Kate Bush and the Power of the Feminine Elise Hudson
Above all else, Kate Bush is a storyteller. From three minute vignettes like “There Goes a Tenner” to her epic half-album saga “The Ninth Wave” (the second half of her 1985 Hounds of Love), Bush fleshes out lush worlds filled with strange characters and unusual plots. And she hardly confines herself to one genre of story. Kate Bush sings about everything from the daughter of the inventor of a cloud machine and her ensuing struggles with the government (“Cloudbusting”) to nuclear apocalypse as experienced by a fetus (“Breathing”) to having sex with a snowman (yes, really, listen to “Misty” off of 50 words for Snow.)
But despite the breadth of her subject material, much of Bush’s work is tied together by a focus on the female experience. Through her music, Kate Bush provides unique insight into the way women experience childhood, motherhood, love, sex, grief, and death. Her characters are complex - sometimes good, sometimes bad, often somewhere in between, and fleshed out with the emotional depth that female characters deserve but so rarely are given. Bush’s fixation on the feminine, while at times inwardly directed, is more often focused on capturing a collective female psyche through telling a wide array of individual stories. Some of these center on the historical. In “Army Dreamers”, Bush sings in a fake Irish accent as she recounts the thoughts of a woman who has just lost her son at war. While the content of the song is mournful, the melody is lilting, not monotone. This tone reflects the expectation for women to stay silently strong in the face of adversity rather than sink into the dreaded “hysteria.” When Bush sings about women experiencing loss (“The Wedding List”, “Houdini”, “This Woman’s Work”) she highlights their perseverance by avoiding grim durges and going for something more nuanced. Grief is complex, and Bush illuminates its other aspects, such as wistfulness, guilt, and anger in addition to sadness. Female grief is often reduced solely to hysteria, and Bush paints a more complex picture.
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