Heresy revisited

[PBMANCHESTER@ccmail.sunysb.edu]

Richard Caldwell (nrc@cbema.att.com) writes:
>It seems to me that the image of Kate that you're talking about didn't 
>drown at the end of The Ninth Wave, it was blown up in a bank robbery, 
>killed with a grenade, lost on a secret mission, drowned in a straight-
>jacket and finally thrown out of the house in _The Dreaming_.  

Beautiful!  This is a better account.  It makes more room for the 
exhilarating promise so many of us felt with "Hounds of Love."

>At some point after _Hounds of Love_ it seems as though the density
>of Kate's work reached critical mass.  At some point while trying to 
>realize her vision of the music that was to become _The Sensual World_
>I have to wonder if maybe it didn't become more of a labor than a
>labor of love.

This is just what worries me.  Well put.  I seem to have done less well in 
expressing a related concern over the thin line there is between creatively 
stimulating shelter with intimate collaborators and stiffling familiarity, 
phrasing it as Jay and Cathy 'conspiring together', which led you to rejoin:

>Here's where I start to disagree with your conclusions.  I don't
>believe that there was ever a plan of this sort.  Now that you mention
>it I wouldn't be surprised if Kate's early experience as "the
>observed" in Jay's photography helped her to develop the lack of
>inhibition that she displays in her early performances but I don't
>think there's any real evidence that Kate's image was a Bush family
>conspiracy.

My fault:  I didn't mean to imply a conscious plan, and certainly not any 
sort of scheme.  I was thinking along the lines of your analysis last summer 
of Del Palmer's influence on Kate's 'ear' in the studio, which I took to 
heart.  There too, what was manifestly a productive symbiosis early on, and 
maybe a triumphant one in "Hounds of Love," is now perhaps closing in on 
itself.

On the commercial aspects of the box set:
>You give us a list a of reasons why this set has a very small market and
>then you suggest that it was motivated by "commercial interests"?
>That doesn't make sense.

It has a very small *rational* market.  We all know we are not a rational 
market; up till now, like lots of others, I have paid *whatever* for 
*anything*.  And it's still working, as evidence posted here daily shows.  
But always before, there was something special to show for it, more than 
sheer collectability:  a new song, a new mix.  And I am reading lots of posts 
from people who wake up gloomy when they get the box home.  Maybe it is too 
harsh to say one feels "shaken down," but it is still not a katelike feeling. 
The very valid reasons you list for issuing the B-sides and remixes on CD 
argue for a two-disk special, not this.

Of course you are right that Kate didn't set out to perpetrate a scam; I 
suggested that she participated in one.  Your account is more gracious, but 
raises concerns of its own:
>That's not what she did.  Instead she created an anthology, a
>collection of what she evidently considers to be her essential works.

This is all too close to a valedictory gesture, which is why I asked, "this 
woman's work; is it over?"  I guess we need a clear attitude here:  Kate Bush 
*owes us nothing*.  I think Jon Drukman has it just right when he says about 
a putative backing away on her part:
>In other words, it might not be laziness or
>decline, it might just be a case of "I don't have to hassle, so why
>bother?"
Though in context he is talking only about making videos, the trouble is, it 
feels to me like the work itself.  If she never tours again, or even never 
makes another album, that's her prerogative.  But I don't have to like it.
............................................................................
"C'mon, we all sing!"                            pmanches@sbccmail  (BITNET)
                                   pmanchester@ccmail.sunysb.edu  (INTERNET)
     Peter Manchester, Religious Studies, SUNY at Stony Brook, NY 11794-3725