Fact: Relationships are challenging. Particularly when one of you is made of snow.
Before Florence Welch and Tori Amos, before Bjork and Madonna, there was Kate Bush.
Not that this is a contest.
But Bush, a 2002 Ivor Novello Award recipient who has landed an album on the United Kingdom’s “Top 5” charts in each of the last five decades, did help to open the door on a type of uniquely feminine music; one capable of birthing dream-like, dance-filled parallel worlds in tandem with its songs.
For me, that was the gift of Bush’s earliest albums and videos (and yes, they were albums, then). Each song was its own melodic, full-blown story: “Experiment IV” described a military lab’s disastrous search for “a sound that could kill someone from a distance,” while “Cloudbusting” (and its accompanying Terry-Gilliam-conceived video) detailed the arrest of a scientist who has successfully created a machine to control the weather. Meanwhile, the didgeridoo-tinged “Night of the Swallow” and peripatetic “There Goes a Tenner” both revolved, it seemed, around the getaway plans of bank heists. This was a lush, morally-muddled, dystopic palette Bush worked from — and as a morally-muddled, dystopic young woman, myself, I remember becoming hooked immediately.
Read the rest of Andrea Schwalm’s post about Kate Bush and comment over on GeekMom.
