Love-Hounds-request@EDDIE.MIT.EDU (01/19/87)
Really-From: IED0DXM%UCLAMVS.BITNET@WISCVM.WISC.EDU >By the way: any place that charges more than $17.50 or so for the usual >import CD's is ripping you off. At Poo Bah in Pasadena, that's the price >ceiling on everything I've ever seen apart from a few Midnight Oil discs >(Aussie imports, I presume) that went for $20.99. I've been to some other >stores that regularly charge upwards of $20 for all imports. Hmph. > > --Peter Alfke This is generally true, although there can be different prices from different wholesalers/distributors to different retailers, which can account for slight differences. In fact, you can still get new import CDs from Rene's All Ears for $16.49 sometimes. By "import", however, we are not including Japanese imports. And since a sizable number of Western as well as Asian releases are available only as Japanese imports (witness, for example, the recent release of the first three LPs by the group Japan on CD), one has to take them into account. Strangely, the prices of Japanese CDs vary enormously, and sometimes in the same store. Tower still sells some brand new CDs from Japan for $18.99, and others for as much as $34.95! Both purchased, presumably, at about the same exchange rate, and both single CDs. A mystery of the Orient. >I have yet to see IED's detailed analysis of The Dreaming, >which I was told about by a friend whose system is not subject >to total amnesia. Perhaps your friend's system isn't, but your friend may be. (Just a joke.) IED has not yet written an analysis of The Dreaming (too daunting a task, maybe), but he has posted a brief theoretical treatise on themes in the first side of Hounds of Love, called "Venturing into the Garden, Part One". This may possibly be the analysis of which your friend spoke. It appears again below. (Non-fanaTiKs can just scroll past it.) >Now, are there any love-hounds out there who would volunteer >to pass on IED's description of the bootlegs? Unfortunately, IED cannot oblige, because he recently deleted the last two months' worth of L-Hs by accident. Let's get Doug to dig it up! >I didn't have any of "that stuff", and it was less than $25, so I bought >it. The sound quality is a bit on the yuck side, but I can live with >it. > >jon drukman Sounds like a reasonable deal. IED forgot to mention last time that the track listings on the back cover are inaccurate and are jumbled up strangely. GOOD NEWS ABOUT THE WHOLE STORY VIDEO: After calling all over the country this morning, IED finally got authoritative information about the video and the mixup with the ad. The short of it is, Ann Randall of Picture Music International, which is quasi-related to Thorn-EMI and which usually handles the production and distribution of EMI artists' video releases, told IED that the OpticMusic ad (announcing the video's release in January on MGM/UA Home Video) was totally inaccurate, and was the result of high hopes expressed too early by EMI admen. She also said that the announcement of the availability of the video (plus the Single File and Hair of the Hound videos) on the U.S. LP cover was just the result of oversight by the EMI's layout department. She said that this was actually a blessing in disguise, though, because the video people are finally learning how many Kate Bush fans are out there -- she's been getting about one call a day about this for the past month, she says. Finally, the good news: she says that the Whole Story video is definitely coming out in the U.S., but because of "longer turn-around time" for video than for music, it won't come out until May or June. Now then, for hard-listening fans, thinK abouT the following phrase, and ask yourselves where you might have heard it before: (ss) (ss) (ss) (ss) I'LL BET MY MUM'S GONNA GIVE ME A LITTLE TOY! (ss) (ss) (ss) (ss) (ss) eKsperimenT with it. -- Andrew Marvick Venturing Into the Garden: A Look at Themes in Hounds of Love Part One Paper contributed in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Kate Bushology Andrew Marvick, K4735r, IED0DXM The following is the first in a series of personal essays which represent one Kate fan's attempts to come to grips with some of the countless messages that lie within the fabric of Kate Bush's new album, waiting to be dug up and decoded. None of my interpretations is meant to be taken as "correct", although for the sake of argument lengthy qualifiers have been omitted. For clarity's sake underlined words are indented on separate lines. Album titles are designated in that way, but individual song titles have been put between quotation marks. To some readers I may seem to have a terrible love of nit-picking; but I am neither the first nor the last fan to whom no detail of Kate's music seems insignificant or without interest; and it is to these patient, mildly obsessive fans that I offer the following reflections. In this essay I will only discuss Hounds of Love proper; that is, Side One of the album. And I will make no attempt here to unravel the many "secret" or half-secret voices, both lyrical and musical, which seem to multiply with each new listening. I sincerely hope that other fans are searching for and finding these voices and that they will consider sharing them with the rest of us in the near future. The first and last audible sounds of "Running Up That Hill" are the same: a synthetic drone based on an E-flat and its harmonic root in the B-minor chord around which the song revolves. This drone travels quietly but insistently throughout the recording like a musical parallel to the thematic thread that connects the songs of Hounds of Love. The sonic textures of both the drone and the lead monophonic motif of the track are, at least in their final presentation, artificial. They are, as in purely abstract art, entirely non-referential, like an aural Rorschach image: the listener can associate freely in hearing these sounds in a way which is not possible when hearing, say, the Irish instrumentation of "Jig of Life", because these synthetic sounds were originated and designed exclusively for "Running Up That Hill" -- they are sounds without a history, at once atemporal and eternal within the space of the recording. (One can of course identify them, correctly or incorrectly, with the Fairlight CMI, but such an association is unhelpful, since the nature of this synthesizer is in the potential for the complete effacement of its own sonic identity in favor of that of the user's imagination and his original sources.) This internal, autonomous song-time, so to speak, is in keeping with the circular structure of the song itself (listen especially to the twelve-inch remix, which returns, in its final bars, to its point of origin not only instrumentally and musically but vocally and lyrically, as well.) Whereas "Jig of Life" (or "Cloudbusting", with its marching snare-drum tattoos) is imagistic, or reference-specific, "Running Up That Hill" seems to defy, through its enigmatic lyrics and cyclical structure, the very accessibility of sound which helped to bring it and, somewhat misleadingly, the album, to the public's attention. A good proof of the recording's elusive essence can be obtained by asking a new Kate fan, or a casual admirer of her "hit record", what that solo synth motif "sounds like". My own ears register a cat's plaintive miaow; but a friend told me recently that it seemed to her more like a cow's low, sped up and "disguised, somehow, by that Fairlight she's always fiddling around with!" Another friend, listening to the same sounds, heard a chorus of successive cries of the question "Why?", one cry dying upon the next. None of these interpretations is the "true" source. Yet all may be considered legitimate interpretations, because all were personally and honestly felt by their respective listeners. As with so many of the "secrets" buried within the dense and fertile soil of Kate's latest musical crop, the "correct answer" may not be more relevant than the many "incorrect" ones: these interpretations are even encouraged, I think, by Kate's music; and they add to the richness and intricacy of the music's design, in the same way, for example, that the various "mis-interpretations" of the "weirdness" passage of "Leave It Open"-- based on the "false" assumption that the passage could only be understood when played backwards (resulting in the phrase, "They said they were buried here," and its many variants) -- actually contributed to the recording's interest and mystery. Appropriately, the theme of "Running Up That Hill" is perrenial, endless and insoluble: the contrast between female and male attitudes, or roles. The female shows strength and endurance in adversity, surviving indomitably under great emotional strain: "It doesn't hurt me...Do you want to know/Know that it doesn't hurt me?" How else could she express, with such clear-headed resignation, "But see how deep the bullet lies"; or pose a question with philosophical, almost psycho-analytical implications, "Is there so much hate for the ones we love?" The male voice is active, aggressive, crudely seductive: "C'mon baby, c'mon darlin'/Let me steal this moment from you now". But to be more accurate about which gender says what, or even to determine whether such an interpretation is any more than vaguely accurate -- this is beyond me. There is in the lyrics, as in the theme itself and the seamless succession of verse upon chorus upon bridge, a constant swapping of places. This deliberate confusion and conflict of roles in "Running Up That Hill" presages the struggle between action and the failure to act which is taken up in the next track, "Hounds of Love". The difficulty of facing intense love, the exchange of confidences and resulting vulnerability, become not only the central theme of "Hounds of Love", but a recurring theme of the album, too -- see how, in the last lines of The Ninth Wave, that same admission of love is finally, soberly risked ("I'll tell my mother...How much I love them"). It is also the theme of "Under the Ivy", wherein the secret shared with another person is accorded tremendous emotional value -- is made to seem as precious as some holy relic, hidden for centuries by devout acolytes in the depths of a private shrine, exposed for the first time to a public whose adoration may prove fickle. The theme appeared earlier, in "All the Love", except that the conclusion in that case was more pessimistic -- a resolution to withdraw rather than expose oneself to such emotional risk. This in turn was related thematically to "Leave It Open" ("Keep it shut") -- in that case resolved positively, as in "Hounds of Love", "The Morning Fog" and "Under the Ivy", while having less connection with love, per se, per se, than with emotional relations in general, or with the appreciation of human works, art, etc. So, the final message of "Leave It Open" refers to the least tangible form of emotional magnet: "We let the weirdness in"; and, with the benefit of hindsight, we can see movement, from The Dreaming's thematic generalities, expressed in reference-specific terms, to the sharp thematic focus and relative sonic abstraction of Hounds of Love. But if "weirdness" is let in, and if something (simply the mind?) is left open, then what is it that, earlier in that song, had been locked up ("I kept it in a cage")? In "Mother Stands for Comfort" we may have the answer: "It breaks the cage and fear escapes" -- dangers of, and resulting fear of, letting loose one's emotions. The phrase may be misleading: Kate has not written "Fear breaks the cage"; the pronoun "it" may be interpreted here as a reference to something else besides fear -- madness, perhaps -- so that the natural inference -- that the pronoun signifies the manifest noun -- may be incorrect. If the natural interpretation is the correct one, however, then the danger which arises from the terrible destructive power of fear -- fear of madness itself, perhaps -- brings us full circle, back to "Hounds of Love" and the line, "But I'm still afraid to be there". The general, surface meaning of this song, already explained by Kate on several occasions, may be summarized as follows: the hounds represent the unknown response to love; by admitting love for and emotional dependence upon another person, one exposes oneself either to tremendous release and joy in finding that love accepted and returned (the friendly Weimeraners so sensitively photographed by John Carder Bush on the LP's sleeves); or to the horror of rejection, humiliation and emotional injury (the dogs that have caught the fox). The human dilemma itself is thus likened to a hound -- which might be gentle and loving, or which might equally prove vicious and deadly. So the vivid scene in which the narrator encounters a trapped fox becomes doubly self-referential, for it deepens the basic analogy of hounds to love (or to death): the dogs have caught the fleeing, desperate, but ultimately helpless fox; in the same way, and with similar desperation, the narrator feels trapped by the possibilities and liabilities of concession to the advance of love; and in the end, he/she too falls helpless to that advance. It is to this implicit meaning of the song that Kate adheres in her film, rather than to the equally vivid but more literal imagery of fox and hounds which runs through the lyrics themselves. Could not the hounds, then, correspond, as well, with the driving, almost bestial masculine force which pled, in "Running Up That Hill", "C'mon baby, c'mon darlin'/Let's exchange the experience"? Rhythmically, "Hounds of Love" seems to begin where the huge climactic drum tattoos at the climax of "Running Up That Hill" left off. That climax, it is interesting to see, occurs simultaneously with the masculine call to love quoted just above. Maintaining what for Kate Bush is a relatively unusual "constancy of rhythm",* *Interview by Capital Radio's Tony Myatt for the 1985 Kate Bush Convention, November 1985 "Hounds of Love" nevertheless steps up the pace and increases the volume as the hesitant lover steels her-/himself to take the emotional plunge, so to speak, in such a whirl of sonic activity that by the last, utterly abandoned confession of the song ("I need love love love love love..."), the density of sound seems to tax the very limits of demo-cum-master tape on which it was recorded. In fact, of course, this is still only a foretaste of what might be called Hounds of Love's "catharsis in decibels", for in the last choruses of "The Big Sky", the celebration of sheer sound does finally saturate, if not the master, certainly the typical vinyl pressings (especially those "marbleized" American ones!), and I would venture to say (at the risk of upsetting more conservative audiophiles) that it is only on compact disc that this overwhelming musical shout of triumph resists distortion completely. We can now see that "The Big Sky", too, shares a common thread with several other Kate Bush recordings, and that thread is, again (and for want of better words), emotional release, or the liberation of feeling. Kate has herself explained* *Newsletter #18, p. 2 how she tried, in the song, to recapture a child's appreciation of the glories of nature, when all sensory experience was new and filled with great emotive power. She has often suggested that adults are still children -- and that, in consequence, many of our adult struggles are simply attempts to regain the wonder once enjoyed in childhood. There is a great deal more going on in "The Big Sky", however, than immediately meets the ear. Take the lyrics, for example -- their syntactical complexity and shifts in tense: in most of the song the narrator sings, "I'm looking," "It's changing," etc. But set against that release in the present action and the promise of freedom to come is a resentment in the remembrance of the past -- "You never understood me/You never really tried." Does this not imply that the narrator is in fact an adult, possibly herself -- and in this song the narrator does appear to be a woman, at least when she calls out, "Tell 'em, sisters!" -- trying to revive childlike feelings which had been suppressed by environment? A third development arises out of this, namely the child's imagination: with a child's easy transference of the imagined onto the real, the narrator -- and her (imagined?) companions -- suddenly are "leaving with the Big Sky"; and, to show the clarity -- the hyper-realism, even -- of the child's fantasy, "we pause for the jet". No wonder then that we, too, are made to hear the jet. As always in Kate's music the sound effect is indispensible, not merely incidental; it serves to reinforce in a very direct and graphic way both the musical and the narrative content. Similarly subtle but equally significant shifts in meaning by means of alterations in tense or mode appear in both "Hounds of Love" and "Running Up That Hill". In "Hounds of Love" the shift occurs in the second verse, which begins the narrative as a past event: "I found a fox caught by dogs/He let me take him in my hands". But as the narrator continues we suddenly move into the present: "His little heart beats so fast/And I'm ashamed of running away/ From nothing real/I just can't deal with this..." At first we merely listen to a story, set safely in the past -- factual, perhaps, but part of another time, another world, even; memories of the huge, magical and dangerous world of childhood. Suddenly we must confront this world -- we have become children again, ourselves; and the scene of the hunt, the trauma to a child's consciousness in beholding a helpless, dangerous, yet mysteriously gentle fox, is presented to us as it happens. In defiance of the safety of a historical event, we see the terrified but passive fox as it rests in the narrator's hands; the heart beats now. And in fact, this crucial, transitional moment is stressed -- almost underlined, in fact -- musically by a single, long, vigorously bowed {treble} F-natural in the cello part, dubbed over the by-now familiar rhythmic cello obligato (in octaves of the same note, on the opposite "side" of the recording) that enters the song at the beginning of that crucial second verse. The leap into the present (we are confronted with the moment, much as is the heroine of The Ninth Wave at the climax of "Jig of Life": violently, with the harshness of grim reality) from the safety of the past effectively connects the past event -- the fact safely remembered -- with the figuratively dangerous, present moment of truth in an adult romantic relationship (which the fox's beating heart so eloquently represents). So, with the first chorus, facing childhood fears in a forest, the narrator sings: "Help me someone", but with the second chorus, experiencing the new dangers of romantic love, he/she cries, "Help me darling". With a similar use of language, the narrator of "Running Up That Hill" asks, in the first verse of that song, "Do you want to hear about the deal that I'm making?" only to add, a moment later, "And if I only could/ I'd make a deal with God". Presumably this deal refers to the swapping of gender roles -- perhaps of gender itself -- between the man and the woman. A transition has been made from the present participle (fact) to the conditional (fantasy); and with that transition is expressed a realization of the impossibility of such fundamental change in human relations. No deals are made with God, the words imply. This relationship begins -- and may end (witness the tragic second verse) -- in the human sphere, on the earthly level. In fact, if we see this all too human relationship as struggling on the earthly plane, then perhaps we can see related meaning, at last, in the title and its surrounding textual lines, "Be running up that road/Be running up that building." Again we are presented with an eternal struggle to reach some new level of awareness -- in this case a fuller understanding of interpersonal relationships; just as in "Sat In Your Lap", the struggle lay in reaching a fuller and deeper understanding of space, the universe and everything; and just as, in "Suspended in Gaffa" (and here I'm really treading on cat's ice), the struggle lay in attaining a new spiritual understanding and self-confidence, despite the constrictions of personal or mundane limitations represented by the eponymous pun on the words "gaffer tape". Yet, in keeping with the general subject of "love" which Kate has declared to be the main focus of Hounds of Love, the struggles in "Running Up That Hill", "Hounds of Love" and even (if we consider long enough the connotations of the lines "You never understood me/You never really tried") "The Big Sky", evolve out of people's feelings for and against each other, rather than out of the more intangible subjects addressed in "Sat In Your Lap" and "Suspended in Gaffa". With this in mind, both "Mother Stands for Comfort" and "Cloudbusting" seem wholly relevant, in complete thematic harmony with the three tracks which precede them. Both deal with interpersonal love -- in fact, familial love of a very specific kind. "Mother Stands for Comfort" treats the subject of a woman's love for her child, however misguided or ill-fated that love might be. The converse of the same subject, "Cloudbusting", investigates the mutual love of a father and his son. It is quite appropriate that one should follow directly upon the other. And in fact the two subjects have more in common. Both refer to the protective instinct among family members, and both carry intimations of failure and eventual separation: in "Mother Stands for Comfort" there are the lines "Mother will hide the murderer/Mother hides the madman"; in "Cloudbusting" we see not only the explicit reference to Wilhelm Reich's actual separation from Peter ("You looked too small/ In their big black car/To be a threat to the men in power" -- a reference to the United States' Food and Drug Administration, which brought suit against Reich in the 1950s), but also signs of an almost paternal concern on the part of the boy for his father's safety: "I can't hide you from the government". No-one as far as I know has yet identified any specific source for the subject of "Mother Stands for Comfort", although I suspect that there is one, whether consciously drawn upon by Kate or not. (Knowing Kate's admiration for The Shining, I might suggest as a possible source a memorable scene from Stephen King's The Dead Zone, in which the mother of a psychopathic murderer is found to have been protecting her son despite the knowledge that he was continuing to kill; but there are no doubt many other possible sources, including Aflfred Hitchcock's Psycho, which deals with the murderous acts of an over-protective mother's psychotic son) In the case of "Cloudbusting", however, because the source is known to us, there arises a great temptation to draw comparison not only with the book (Peter Reich's A Book of Dreams) -- especially as Kate has herself admitted feeling an obligation to "do justice to the book"* *Capital Radio interview, November 1985. -- but also with the facts surrounding the elder Reich's sad treatment at the hands of the FDA. Certainly there are many specific references to the subject in the song. The phrase "...something good is going to happen...", for example, stems from a recurrent foreboding, in Peter Reich's memoir, that "something bad was going to happen." And, in fact, the military, march-like rhythms in the recording may have arisen directly from the author's descriptions of the Cosmic Engineers, in which, as a child, he had filled the rank of Lieutenant. (It is with powerful irony, therefore, that the footsteps of the government agents in Kate's film for "Cloudbusting" are shown keeping time with the music.) There are, however, significant discrepancies between these sources and Kate's work, as well. A single look at the marvellous Donald Sutherland in the film suffices to demonstrate that fidelity to the picture in her own mind's eye bears far greater weight with Kate than any feelings of responsibility to the facts. (In reality Sutherland, moustached and grey-haired as he appears in the film, looks, I dare to suggest, a bit more like Kate's own father than Wilhelm Reich, who was bald, clean-shaven, and quite stocky!) Furthermore, the gorgeously verdant but unmistakably English countryside; the fascinating but factitious gizmos in the laboratory; the utterly intriguing -- because alliteratively and phonetically suggestive -- reference to Oregon rather than to Maine or Arizona, where Orgonon and Little Orgonon were located, respectively;* *New implications arise from the re-spelling of the name Orgonon itself within the song. It has not been determined yet whether or not this re-spelling was originally a deliberate one. It is arguable, however, that, by the time the twelve-inch Organon Mix was released, the emphasis on this spelling reflected Kate's intentions. If this is so, then the word organon may be seen as a reference not only by pun to Reich's once-controversial sexual theories, but also directly to the term "organon", used by Aristotle in reference to several of his logical treatises, and again by Sir Francis Bacon in some of his philosophical writings. Suggestions have been made, as well, that the misspelling may be a reference to a character from the long-running British television series "Dr. Who", although this seems a remote possibility, since it is unlikely that Kate is certain of the correct spelling of that character's name. Is it not, however, conceiveable that Kate wished to rationalize her single known vice by referring to Walter Rumsey's "Organon Salutis", an obscure document of 1659 subtitled, "Divers new experiments of tobacco and coffee: how much they conduce to preserve humane health"? Ken Hill's quite breath-taking Cloudbuster, far more beautiful and impressive than the originals ever were; and even the boy's disclosure -- with conspiratorial smile -- of a paperback edition of A Book of Dreams in his father's jacket pocket (an element of the surreal or fantastic quite in keeping with the gathering rainclouds attracted by the Cloudbuster's positive orgonotic energy); all of these details combine to show that the ultimate source for the recording, as for the film, was simply the imaginative authority of Kate Bush herself. One final group of comments before this rumination on Hounds of Love is suspended, these in relation to one of the many aspects linking Sides One and Two, aspects heretofore de-emphasized by Kate herself in an understandable wish to make clear to her public the basic autonomy of The Ninth Wave from Hounds of Love. Apart from the many images which define the atmosphere of both sides (images of sky, clouds, water, darkness, storms and animals -- everywhere animals, from the cat {"Mother Stands for Comfort"} to the sheep {"And Dream of Sheep"} to the blackbird {"Waking the Witch"} to the gulls and whales which are audible at various points in The Ninth Wave, and back to the fox and hounds, to name creatures from this album alone), there is one specific transitional motif which I cannot help interpreting as an implied invitation to move from the setting of "Cloudbusting" to the structure of the whole of The Ninth Wave: namely, the dream. Not without communicative purpose did Kate recently site Salvador Dali as a favourite artist.* *Newsletter Number 17, p. 22 As "Cloudbusting" begins ("I still dream of Organon {sic}"), so does The Ninth Wave ("Let me be weak, let me sleep/And dream of sheep"). In fact, Kate has shown a longstanding fascination with dreams and dreamlike states (I've been told that she once described having dreamt of a long vigil in the sea in an interview dating as far back as 1978), and with the thin line between waking and dreaming -- her interest in the experience of sensory deprivation being one recent example. It seems to me no mere co-incidence, therefore, that Peter Reich's A Book of Dreams unfolds in a fashion almost eerily like that of The Ninth Wave: both develop around a temporarily helpless and incapacitated person drifting between conscious understanding of real danger and pain, and unconscious dream experiences. In fact, if there is one thing that Hounds of Love and The Ninth Wave do not include, amid their huge variety of subjects, images, symbols and partly or wholly hidden references, it is -- mere co-incidence.