Mules

[Doug Alan <nessus@athena.mit.edu>]

I recently was looking through some comments IED made on my interview
with Kate Bush and I have decided to take a few moments to counter.
(|>oug is also wondering how his interview got so thoroughly reformated
by IED.  Did IED go through the effort of retyping |>oug's entire
interview?  This would hardly have been necessary considering that
|>oug can most certainly guarantee that he still has it online.)

> KATE: Right! Well, um...I think you...It's kind of weird the level of
>       interpretation that you are reading into things, because...I
>       mean, a mule--in our country--all it represents is a stupid
>       animal. They are considered stupid.

> <This, of course, is the dominant significance of the mule as a
> symbol in the United States, as well. The expression "stubborn as a
> mule" is considerably better known in both countries than the
> sterile condition of the animal--as the interviewer ought to know.>

Of course, "stupid" and "stuborn" are two completely different words
with completely different meanings.  Yes, in the U.S. mules are used
very often to symbolize stubborness.  They are not however often used
to symbolize stupidity.  In fact, mules are often very stubborn
animals.  They are also, in fact, very intelligent animals.  The
distinction bewteen stupidity and stuborness is something that Mr.
Marvick ought very well to know.

The reason that the use of the mule to represent stuborness did not
occur to me is that the song "Get Out Of My House" seemed to have a
happy ending.  (And of course, the mule could never symbolize
stupidity to me because mules just don't symbolize stupity --
jackasses do, but a mule is not a jackass).  The man and woman seemed
to have found something in common in their muleness and sang to each
other.

I'm not the only one who had this interpretation.  I spoke to many
people about the song over the years, and most of them seemed to feel
also that the song had a happy ending, and that the man and woman were
happy to be mules together.  The challenge then in interpreting the
song was to figure out why it was a happy thing for the man and woman
to become mules.  The sexual neutrality of mules then seemed like a
likely explanation.  Other people I talked with before approaching
Kate with the issue seemed to think it a reasonable theory.

Kate, on the other hand, says that she intended the song to have a
unhappy ending.  The song is in my opinion one of the very best songs
ever written, however, her unhappy intention with the ending certainly
wasn't communicated to me.  Quite to the contary.

> DOUG: In any case, what is really strange about the singing at the
>       end of _Leave_It_Open, is that if you play it backwards, it
>       also sounds like intelligible singing. In fact, it sounds to
>       me like, "And they said they wouldn't let me in", which is
>       wonderful because then it has the opposite meaning backwards
>       as it does forwards.

> <Except that it does _not_ sound like "And they said they wouldn't
> let me in" when played backwards.>

Says you!

> DOUG: (Kate is saved by the bell, as her brother is at the door, and my
>	half hour is up. I talked to both of Kate's brothers some time
> 	later, however, and neither had any qualms about giving away
> 	the secret of the two-way messages. It involves listening to
> 	singing played backwards on a tape deck, learning to sing the
> 	backwards sounds, and then recording that strange singing
> 	backwards....)

> <This is apparently a reference to the explanation given by Paddy
> and John to the entire audience of the 1985 Kate Bush Convention in
> Romford, England. In fact, however, their description of the process
> does nothing to explain the apparent presence of two simultaneous
> messages, only the basic method of creating the first, "backwards"
> message.>

Do you have to assume me a liar, IED?  This is not a reference to the
explanation given by Paddy and John at the KBC Convention -- rather it
is a reference primarily to an explanation given to me by John Carder
Bush at Tower Records in Greenwich Villiage.  He told me that Kate got
the idea from this guy who used to appear on talk shows in England.
He was sort of a human tape recorder.  You could give him any sentence
and he could speak it backwards.  On the talk shows, they would have
him speak into a tape recorder, then they would play the tape
backwards, and out would come the sentence that he had been asked to
speak.

I assume that the process of achieving a two-way message is much like
the process of coming up with a palindrome.  It takes a good feel for
doing this sort of stuff, and lots of fiddling until you get something
that works out.  Because of Kate's auditory two-way message, and some
unusual artwork I had seen once, a few years back I was inspired to
devise a visual two-way message.  If you read it right-side up, is
says "We let the weirdness in".  If you read the very same script
upside down, it says "They would not let me in".  Now, it's not
particularly legible in either direction, but I'm no great artist, so
I'm sure someone else could do a better job.  If I can do a
rudimentary visual two-way message, I'm sure Kate can with a bit of
effort do a two-way aditory message.

|>oug