[mod.music.gaffa] Kate-echism V.1.xix

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.