HERESY

[PMANCHESTER@ccmail.sunysb.edu]

       Today I took a drastic step.  I went down to the Record Stop in
Lake Ronkonkoma, who had the box set for the best price that I've
seen, $159, and told them not to hold one for me.

       Record Stop is where I forked over $99.95 for the Japanese
import video "The Single File," $125 for the original 7" vinyl SF box
set (without the box, but otherwise complete and virgin), and roughly
$120 per album since HOL, by the time I would lay in the import
singles in 7" and 12" and the album itself in vinyl and CD.  I don't
even want to get started on the imported songbooks, copies of Kerton
and Vermorel, original editions of Reich's A BOOK OF DREAMS, and so
on.  I've been the sort of fan who has prowled through libraries to
photocopy old reviews, xeroxed BILLBOARD charts and blurbs from MELODY
MAKER, and subcribed to and archived this digest.  At the party I put
on when TSW was released, a friend contemplating the 6'X 4'
sand-through-hands poster on my wall said, "I guess you must be a
fan."  "Having one of these posters doesn't make me a fan," I
answered.  "It's having TWO."  Just as I have two copies of Jay Bush's
CATHY, one that I keep unopened in the original mailer.

       I don't say No! to this new box release because I've ever
stinted on my devotion to Kate Bush, but because this seems to be a
marketing scam unworthy of her participation.  To me it seems the
latest in a culminating series of bad signs.  I'm gonna be volunteer
lightning rod here and utter lots of heresy, bring down flame and fire
upon my head.  But I'm only trying to formulate the disquiet that I've
heard from many of us in recent months.  The love-hounds who will be
seeing her in London later this month may have opportunity to help get
her back in touch with her audience and her commitment to her work.

*	Bad sign: how long it took to get working on TSW.  Forget how
long we had to wait; the questions have to do with how long it took
her to get back to her work, and whether she really went back to it
with full commitment.  The is where the Del Palmer question Richard
Caldwell raised comes in, but it isn't Del in particular.  I'll come
back to this.

*	Bad sign: for the FIRST TIME in the History of the World, a
Kate Bush album was accompanied by only THREE videos.  It has always
been four.

*	Bad sign: in those videos, Kate spends so much time showing
the bottom of her chin to the camera it gives you a crick in the neck
to watch her.  Or she drapes herself in upholstery fabric.  It isn't
vanity, otherwise she wouldn't include the interview, which shows us
clearly that she isn't a 19 year old nymph any longer.  It's
professional indecision: she doesn't seem to know what to do with
herself.  For me, the redeeming moments come when she's doing what
somebody called the funky chicken with the band, in "Love and Anger."
There at least she is a little unselfconscious, looks like she is
having a good time.

*	Bad sign (recent evidence perhaps--it can be hoped!--to the
contrary): her unwillingness to perform live.  She seems to think she
has to top the Tour of Life.  I can't tell whether this is timidity,
nostalgia, or arrogance.  Here she is with this great songbook, in a
position to put together a killer band, with world's thirstiest
audience awaiting her!  Vickie put her finger on it.  She should
either take ten years off and have a baby, and then see whether she
wants a professional career any more, or she should get herself into
touring shape and bop around in front of a band for a while.

       The crassness of the current box release has been well brought
out these past weeks.  Only fans are going to put out $150-200 for a
kb collector's item--but we are the very ones who likely have the six
albums already amd maybe, like me, all the relevant singles.  I'd buy
it in a minute if there were two songs I hadn't heard.  Even one.  A
true historical record like Andrew Marvick outlined would deserve
support.  But the only *rational* market for this release is to be
gifts from fans to neophytes.  To me, that feels like I am being
shaken down.  It's not a katelike feeling.  Have commercial interests
gotten bigger than her talent?

       One of the reasons I've loved kb is the sheer craft of her
search for and achievement of professional power.  She had total
artistic control over her own product before she was 21; it took the
Rolling Stones nearly 10 years to get that far.  She made the
commercial aspects of pop music part of a new 'performance art'.
Remember that a Kate Bush album release has never been the album
alone, it has been a whole Manifestation Event: the first single comes
out in England, then here; then the album; then Kate's over here, her
mug on MTV; the videos start to arrive, the 7" and 12" import singles;
long reviews and interviews appear.  One could always feel her
presence, her darsan, behind it all.  This was her work: to be
impressario of her own appearance.  Vermorel correctly remarks the
hostility of photographers to her policy of wanting final review
rights over their work before she will grant a photo opportunity;
anybody ever wonder why kb is never featured in Vogue, Mademoiselle,
etc.?  When she was in New York in November, 1985, BILLBOARD reported
it in a regular news item, mentioning that she was not only writer,
arranger, performer, and producer of her music, but was also now her
own manager.  Great, I thought.  Kate's peaking.

       Five years later, I am worried.  It has helped me to understand
all this to have John Carder Bush's CATHY set.  Jay is 14 years older
than Cathy as they conspire together, he to be a photographer, she to
be a presence.  One can simply see in these photographs the birth of
what beguiles us in the Kate Bush they were inventing, with Paddy as
the band: Kate's precocity has always been met with a total, loving
acceptance, first from her brothers and parents, later from us as
recruits.  She projects this expectation when she performs--which is
why cynical souls are driven off screaming.  The fact that she is also
good makes her cosmic.  Every so often someone professes that Kate
Bush is God.  A colleague announced one time in seminar that that's
what I think.  I said he was wrong; she is God's sister.

       Well sister Kate is older now, and it's less and less
appropriate for her to be working inside an image she came to with her
brothers and Del.  The Kate Bush they saw in her, and she performed
for us forever--in "The Kick Inside" and the Hammersmith video from
the Tour of Life--had room for three more albums, but it ended with
"Hounds of Love."  Dead and drowned, that Kate will forever live again
to tell her mother, tell her father, tell her brothers how much she
loves them.  But she's been milking it since then, first with "The
Whole Story," which was useful and deserves its success, but now in
TSW and its uncertain promise.  Even those who like TSW, me among
them, don't claim that it is an artistic breakout.  And in that
context, the new box set release feels like the Heavy Hand.

       This woman's work:  is it over?


............................................................................
"C'mon, we all sing!"                            pmanches@sbccmail  (BITNET)
                                   pmanchester@ccmail.sunysb.edu  (INTERNET)
     Peter Manchester, Religious Studies, SUNY at Stony Brook, NY 11794-3725