Kate-echism VII.4.xvi

[IED0DXM%UCLAMVS.BITNET@wiscvm.wisc.edu]

OK, we need mailing addresses from Walter Henry and
Peter Alfke, if they want to get the KompilaTion tape
(eventually, if everyone does his part).

>Some fellow with the unlikely userid of IED0DXM appears for the first
>time, calling in from the Left Coast, finally demonstrating that yes,
>Virginia, there really is a use for BITNET.

>I was going to say something about my successive bouts of despite, envy,
>and ultimately appreciation of IED's ability to balance elements of
>clinical evaluation and emotional outbursts of KaTeian fervor, and about

What is this with the compliments? IED's gonna get a swelled head soon.
(As opposed to a Swelling Itching Brain, which he already has.)

>my ongoing battle to keep third-person self-references out of my writing,
>but every couple lines, another of the latter sneaks in; Dave will
>instead leave these phenomena unmentioned.  Dang, I blew it...

Ha-Hah! IED's secret plan is finally coming to fruition!
Soon, ALL the L-Hs will refer to themselves in the third person,
and NO-ONE will read or write in this forum -- only their new,
infinitely more obnoxious ALTER-EGOS, who will vote to re-name
this forum "Max Headhounds". It's kind of spooky, huh?

>A practical, if not particularly elegant solution.  The record store threw
>in a jewel box with my Big Time CD-EP, and I'm trying to work out a useful
>mod to accommodate the sleeve, of which I'm sure we'll see many more.

Well, let us know if you have any new ideas. Meanwhile, here's IED's
proposal for two new hypothetical KT CDs, to be released in '88
and '89 by EMI in order to fill the gap between HoL and KBVI.

 I. Kate Bush: The Re-Mixes (approx. time: 43 mins., suitable EMI rip-off time)
    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
 1. Running Up That Hill (instrumental mix)
 2. Running Up That Hill (extended re-mix)
 3. Cloudbusting (video re-mix)
 4. Cloudbusting (Organon Re-Mix)
 5. Hounds of Love (Alternative Hounds re-mix)
 6. The Big Sky (Special Single Mix)
 7. The Big Sky (Meteorological Mix)
 8. Experiment IV (extended re-mix)

II. Kate Bush: The B-Sides (approx. time: 48 minutes, almost too long by
    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^                EMI standards)
 1. Passing Through Air
 2. Maybe (previously unreleased);
 3. The Empty Bullring
 4. Ran Tan Waltz
 5. December Will Be Magic Again
 6. Warm and Soothing
 7. Lord of the Reedy River
 8. Dreamtime
 9. Ne T'enfuis pas
10. Under the Ivy
11. My Lagan Love
12. Burning Bridge
13. The Handsome Cabin Boy
14. Not This Time

>I think that yes, this is the notion I was trying to convey.  A frontal
>assault of pure genius, thinly veiled with periodic markings of early
>Kate.  The appropriateness of this idea is wide open for discussion;
>I'm still toying with it myself.

Same here. The "periodic markings of early Kate Bush" --
could you be more specific? Where do you hear those markings?

>Odd, that's the reaction I had from the strings' first exposition.
>But when the recap goes into a repeat, you feel almost cheated, left
>on tenterhooks, hungry and deflated.  Certainly as the piece is now
>constructed, it's indispensible; the hypothetical question is, would
>an additional verse and perhaps a different ending have ruined the song,
>or would it have raised the level of intensity beyond the average L-Her's
>threshold of pain?  (Warning: this is a silly, romanticized notion of
>mine that just happens to fit all too well into my mental mythology)
>I'd like to believe the latter; although Kate admits that of the songs
>on _TD_, "Houdini" was the most emotionally demanding to write, she also
>claims that singing it was a fairly simple matter of recalling an image,
>a sensation of `almost pining for Houdini' (source: KBC Newsletter dated
>1983, as quoted in this forum last winter).
>
>Am I beating a dead phantom horse?

No. In fact, IED, upon thinking it over, more or less agrees with you.
You're right! It IS a little dull (by Katian standards) hearing the
same eight-bar passage played twice through at the end,
with the only real change coming in
Eberhard Weber's phrasing on the bass and a bit more poignancy
overall. It's not really like Kate (esp. in TD) to say something twice
in virtually the same way. Good point, mildly deflating, but actually
good fuel for IED's (now more or less abandoned) campaign to compare
HoL favourably to TD.

>While GOoMH (a terrible acronym,
>it makes me shudder) does not possess nearly the intensity of Houdini,
>at least in the humble opinion of THIS L-H, the picture that it
>paints appears to have been conceived in fair detail at a very early
>stage.  Its evolution, therefore, produced a song for which further
>refinement would have been a waste of effort; it is extremely good as
>it was left.  Houdini, in some ways like "The Big Sky", seems to represent
>the culmination of a large number of shots at a moving target and with
>this in mind, I believe it still has room to grow, even considering the
>already great investment of time and energy and the obvious brilliance
>of the work that it is.  Is Kate not the great craftsman we know she is?
>What if...  Ach, go to the previous paragraph.

Whew. IED is a bit lost. This paragraph is fraught with challenging
ideas. Unfortunately, they're all a little hard to pin down.
The interpretation of Houdini as more "intense" than
GOoMH (great!) is very sophisticated and interesting. IED's
not sure he agrees, but not because GOoMH is faster, louder, etc.
Rather, it's because there are several details in GOoMH that are
so queer, so deeply personal to Kate and therefore uninterpretable
to us, that they give the whole track a cloak of darkness, so to
speak, which is genuinely overwhelming (to IED). Houdini, on the
other hand, communicates its emotional intensity more openly,
more interpretably, so to speak, and while that doesn't militate
against your claim, it reduces the track's impact on this particular
listener just a little. In other words, while the emotion is
possibly a bit more distilled and purely expressed in Houdini
than in GOoMH, the relative mystery surrounding some moments in
GOoMH arguably creates a stronger emotional effect for the listener.
(Christ, this is effete!)

>...and the rhythm tracks and simplified progressions dominate _HoL_ just
>as the complex melodies dominate _TD_.

This is a very interesting way of looking at the two albums. IED
is inclined to accept this view, but reminds the L-Hs that before
HoL came out, TD was almost always described as being based almost
obsessively around its rhythm elements. Now, of course, we have the
benefit of hindsight, which gives us a better awareness of the importance
of the non-rhythmical components of TD, in comparison with side
one of HoL.

>Sure, HoL is much more
>refined than _TD_ as _TD_ was of its predecessor (particularly as The
>Ninth Wave was conceived as a progression of interlocked images/episodes)
>but are the images cast into such sharp relief?  I don't think so.
>_HoL_ is a vastly more subtle work, but sometimes to the point where it
>falls short.  After dozens of listenings, I find that the pseudo-
>crescendo at the end of RUTH (a popular scapegoat) does not work properly
>for me.
>I still find _The Dreaming_ to be the most ambitious of her albums,
>possessed of more energy and creativity (roughness, if you must) than any
>before or since, particularly when you consider that it was the first one
>in which she assumed total artistic control.  As a contemporary musical
>prodigy, Kate ha(s,d) few, if any, peers, but while the level of
>refinement has increased, _HoL_ represents a visit to a different
>tangent, one which I find less engaging than _TD_, if only marginally.
>`Holy writ is holy writ', I believe you once pointed out.

Your preference is understandable, as is your objection to the RUTH
climax. In general, despite his liking for the first four
tracks on side one of HoL, IED thinks of The Ninth Wave and
Cloudbusting as the meat of the album, its main achievements.
The difference is, IED believes, that in a track like Cloudbusting,
for example, the refinement -- which is admittedly extreme, even
(to a lover of TD) possibly excessive -- is nonetheless put directly
in the service of a completely original musical/poetic idea.
Despite its polish, which superficially tends to ally the track
with commercial aesthetics with which most of the L-Hs rightly want
little to do with, Cloudbusting is so completely unprecedented
in terms of integration of musical styles and genres, and of
sheer originality of melody and harmony in the field of popular
music, that it attains a level of intensity or "roughness" (in the
c 177.1tive context used here) as high as or higher than some
parts of The Dreaming. The result is that when this listener hears
Cloudbusting's technical perfection -- in Porsche terms, an almost
predictable and thus nearly boring perfection -- he is disposed
to accept it, and even to ascribe to it a high artistic value,
because the musical information which it communicates is so
patently sincere -- with the stamp of authentic Katian feeling: true
bizarreness -- that no less a degree of technical perfection
would be acceptable, and that Kate's decision to perfect it in
that way must have come out of her original inspiration -- must
have been part of the music in her head in the first place -- as
well. Is that sentence at all clear?

>I meant "passive" in a respectful sense, as much as one could imagine
>the Porsche being "passive".  When I first heard _HoL_ slightly less
>than a year ago, it immediately struck me as being the most intensely
>performed piece of modern work I'd ever listened to.  _TD_ just seems
>to be that much _more_ involving, although the exact mechanism remains
>a mystery to me.  For some reason, "Suspended in Gaffa" still evokes
>more of my emotions than anything on The Ninth Wave.  Maybe I've blown
>a fuse somewhere?

Not at all. It's very understandable. How can we have an argument
on this subject, anyway? Every time you give an example of why
you like The Dreaming more than Hounds of Love, IED's faculties
are flooded with the same ardor for that example that you have,
and he can't help but see your position. Suspended in Gaffa is
indescribably great...indescribable.

>It seems all too easy to create a |>oug Alanism here, an image of how
>a tentative current runs deep in the execution of _The Dreaming_,
>supporting a leafy raft of the thematic material itself; that microcosmic
>Kate-viewed world with its wildly strewn scenery, from the baked earth
>of aboriginal homelands to the lush curtain of an Asian jungle, from
>the warm wisps of smoke issued by a medium's candles to the damp night
>air of a London bank, from the empty, echoing promises of sorrowing friends
>to the futility of hollow aspirations; adrift in a sea of musical brine,
>borne high above the other flotsam by a swelling tide of genius, driven
>relentlessly skyward by the pull of the Bush.

That is GREAT. Jesus, that's really good writing. And the image (the
leafy raft) is terrific.
If we get more stuff in L-Hs this good, we really ought to make up
a little anthology of L-Hs writings and send it off to Kate. She
ought to get a chance to read the above.

>From Neil Calton:
>Thought that particular gentleman came from your side of the pond. As
>for the Mayfair pseudonym, the chinless wonders who constitute the
>denizens of that region of the Smoke are noted for having an
>IQ inversely proportional to their wealth.

Here?! On our turf?! The slime! Coward! Show yer face, galley-slop!
Faith! IED'll hoist you by the tops'ls, he will! Ptarmigan! Pteridactyl!
Bashi-bazouk! Billions of bilious blue blistering barnacles in a
thundering typhoon!

>and under one of those names she will live in New York with a Japanese
>musician/artist and a maniacal 'fan' will one day approach her ....
>Oh, oh, better stop the analogy here.

Yikes! That's frightening! But wait! There'd still be three of her left,
so maybe twenty years from now she'll get the three survivors
together again, and then hire the dead Kate's
one-tenth-as-talented-but-nearly-sound-alike offspring to take over her
part and participate in an unannounced one-off reunion; but it will be
something of a disappointment.

-- Andrew Marvick