on the multitude of Her talents

[Jamie Andrews <jha%lfcs.edinburgh.ac.uk@NSS.CS.UCL.AC.UK>]

on Her voice:

     I think the great thing about Kate's voice is not necessarily her
range, although that's technically impressive.  It's the way she uses
it: her sense of how to phrase, what to do with a note, which way and
how long to "smear" the first or last note of a phrase.  Take "The Man
with the Child in his Eyes", for example.  Pat Benatar (ecch) or even
Suzanne Vega could not get the emotional content out of that song that
Kate does.  Consider specifically the following (my punctuation):

     "Here I am again my girl, wond'rin' what on earth,
      I'm-a doin'-a here; maybe, he doesn't love me;
      I just took a trip, on my love for him."

     Think of what she does with each note there.  The only singers I
can compare that to are Nat King Cole, and Barbra Streisand when she
had some sense of musical style.

     But of course there's more to it than that, because that great
sense of presentation is integrated into the writing of all her songs.
When she wrote the melody to the line "the man with the child in his
eyes", she knew exactly how she was going to sing it.  (Actually I
suppose the two came together.)  Similarly with all of "The Flight
(night? oops, I forget) of the Swallow", or "The Hounds of Love", for
example.

on Her videos:

     What we must remember is that Kate was making videos back when
they weren't even called videos, when it was kind of "oh yeah, Kate
Bush has recorded this kind of movie clip to go with her song".  The
videos for "Wuthering Heights" and "TMwtCihE" are pretty embarrassing
(to me, anyway), but for instance those for "Breathing" and "Sat In
your Lap" I think are excellent, and they were before the video boom
too.

     Of the post-video boom videos, I think "Cloudbusting" is vaguely
farcical (unfortunately, because it's my favourite Kate song).  But
"HoL" and "RUtH" are great, and I would almost say that she wrote "The
Big Sky" as a video song specifically, it works so much better on
video than just the record itself.

on Her emotional impact:

     I think the thing that ties together Kate's songs with things
like, say (for me) _Blade Runner_, _Lolita_, or Ravel's music, is the
sense of "artistic rapture" in them (to coin a phrase).  It's art
taken to a level where it becomes a tangible sense of esthetic bliss.
When it doesn't work it comes off as bad melodrama or bad psychedelia,
which is how some people view all of these things anyway, but when it
works it really is rapturous.

happy birthday Kate

happy Katemas everyone

--Jamie.
  jha@lfcs.ed.ac.uk
"Tonight's the night of the flight"