Venturing into the Garden IA

[IED0DXM%UCLAMVS.BITNET@WISCVM.WISC.EDU]

Hello, Kate fans.  The followingis the
first, I hope, in a series of papers
devotedto the relatively new scholarly
field usually grouped under the heading
Kate Bushology. As always,comments and
criticism are encouraged, so long as they
contribute to the body of Kate Bushological knowledge.
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..ll 78
..ce on
..us Venturing Into the Garden: A Look at Themes in Hounds of
..us Love, Part I(Beginning)
..ce off
..sk 2
Paper contributed in partial fulfilment of the requirements
for the degree Doctor of Kate Bushology
by Andrew Marvick K4735r
..para
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 album
titles are underlined, song titles put between quotation
marks. To many fans I may seem to have a terrible love of
knit-picking; but I am neither the first nor the last fan
to whom no detail of Kate's music is insignificant or
without interest; and it is to these patient, mildly
obsessive fans that I offer the following reflections.
..para
In this essay I will only discuss
..us 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.
..para
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
..us Hounds of Love.
The sonic
textures of both the drone and the lead monophonic
motif of the
..footnote "song"
..footend
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
..us 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 a Catch-22, 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.
Douglas Allen has denigrated this sound (and the motiffor
which it was developed), but his reasons for this are unclear.
..para
None of these interpretations is the "true" source.  Yet
all may be considered legitimate interpretations, becauseall
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.
..para
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?"
..para
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".
..para
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
..us 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 there
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, 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
..us least
tangible form of emotional magnet: "We let the
..us weirdness
8n"; and, with the benefit of hindsight, we can see
movement from
..us The Dreaming's
thematic generalities expressed in reference-specific
terms, to the sharp thematic focus and relative sonic
abstraction of
..us Hounds of Love.
..para
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
..us locked up
("I kept it in a cage")?
In "Mother Stands for Comfort" we may have the answer:
"It breaks the cage and
..us fear
escapes" -- dangers of, and resulting fear of, letting
loose one's emotions. It 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
..us afraid
to be there".
..para
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 and 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?"
..para
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
..footnote "rhythm"",
Interview by Capital Radio's Tony Myatt for the 1985
Kate Bush Convention, November 1985
..footend
"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 with 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.
..para
In fact, of course, this is still only a foretaste of
what might be called
..us 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.
..para
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
..footnote "explained"
Newsletter #17
..footend
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.
..para
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.
{TO BE CONTINUED}

[Editorial Note: Oh, my.  It looks like Mr. Marvick is trying to outdo
me! -- Doug]