Re: Cloudbusting - The book, the song, the controversy!!!! :-)

[ag@sics.se (Anders G|ransson)]

In article <y77L5B2w165w@netrun.cts.com> 
rhill@netrun.cts.com (ronald hill) writes:

A this spirited defense of Kate Bush's lyrical;


           Anders puts forth the dubious notion that the lyrics to 
   Cloudbusting are "weak" and that the fact that the lyrics don't give 
   all the background to the story makes them less important then the 
   music!  What a dubious notion!  

Well, it's not that the lyrics don't give all the facts of the
matter the makes it less important than the music. No, my idea
was perhaps even more dubious: If the song (music&lyrics) gives
an emotional impression this is to be credited to the music
since the lyrics are (*as I see this*) so weak. Now, one of the
weaknesses of the lyrics is that it is so fragmental as to be
more or less meaningless to a listener unaware of the
background to the lyrics. (I admit that I'm not a great
fan of W. Reich (nor of Freud) and this may have made me
prejudiced against the theme of the song.)


   Firstly the song "Cloudbusting" is a 
   successful song (number 20 on the British charts, not bad for such a 
   long song!) and has been the basis for a very successful "sampled 
   song", "Something Good" by Utah Saints.

My immediate reaction is to congratulate Kate Bush and her record company
to this success! Let's include the "Utah Saints" too in the
congratulations!
 

  The fact that the story isn't 
   so easy to figure out hasn't stopped lots of people from loving the 
   song.

This might well be untrue! Maybe it has! It stopped me from
loving the song.


   Listen to the parts of the song that go "I just know that 
   something good is going to happen" or "on top of the world.." or many 
   other places in the song and tell me that the lyrics don't add 
   anything.   The first quote was the whole bases for the Utah Saints 
   "song", and people responded to it with no further story at
   all!!! 


The pictures used in a Rorschach test are not works of art.


           Generally, poetry and music are what can speak directly to the 
   emotions, without having to give us the "background info".  Movies and 
   books almost always do, which is probably why music can have the same 
   impact, compacted into a much shorter time.

There are degrees in this matter of "background", why even the
single letter "K" might give you an emotional reaction. To say
that movies and books almost never gives us "background info" is
in my opinion an untrue generalization or a misuse of the phrase.


           Take the line from Anders' sig "If you see Saint Anne, please 
   tell her - thanks a lot", that comes from a Bob Dylan song, a song I've 
   only heard from Neil Young's version at "BobFest".  

You cleverly spotted this. The song is 'Just like Tom Thumb's
Blues' from Highway 61 Revisited. 

   To me that line and 
   song have very important meanings to me.  
   Do I know what the songs 
   "about"?  Not a clue.  But I can applying the meaning and emotion to 
   very personal things in my life.  Do I want to know what the song is 
   "really" about?  I don't know.  

Jesus, it's there in plain English. I won't pester gaffa by
spelling the content of this lyrics out but briefly our hero
visits the Mexican city Juarez 
     "When you're lost in the rain in Juarez and it's Eastertime too
      and your gravity fails and negativity don't pull you through"
getting some terrible decease from 'Saint Annie', getting a
D.T., getting an astute impression of the corruption, the
organized crime and the scant prospects for the people living in
this town and finally returning to New York City "having had enough".
(And I felt guilty when introducing the relatively
 colourless "America" as an object of comparison...)

Since you can apply the meaning without getting this ...well
you don't really need any lyrics at all...your fierce
imagination sparkels off at a sentence, a word, a letter, the
image of a letter...the ideal recipient for Kate Bush's lyrics
(my polemical instinct have by now got the better of me)

   Did I need to understand the background 
   to the lyrics to "Cloudbusting" to love the song?  No.  Did reading 
   more about the song give me a different perspective on the song, 
   without erasing the original, more personal perspective?  Yes!  
           Kate's talked about this subject several times, including:

           KATE: An engineer we were working with picked out the line in 
   "And Dream of Sheep" that says "Come here with me now."  I asked him 
   why he liked it so much.  He said, "I don't know, I just love it.  It's 
   so moving and comforting."  I don't think he even knew what was being 
   said exactly, but the song is about someone going to sleep in the 
   water, where they're alone and frightened.  And they want to go to 
   sleep, to get away from the situation.  But at the same time it's 
   dangerous to go to sleep in water, you could drown.  When I was little, 
   and I'd had a bad dream, I'd go into my parents' bedroom round to my 
   mother's side of the bed.  She'd be asleep, and I wouldn't want to wake 
   her, so I'd stand there and wait for her to sense my presence and wake 
   up.  She always did, within minutes; and sometimes I'd frighten her - 
   standing there still, in the darkness in my nightdress.  I'd say, "I've 
   had a bad dream," and she'd lift bedclothes and say something like 
   "Come here with me now."  It's my mother saying this line in the track, 
   and I briefed her on the ideas behind it before she said it.  And I 
   think it's the motherly comfort that this engineer picked up on.  In 
   fact, he said this was his favourite part of the album.   (1987, KBC 
   21)


If Kate could write some lyrics in this fashion, it's sad when
the explanation of a poem is so much better than the poem itself.

You might say she cuts herself loose in her lyrics and hoovers 
some ten inches above the ground (befitting a divinity) but we
who walks on the earth need some friction to get forward and 
are not much helped by Kate Bush's lyrics.
As always *in my opinion*, it might be noted that I appear to be
alone in this opinion....


best regards Anders





--


If you see Saint Annie, please tell her - Thanks a lot.