Re: The Ninth Wave - Yet more KonTroversy

[Mark Anderson <manderso@ugly.cs.ubc.ca>]

Yes, I know this has been discussed and discussed and discussed,
but it's _my_ first contribution...

In <18505@usc.edu> Stephen Kurtzman writes re _The_Ninth_Wave_:
>Yeah, its pretty clear that the person does not survive. Otherwise
>you have to make all sorts of out-of-body experience hypotheses to
>account for her being a ghost watching her loved one in "Watching you
>Without Me" and her ability to play peek-a-boo with the earth in
>"Hello Earth".

No! No! No!  She does NOT die (IMHO)!  Before I bought _HoL_, I had
already read a bunch of arguments discussing the subject here in
Love-Hounds.  So when I finally bought the album, I thought I would
have a lot of trouble deciding whether or not she dies at the end of
_The_Ninth_Wave_.

But to my surprise, I found that after only a couple of listenings, I
definitely had the feeling she survives.  Not, perhaps, because of what
the lyrics say (as we have already seen, the lyrics are ambiguous) but
because of the feelings and emotions the music evoked.  In particular,
_The_Morning_Fog_ seems to be about, well, the morning fog.  That is,
making it through the night.

Regarding the argument that you have to believe Kate is talking about
out-of-body experiences unless she means that the heroine dies:  personally,
I think _WYwoM_ describes a hallucinatory experience the heroine is having,
in perhaps an almost dreamlike state in the water.  Ditto _Hello Earth_.
And I'm pretty sure Kate herself has given this explanantion before.
However...

In a Love-Hounds article of Fri Jan 31 23:13:47 1986, |>oug replies to
someone's question about Kate's beliefs in the paranormal:

>> And [Kate believes in] astral projection? [...]
>
>Yeah, astral projection.  Listen to "Watching You Without Me" and "Hello
>Earth".  She's admited to believing in most of these things at some
>point or another, but doesn't seemed to be particularly obsessed with
>any of them.
---
Mark Anderson <manderso@ugly.cs.ubc.ca>
{att!alberta,uw-beaver,uunet}!ubc-cs!{good,bad,ugly}!manderso
"Narrow mind would persecute it, die a little to get to it..."