smibbo | The Belated Brilliance of Kate Bush (or why I'm not a big fan of Bjork)

I saw my first music video when I was about 11 or 12.

The Turner station here in Atlanta (aka as "Super17!") originally was a crappy little UHF channel dedicated to showing all the old junk from the 50s and 60s as well as old grade "C" movies. It was the channel you watched when there was nothing else on. They didn't have the budget to buy good syndications or decent old movies so everyone knew that "Super17!" basically was crap. Except, of course, if you were a baseball fan. Since Turner owned the Braves, only "Super17!" had exclusive access to their home games. On the other hand, there were odd occasions when they showed something new and interesting - the kind of shows that other channels wouldn't take a chance on.

That was how I saw my first music video. No, it wasn't "Video killed the radio star" as it was for so many people. Technically, it was Cheap Trick's "Dream Police". I say 'technically' because what I saw was a prototype music video show and I saw several videos that day at 2 in the morning.

I saw "Angels" and "Little Bird" by Lene Lovich, "Dream Police" by Cheap Trick, "What's the matter baby?" by Ellen Foley (who later went into acting and was originally the public defender on "Night Court"), "video killed the radio star", as well as a couple of other forgettable things. I was enthralled. The notion of putting music to visuals wasn't exactly stunningly new, variety shows had been doing that for quite some time, but having an actual plot through the song was new. Telling a story through the lyrics was novel and neat to me.

Not long after that, I saw another music video show on television. Once again, it was on a crappy UHF channel. Once again, it was on during a lag-time of TV programming (3:30pm). This time, however, there was more than the 6-7 videos I had been watching before. The show also had a host ("Cousin Brucie") who was endlessly irritating. It was then I saw my first Kate Bush video. It was quite remarkable because the host gave a little introduction to two of her videos. Apparently someone had written in, accusing him of not liking Kate Bush and demanding that he show her videos. He strenuously objected to this assessment and subsequently showed two of her videos post-haste (and thereafter always played at least one of her videos). The two he showed were "Breathing" and "Suspended in Gaffa"

"Wow," I thought, "what a weirdo!"

I believe in "Breathing" Kate is inside a big flexible plastic bubble. She does some kind of rythmic dancing based loosely on ballet. I honestly can't remember what "Suspended in Gaffa" looked like but I do remember that I thought that video was even freakier than "Breathing"

Her huge wild eyes, her scrawny limbs moving so slowly, her too-red pouty lips all draped in a torn white ballet pinafore. She kinda freaked me out. I somewhat liked the tunes (and when you're 14 most songs that have any kind of rhythm appeal to you after repeated exposure) but I couldn't understand a word she sang. Something in me knew, even at 14, that this music was quite a bit over my head. I certainly appreciated her ability to make a song unlike anything I'd ever heard before while still being catchy and melodious but Lene Lovich held more appeal for me, partially because I could understand what she said and thus relate to her subject matter. Lene was more melodramatic, less artsy, more Goth, less Atonal. I saw both Lene and Kate as being cut from the same cloth; Lene was for youngsters like me, Kate was for 20-somethings.
Later in my adolescence, I was able to view a few more of Kate Bush's offerings and began to get a sense of what her lyrical content was about - "Babushka", "Army Dreamers", "Wuthering Heights" -I could grasp those songs and understand what they were about probably because they were fairly straightforward stories. I couldn't, however, get behind her bizarreness. Even though I was enjoying music from Siouxsie and the Banshees, the Sex Pistols and Nina Hagen (Talk about bizarre!), Kate Bush was just inexplicable to me. It was just too artsy for me. Not pretentious, just cold. Then there were the men. Mentioning Kate seemed to elicit some kind of almost sexual response from most men who had ever listened to her. I was constantly baffled by the slavering devotion men apparently paid Kate. I chalked it up to her looks, assuming in my sexist belief that it had little to nothing to do with her actual talents or empathetic abilities. In fact, at some point, I found it rather obnoxious; all these intelligent men rhapsodizing about Kate Bush as if she was just the most amazing thing in the world... obviously she made them get hard and all their exhortations made it just seem more fake to me. I started despising anyone who said they liked her. What arrogance, eh?

When I went to Washington DC to stay with my best friend Nikki, we spent most of our time going out and drinking with her friends. One of the bars we went to had a HUGE rear-projection screen which they played music videos from. This was quite typical for the time. Rather than have an in-house DJ, on slow nights most bars would merely put on one of many music video broadcasts that could be rented out. I'm not talking about MTV, These were private channel broadcasts that you either had to pick up via satellite or get sent to you once a month on extra long Beta tapes. "RockAmerica" I believe was the most popular one at the time. "RockAmerica" had an extensive catalogue and because they were a tape rental company, you had your choice of music genres to choose from. The bar we frequented, Bogart's, subscribed to the genre of what would be considered "Alternative" today.
One night, while there, a Kate Bush video came on. "Experiment IV" I believe it was (don't look for it, it was never made available on album). Nikki told me that she had come to really like the song and that she was considering buying Kate's latest album, "Hounds of Love". Nikki was my new music source; I paid close attention to Kate's new song.
I really liked it. It wasn't anything fabulous; another one of Kate's rare straightforward stories in musical context. THe tune was quite catchy, the video was interesting and the story was silly but well-crafted ("Experiment IV" is about scientists creating something amazing designed to kill people) so I liked it. I still wasn't about to go buy it and be another besotted fool who couldn't admit it was just sexual interest parading about as serious "art"
But wouldn't you know it, a few months later, Nikki calls me up and tells me in no uncertain terms that we were all wrong about Kate. Upshot being "go buy her latest album at the very least and listen to it closely" So, of course, I did.

Ho wow. What an arrogant fool I was. Bear in mind that I still think Kate's earlier works are a bit disjointed and somewhat missing of the mark, but "Hounds of Love" became something amazing. It became my companion. I realized that Kate was actually talking to me... I finally got it. By the time "The Sensual World" came out, I was an inarticulate moron when it came to Kate's music. The most impressive thing I could tell people when asked was that "Cloudbusting" was written about Wilheim Reich - an incredible socio-political philosopher who bit the hand of Freud who schooled him and campaigned for complete sexual freedom for adolescents. To me, hearing Kate tell me that she cried thinking of Reich's downfall and near-madness touched me in a way hardly any musician ever had. Gary Numan gave me a similar feeling, as well as Glenn Branca, but Kate touched me in a uniquely female way.

Going back over her music from before "Hounds of Love" I see the brilliance I had easily missed before. I'm not really embarrassed about it, after all, her music really is mature and deep. It isn't easy to understand what's she's talking about - whether or not you can discern the lyrics - unless you've actually BEEN there. You couldn't possibly understand "Cloudbusting" unless you knew about Reich to begin with. I came to find most of her songs were like that, whether they were about Aboriginals being killed and their land raped ("The Dreaming"), a mother lamenting her son's death in the military ("Army Dreamers") Bess Houdini's relationship fears ("Houdini") or becoming a computer-junkie shut-in ("Deeper Understanding") you could easily view her songs as pretentious arty shiite with no substance until you saw the meaning. Then suddenly, like a page of 3D art, it jumps out at you and you wonder how in the world you could have not seen it before.
Discovering the meaning behind Kate Bush was, to me, an amazing experience over and over. I was breathless with her secrets. I felt "in the know" sometimes and other times it seemed like sitting down with a best friend and using a special code during our conversation. How could I have missed so much for so long? Easy.
It was the music that screwed me up.
I do think Kate is an amazing composer. Unfortunately, her songs often run the edge of the fence between "interesting" and "unacceptably freakish". She didn't always write songs, she wrote compositions. Some of her songs ("Waking the Witch") even seemed to be mini-operas in and of themselves. Sometimes I couldn't even tell when one song ended and another began. She could be emotionally jointed ("The Sensual World" before "Love and the Anger") or she could just think up a single unusual idea ("Heads We're Dancing") All of her albums have some kind of theme to them but until "The Red Shoes" the theme was often loose and inconsistant. I liked that, though; it bespoke a mind teeming with notions that didn't neatly fit into one category. Even "The Red Shoes" have some anamolous material ("Eat the Music") In any case, Kate was always far more complicated than I could ever discern and that's part of what made me such a devotee. The music, however, the music was definitely art. Even if she wrote a catchy, radio-ready tune ("Rubberband Girl") it was still chock-full of odd touches that had to be paid attention to to catch. Much like my appreciation of The Eurhythmics, you had to get behind the wonderful voice, stop noticing the catchy melody to hear the subtle oddities of each song... "background weirdness" I dubbed it in my mind. That kind of subtlty eventually became more admirable to me than any of the up-in-your-face wacky stuff I had listened to all through my teens and tweens. Anyone can do wild and freaky shit: feedback noise in the middle of a tune, gutteral screeching, scat-styled nonsense singing, atonal melodies - but weaving someting unusual into what sounds like a "normal" song, that takes inordinate talent.

Thus, do I not bow down to the excellence of Bjork.
I do believe Bjork is talented. I do believe Bjork makes interesting music. I also happen to believe that Bjork isn't really a musician. She's an artist. A basic performance artist who chooses music as her primary form of medium. She could just as easily have chosen to be a visual artist (and in many ways and instances she is, but it's not primary) or a creative director or anything other kind of expression but she chooses music as her form. I have no problem with this, but I generally don't listen to music in order to experience ART. I listen to music to connect with a musician on their terms. I expect to be spoken to, moved, or just pleased by what I hear. I don't mind being made to think, feel or dance but I do expect to hear what I think of as MUSIC, not AURAL ART.

Trust me, I dealt with and listened to many many aural artists in my lifetime. I've interviewed them, watched them work and even tried my hand at engineering as well as creating some aural art myself. I have no problems with this. But althroughout I never would have stood for any aural artist trying to convince me that they were "making music". Artistic music, musical art: they are NOT the same thing. Bjork makes musical art, Kate Bush makes artistic music. Sometimes I am all fired up for some musical art. Sometimes, I am not. More than anything, I do not want to put on something I have been told is music and discover that it is in fact art. When I want to be entertained, I listen to music, when I want to be provoked, I experience art. Yes, the two can meet and intertwine but never should one be mistaken for the other. The thing about Bjork that bothered me for a long time is that she an artist who has been labelled as a "fresh original" musician.

She is neither. She is an artist. I like her art very much, I do, but I do not like her "music" for the most part. Sometimes she gets lucky (or wants to make some money, I don't know really and I don't care) and she ends up with an actual song that passes for bona fide music, but mostly, she engages in the same self-masterbatory expression of her ideas that all other famous artists do. The idea is usually more important than the music itself. Before I realized the crucial difference in Bjork's works I used to get seriously annoyed with her and her fans. Everything she did, to me, didn't seem fresh or original at all. For every "song" of Bjork's that you could pose to me as either qualification, I could easily pull out two-three maybe more artists who had done the same thing, the same way with similar results. That doesn't mean I think she's hackneyed or bad, just that what she explores, to me, is nothing incredibly new. It may be more interesting than other artists' take on the theme she uses, but I've definitely heard every technique and trick she's ever tried before. Her newest album? Yeah, that was probably the most familiar stuff I've ever heard from her. It was neat, and kinda cute, but frankly I found it to be more disappointing than anything she'd ever done before. because none of it was even remotely original so far as technique went Even the melodies, geeziz especially the melodies seemed like an afterthought - something to be worked out once all the production and cutesy sound experiments were finalized.

Last of all, I got quite annoyed with Bjork's lack of musical consistancy. Put on any album by her and you'll hear every kind of "song" there is to try. (Her fascination with show-tunes doesn't endear her to me either) I don't like having to put on a different song from ten different albums in order to fit a mood I'm in. I accept that most musician's will have a range of musical tastes in any one album (and that's good) I just don't want a trip all through their entire mind each time I plop a new CD in. I especially don't want to find 50% or more of an album to be too tedious to sit through because most of it is just so inappropriate to my mood. If I wanted that experience, I'd buy a 12 CD changer and put in everything from Beethoven to Nusrat to Cole Porter to Nickelback and put it on "shuffle". (note: I am not a fan of Nickelback)

Related to that issue is the fact that I can't ever recognize Bjork until she starts singing. Many times I've been fooled at the beginning of one of her songs into thinking it was someone else (and older) only to find out I'm listening to Bjork swiping someone elses technique again. (not that swiping is a bad thing, it certainly isn't) I sincerely believe that part of being a talented musician is having your own style and if you don't have one, you might as well be a session musician. Just because you play well does not make you an artistic musician, it just makes you competant. Just because you can think up cute new ways to write a song does not make you original or stylish; it just makes you mildly creative.

So, why am I not a Bjork fanatic? Because she's made very few songs I like. The ones I like, I like very much. But the albums? Mostly they fall into the category of "things Bjork played with today" - inconsistant experimental artsy knockoffs. Cute, neat, interesting, good art to be sure, but not good music.

Basically, it's all Kate Bush's fault.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Good article, and you've been very fortunate to see the Kate Bush videos. Despite having enjoyed her work from the beginning, I never saw any of the videos.

I can't comment on Bjork, as I've never bothered to listen to her music, but I do have an anecdote about her.

I was at a Hallow'en party at the pub a few years ago, and this woman (early 20's) was wearing a simple white dress in a classical Grecian/Roman style, with a stuffed swan doll wrapped around her neck.

I went up to her and said, "Leda and the Swan, nice costume."

She looked at me blankly for a moment and then replied, "No, I'm Bjork. Who's Leda?" And I then told her about the classic myth of Leda and the Swan.

So my only "Bjork" experience is where she had subsumed an icon from classical mythology for herself.

what a neat story! (regardless of what artist you were talking with)
Of course that makes one wonder if Bjork had heard the story in question and merely forgotten it... that happens to people all the time. Funny though, seeing as you didn't recognize her (especially because I've seen pictures of her in that outfit, I think she wore it to the Grammys) but recognized the metaphor of the outfit.
LOL

?

I was wrong, it was the Academy Awards, not the Grammys.

Actually, it wasn't Bjork, just a woman pretending to be her for Hallow'en.

But then again, yeah, I probably wouldn't have recognized her if it was the real Bjork. *LOL*

I thought when she said "I'm Bjork" you meant she actually was Bjork. I see, *blush* DUH!

Still, a cute story. Too bad it wasn't the "Real" Bjork you were educating. I wonder now if that dress is supposed to be a metaphor for Leda and the Swan. I'd be surprised if Bjork didn't know that tale.

I love Kate Bush and like you mentioned, I like her because her songs are on several levels! At first it's just a melody, a tune then after a few listens the words start to pop out and the story emerges and it's a whole different experience. A slightly funny aside. I had not read Wuthing Heighs when I came to hear the song. After listening to this glorious love song, of lovers parted and reunited, I just had to read the book! I borrowed a copy from a roommate and read it straight through, cover to cover. (I had really bad insomnia and spent many nights just reading) The next day we were in the car and the song came on and I popped the tape out and asked Dan for something else. He asked what was up, because I usually liked that song. I asked if he had read the book and he admitted he had not. I pushed the tape back in, let it run, recited a few lines and then added "Ok, so she's home, she loves him and she came back to him, sounds great right? And she's cold...you know why she's cold? BECAUSE SHE'S DEAD!! She wants to come in the window because he's nuts seeing a ghost and she's DEAD!! It's the most horrible, sad, depressing story that they *try* to lighten up at the end but you can't help still being depressed!!"

We started listinging to a different tape in the car!

*laughs*

Actually, I never read Wuthering Heights either. I saw the movie, but didn't want to read the book because of the song. The song, more so than the movie, made the story sound even sadder than I could imagine dealing with and so I never read the book. There again is Kate Bush's power to affect me: I'm a reading nut and usually any excuse, any recommendation is good for me but Kate made me NOT want to read a book - an amazing feat!

I have seen the movie as well and all I can say is that it's just not possible to convey the deep feelings and the passion in any way other than the book. In the movie Heathcliff comes across as just a really weird, mean guy and it's hard to see how and why he loves Katherine. In the book, and thus inside his head, you get a much better understanding of his feelings, and how her behaviors affect him and really, why he is so cold and bitter later in life. In the book he is deep, dark and smoulderingly passionate about her. In the movie he's just creepy!

The thing with the song for me was that listening to it I thought it was a HAPPY story, angstfull (as so many songs about love are) but she comes back right? So when I read the book and she doesn't just run away to the moors, to come back later and reunite with him, I was CRUSHED! Even now when I hear that song I get a little mad because I feel like the real story burst my happy little bubble!

The Sugarcubes were an entirely different creature from Bjork -- much more uniform than what she does solo. I wonder what you('d) think of them.

I liked them very much. That's why I ever listened to her in the first place. I wasn't crazy about the guy who sang sometimes... his voice kinda annoyed me.

Poor Einar. Always so scorned and spurned.

Ohh nice icon!

"The Real Ramona" is one of my favorite albums of all time.

Merci!

The Belated Brilliance of Kate Bush (or why I'm not a big fan of Bjork)

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