock & the 70s.
What has been an interesting self-reflection while reading Under The Ivy is that there is an experience of inhabiting an existence I have no access to (she’s a female pop star and I am … not) but feel a kinship with nevertheless: her interest in Celtic mythology, ancient Britain, death, Christian mysticism, boredom with dominant social customs.
Superficially, Bush’s album The Dreaming falls into some kind of theatrical pop territory, but is straight up hard. I think it’s safe to connect some kind of thread from The Dreaming to Lingua Ignota’s album Caligula, which is tipped further toward an essential horror—the first sonic jump scare I’ve experienced. If Caligula has this rotting, violent gothicness to it, (highly American), The Dreaming is gothic but ultimately English and less menacing, more purely aesthetic.
Within the chorus of Track 3 on The Dreaming, “Pull Out the Pin”, which seems like a song sharing the narrative of one soldier trying to justify killing another soldier, the whole song a 5:25 interior argument about the justification for violence to save oneself but acknowledging the fact that the enemy feels the same way and neither experience is invalid, Bush screams “I love life” in between the sung lyrics. Each chorus climaxes with a triplet of these fryed “I LOVE LIFE! I LOVE LIFE! I LOVE LIFE!” These function in the lyrics almost like each soldier is yelling it at the other and yelling it to themselves as they finally destroy each other.
Just one thing in it: me or him
I love life!
Pull out the pin
Just one thing in it: me or him
I love life!
Pull out the pin
Just one thing in it: me or him
And I love life! I love life! I love life!
Oh, oh, pull out the pin
This is the kind of grizzly intensity embedded in Kate Bush’s otherwise whimsical music.
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