Mailbags, and bags, and bags, and...

[IED0DXM%UCLAMVS.BITNET@MITVMA.MIT.EDU]

Welcome to all the new Love-Hounds! You have found the land of Kate
Bush obsession; and you have now been warned.

>    Here are some other 12 inch singles.
>        ( before and after  RUNNING UP THAT HILL. )
>    -- John Bryant

     Actually, John, _RUTH_ was the first Kate Bush twelve-inch
single, so there couldn't really have been any "before"s. But you
could call the U.S. mini-album a twelve-inch, IED supposes, which
would also allow you to qualify the "On Stage" EP as a twelve-inch (in
some countries' editions), and then there was also a four-song U.S.
twelve-inch sampler for _The Dreaming_ LP, which might squeak by under
a loose definition of the term.
     Kate once said that she had wanted to release the single of _The
Dreaming_ as a twelve-inch. EMI was not yet convinced of the
commercial viability of the twelve-inch single format in 1982,
however, and refused. The seven-inch of that song could have passed
for a twelve-inch without any other changes, though, since both _The
Dreaming_ and the non-lead-vocal mix on the b-side, _Dreamtime_, were
pretty long tracks for a seven-inch.

      [	Kate has also said that a few 12-inches of "Sat In Your Lap"
	were actually pressed, but that it was never released.  --
	|>oug ]

> * NC State doesn't give a hoot about my musical opinions.
> -- Joseph Hall

      That's no surprise. _One_octave_?! Opinions are one thing,
Joseph.  Plain ordinary tone-deafness is another. Try listening to the
lowest notes and then the highest notes, and then go to a piano and
_count_! During the course of _Hounds of Love_ Kate easily surpasses a
three-octave vocal range. Over the span of her first five albums she's
covered more than four octaves.

> Sorry, guys.  Don't get me wrong...I have also spent many hours
> listening to such goodies as "Lagan Love" and "TWW" and trying to
> find just what the fair Ms. Kate is getting at, what she's striving
> for.  But I also have been known to just sit and FEEL, without an
> analytical bone in my body, and let that be good enough for me.
> Comments?  Am _I_, a newcomer, a bimbo for making such statements?

     Of course not, Deb! Yours is an entirely valid point of view. In
defense, however, isn't it likely that alot of the analysis that goes
on in Love-Hounds is produced because the analysts in question first
did just what you've done: namely, sat down and felt, without an
analytical bone in their bodies? At least, let's hope so. The instinct
to "understand" art in at least some kind of intellectual sense is
pretty basic to most people, and it usually develops out of a powerful
initial emotional experience. Anyway, IED for one never thinks of all
the crap he's going to be churning out about Kate's latest song until
he's sat down and just felt it for quite a while. It's probably the
same with all "analytical" Kate fans.
     And then, too, Kate encourages people to do more with her music
than just feel it. She has herself acknowledged several times that
listeners can get a lot more out of her songs if they take the time to
read the lyrics very carefully, than if they do nothing but listen to
the music blind, so to speak. Granted, Kate's music is incredibly
satisfying just to listen to, but the experience can also be
intensified by further exploration into the hidden meanings and secret
details that wait beneath the surface for those who take the time to
seek them out. Kate knows this, and she designs her music to encourage
it.

> Perhaps it will be included as a bonus track on the CD of KB VI?
> (one can only hope!).  I also wish she would put out a CD of her
> b-sides...

> -bob

     If it's any comfort, Bob, Kate was sent the latter suggestion
from a Love-Hound, who was told that she did read it. Whether anything
will ever be done about it, however, is, as with everything else about
Kate, a mystery. Anyway, EMI seems to have its own ideas about Kate
compilations.

> It's all a matter of perspective, you see.  Certainly "This Woman's
> Work" stands head and shoulders above all the tracks on the
> soundtrack album, but the competition isn't all that stiff
> (excepting XTC, of course).  When ranked with the corpus of all
> Katedom, it's up there, but it's kind of maddening to hear Kate
> doing something less than the ultimate unbelievability of which we
> know she is capable.

     Well, okay. Agreed that "TWW" is probably not Kate's greatest
masterpiece to date. If you're willing to say "it's up there," IED can
live with that. But it _is_ incredibly f. g., though. (And do _not_
except "XTC"!)

> I think it's actually not so much the production, but rather the
> performance.  The voice, the piano, the fairlight bass blasts are
> all terribly powerful, but I don't see much indication of complex
> production here.  It's clear, it's wonderful, etc, but I think it's
> more the power of Kate's musical technique rather than any involved
> production work.

    It's a matter of language, then. After all, with Kate Bush,
production work _is_ performance. The song evolves out of the
production and vice versa. The demo is the master. So which is which?
If you think the performance is powerful, then you might just as well
be saying the production is powerful, too.  Beyond that, though, the
climax of _TWW_ is a producer's tour-de-force.  It _is_!  The way
those tracks build up seamlessly from the opening "Aha-ooh"s to the
final "tutti" is extremely virtuosic from a production standpoint.
It's just not such an obvious display of production as, say, "GOOMH"
or "Waking the Witch". But, as the Ragu people never tire of saying,
"It's in dere!"

> The people staring over my shoulder seem to think that this is all
> incredibly juvenile behavior for grown adults, dissecting songs in
> this detail. It's so much fun, though!

     Hear, hear! Now tell Deb that.

> I thought the lyric for the last line of the first stanza was:
> "Now starts the craft of the father."
> Well, does IED agree? I think it fits.

> -- Thomas Affinito (?)

     Well, yes, it definitely _sounds_ like those words. But what
exactly do they _mean_? Why "craft"? A lot of Kate's words sound like
one thing (at least to these American ears), but then turn out to be
something else.

     Malcolm Carlock asks:

> What is the significance of the "eeeyaaaaaw, eyaaaw, eyaaaw" (donkey-
> like braying) heard in "Get out of my House", as well as at least one
> other song on "The Dreaming" (can't remember which one at the moment) ?

     Uh-oh. Doug, you wanna offer an idea or two? (Nudge, nudge...)
_Superficially_, at least, the line "I change into the mule" explains
the "hee-haw" sounds in _GOOMH_. There are two mules audible in the
song.  One is the woman/spirit/house (Kate's voice), the other her
pursuer/lover.

	[ According to Kate, the meaning of "I change into the mule" is
	  really, "I change into the donkey".  Kate just doesn't know
	  her mules from her donkeys.  -- |>oug ]
	
     (Off-hand, IED doesn't know of any other Kate Bush song with mule
sounds in it, Malcolm. Can you be more specific?)
     The last section of the song was inspired by an old English (and
Irish and Scottish and just about every country in Europe, too) ballad
called _The_Twa_(read Two)_Magicians_, in which a young maiden is
wooed by a young man. In the original the girl threatens to change
form (in some versions the boy does all the hypothesizing), from human
to animal or vegetable. The boy always responds by promising to take
the form of a compatible or superior animal or vegetable.
     Kate merely borrowed the general idea. Her specific images of
bird-to-wind, the "song's hit," and the mules are all unprecedented,
however, at least to judge from the dozen or more versions of the
original that IED has come across recently. Musically, there's no
connection, either, as far as this listener can tell.

> Indeed, what is the inspiration behind the song "Get out of my
> House"?  (Overzealous fans, perhaps??  Naaah, she'd never get mad at
> US.)

     Kate answered this one in the article that Doug re-printed. The
song is _not_ about overzealous fans. (Funny, though, that idea seems
to ring a bell...)

> Who is Kate talking about in the song where she screams, "the one
> thing in my MIND is to pull you from the WAter (or WAW-tuh)"?

     Kate explained that this was Houdini, in an earlier episode from
his life, when he was unable to free himself from a tank of water in
time, and nearly drowned.

> What is the inspiration behind the lyrics, "The first time that I
> died, it was in the arms of good friends of mine"?

     That's a good question. It's apparently a kind of passing
reference to re-incarnation, an idea which Kate has frequently
expressed "interest" in, though not exactly admitted a hard-and-fast
belief in.
     IED admits bafflement with some of the lines in _All the Love_.
Here is the section that he has never been sure of the meaning of
(first without any punctuation, as on the album):

      The next time I dedicate
      My life's work to the friends I make
      I give them what they want to hear
      They think I'm up to something weird
      And up rears the head of fear in me
      So now when they ring
      I get my machine to let them in

     The problem IED has with this stanza has to do with pinning down
the time-frame. Kate likes to switch from past tense to present tense
quite a lot in her songs. This is sometimes calculated, and more often
(IED thinks) instinctive, or intuitive. The tense-shifts usually
follow a pattern: the story begins in the past, and then shifts to the
present as the dramatic climax approaches.
     In the above passage from _All the Love_, the shifts in tense are
confusing, especially since there is no punctuation in the original
written versions, and Kate's own enunciation of the words is not
conclusive either way.  For example, try reading the above lines as
follows:

     "The next time I dedicate my life's work to the
      friends I make, I give them what they want to
      hear. They think I'm up to something weird, and
      up rears the head of fear in me. So now when they
      ring, I get my machine to let them in."

     But if you just change a few of the punctuation marks, the verse
acquires a very different meaning:

     "The next time, I dedicate my life's work to the
      friends I make: I give them what they want to
      hear. They think I'm up to something weird, and
      up rears the head of fear in me. So now when they
      ring, I get my machine to let them in."

In the first reading the narrator might be saying:

     "Next time I'll give them what they want to hear,

because otherwise they think I'm up to something weird, which is the
way things are now."

But in the second reading, she could be saying:

    "So the next time, I _did_ give them what they

wanted to hear, but instead of trusting my good intentions, they
thought I was up to something weird. So now I keep my friends'
interests at a distance."
     In the first version, the narrator simply presents the conclusion
that she has reached from her earlier experiences, namely, that it's
important to find a way _not_ to keep other people at a distance.
     In the second version the narrator describes _another_ such
experience, and then decides that the solution _is_ to keep other
people at a distance.
     It's a very mixed up group of phrases, and probably not entirely
by design. Anyone have a definite theory about this song?

-- Andrew Marvick

      [	Andy, I think your first reading is really stretching it!  For
	one, it is incredibly awkward.  The final conclusion, "I'll
	give them what they want to hear" being presented in the
	middle of the paragraph with no audible indicator that this is
	the conclusion?  The conclusion at the end of the paragraph
	with the very audible "So" to indicate that it is a
	conclusion, not being the real conclusion?  You'll have to do
	better than that!  Also, I do not think that anyone would
	maintain that "telling people what they want to hear" is a
	good thing.

	As I read the song, the story is a tragedy.  The protagonist
	died having lived a lonely end because she hadn't kept in
	touch enough with her friends and they hadn't with her.  As
	she's dying, they express their love for her -- love that they
	hadn't expressed before.  The protagonist thinks, however, why
	express your love now, when it's too late?  But the
	protagonist knows that she didn't express her love for them,
	either.  Both sides were waiting for the other side to make
	that move.  The protagonist didn't want to express her love
	because she didn't want to let her friends see her weak -- she
	wanted to show that she could stand on her own.

	The protagonist is then reincarnated and has another chance.
	This time she sets out to retify the situation by dedicating
	her life to making her friends happy.  But she has trouble
	finding the proper balance.  The fact that she is always
	telling her friends what they want to hear make them think
	that her friendship is actually superficial and that in
	reality the protagonist is up to something.  They think she's
	just pretending to be so nice because she wants something from
	them.  So the protagonist gets terrified because in this life
	she's messed up her oportunity to have good relationships with
	her friends, so she isolates herself from the world.

	And whether things ever get better is left up in the air.

		-- |>oug ]