Kate Bush Smiles in Her New Red Shoes

[josh@phoenix.lehman.com (Josh Whitehouse)]

November 24th Edition of _New York Press_ (New York's Free Weekly Newspaper)
has a review of _TRS_, reprinted here w/o permission.

Peter Gambaccini
Music
*
Kate Bush Smiles in Her New Red Shoes

Just as I can't understand why so many people have a problem with the estimable Hillary Clinton, I don't get the critical barbs often aimed at the inimitable Kate Bush.  Even in flattery she's called "pretentious," as if incorporating Emily Bronte and Lord Tennyson and a passel of psychobabblers into her material with often seamless skill were inherently a bad thing.  I understand that the Great Books don't carry the weight they once did, but I always maintained that having a long literary syllabus at one'
s command was a _good_ thing.

In a tv retrospective of _Saturday Night Live'_s early days, Paul Shaffer suggested that the most bizarre incident of his time as the show's musical director was when a very young Bush writhed on his piano, dramatically and terpsichoreally enacting "The Man With The Child In His Eyes," which she'd written at the age of 16.  Shaffer's act, of course, is the essence of inauthenticity, so consider the source.  Still, despite endless _SNL_ reruns, I don't believe her segment ever aired again.

Bush is a genius.  Geniuses do overreach.  Some of her stuff is awful, paint-peeling noise.  I question certain of her choices.  One thing I love about civilization is that we can disagree about such things without strafing each with automatic weapons fire.  Bush connects about two out of three times, and a .667 beats not only John Olerud's batting average but the average pop artist's two or three acceptable cuts per CD.

Her "Love and Anger," a stunner MTV never plays anymore, is about third on my alltime video list (behind R.E.M.'s "Shiny Happy People", and Midge Ure's "Dear God").  "This Womans Work", with the couplet "Ooh, it's hard on a man, his work is over," is the chillingly apt backdrop to the scene of Kevin Bacon fretting out Elizabeth McGovern's difficult childbirth in _She's Having A Baby".  It almost makes you forget how pedestrian the rest of the film is.

I was a sucker for her banshee vocal as the ghostly Cathy on "Wuthering Heights."  She re-recorded a more human voice for the song on her compilation _The Whole Story_.  "In the Warm Room" convinced me to have sex with someone I was waffling about; "Wow" has become my anthem to anyone who amazes me; I sing "Lionheart" to my cat.

Bush has used Bulgarian women's choirs and African drummers and David Gilmour's guitar to magnificent effect.  Her malleable and expansively ranging voice pairs with her studio wizardry to give her the most astonishing vocal control of any recording artist extant.  She steps so far in front of the dense sonic landscape on "Suspended in Gaffa" that you figure she's left the speaker and must be in your apartment.

_The Red Shoes_ (Columbia), here after a four-year wati since _The Sensual World_, adds to her stature and could add to the size of her American audience.  It's accessible.  It's not terribly polysyllabic.  The obscure cultural reference points are fewer than in a Dennis Miller monolog.  Parts of it are just darn pretty.  At 35, Kate Bush has produced her most gleeful album in a decade.

The 1993 Bush gives us instant smiles with "Rubberband Girl," which, I dare say, is just plain fun.  A clever analogy spins out as she details her life.  She's inflexible; she'd like to bounce back, to snap out of it, like a rubberband.  "Those trees bend in the wind," she notes, while "I try to resist."  It's rendered to a jaunty beat.  No Ph.D. required to grasp this one.

Kate Bush always manages to be steamily exotic without being the least bit smutty.  There's this thing called subtlety, see.  I won't quote the lyrics of "And So Is Love" at length out of context, but her terrible sexy tease is the explicit detail she leaves off the end of every line.  It sounds like an infuriating device, but it's brilliant.   It's another of her unabashed testimonials to the primacy of true feeling; in affairs of the heart, Kate Bush always means business.

Eric Clapton guests on "And So Is Love."  He belongs, but he's not the star--it's her show.  "Why Should I love You?" is different.  Prince co-arranges, shares vocals, and plays his customary array of instruments.  The result is exactly what you'd expect.  It's okay, but it was never in my dreams.

"Moments of Pleasure" probably _will_ inhabit my dream state.  Direct and piercing, it's only Kate at the piano and Michael Kamen's orchestrations; it's achingly, unbearably exquisite.  She recalls a dive off a rock at the beach, snow on a New York balcony, and a favorite saying of her mother, whose relatively recent death informs much of _The Red Shoes_.  With all the feeling she can muster--and she can outmuster anyone--Bush affirms "Just being alive, it can really hurt/And those moments given are a gift
 from time/Just let us try to give the moments back/To those we love, To those who will survive."

Bush has customarily shunned interviews and the p.r. mill, insisting that all she needs to say is in her music.  I'm always reminded of Peter Handke's novell, _A Moment of True Feeling_.  There are more of those moments, deeper and honestly proferred to us, in _The Red Shoes_ that in piles of product gracing the airwaves.  If the gorgeous and affecting "Moments of Pleasure" doesn't suffice, we're dead.

Elsewhere, she lightens up a lot.  In "The Red Shoes," a girl dons the fabled footwear and can't stop dancing.  And you can dance to it, and to "Eat the Music," whic is vaguely Mexican and so laden with fruit imagery that you'll get hungry.

_The Red Shoes_ has its misses.  Her "Song of Solomon" isn't as riveting  as the Bible's, and "Big Stripey Lie" is a nifty title for an ugly tune.  But what's most often apparent is that Bush, who rarely does concerts, brings such care and expertise to here production.  In the course of a single trach, she is first one voice and then an altogether different one, singing from geographically distinct locales in the aural mix.  In "Top of the City," she pauses perfectly between vocal steps, jsut as anyone mak
ing a climb to such a lofty pinnacle would have to.

In "You're the One," a finale that brings together Jeff Beck and the Trio Bulgarka without a stumble, she cogently observes the futility of trying to sort out what's yours and what's mine after a breakup; almost all of it is ours, materially but, more importantly, metaphysically.  She can gas up the car and load it with her things, but "you're the only one I want," she repeats again and again.  At the end, farther away, she's calling out "Sugar?  Honey?"

Pedestrian notions rendered in simple terms, perhaps.  _The Red Shoes_ is as plain-speaking as Kate Bush gets.  But not pro forma, and even the small words have been selected with great care and precision.  From the most serene bliss to the most desperate urgency, no singer locates as many spots on the emotional spectrum as Bush does.

Every one of Bush's albums contains songs I couldn't live without, but _The Red Shoes_ is a rewarding chance to begin to accept her as your personal, uh, genius.  "You see, I'm all grown up now," she sang in 1989 on _The Sensual World_'s "The Fog".  No, you're all grown up _now_.
*