Re: re:ninth wave

["Alan Chamberlin" <xxxxabckid@ix.netcom.com>]

Jack <noone04@ibm.net> wrote in article <3426155F.3988@ibm.net>...
> I was thinking about the Ninth Wave today, and decided to listen to
> the baktabak interview disc for The Dreaming and HOL. What I realised
> I'd forgotten about was that TNW isn't about a woman (i.e. kate) but a
> man who spends a night in the water. She's got such a storytelling
> quality to her music that you don't always realise she's not talking
> about herself. Cloudbusting and Mother Stands For Comfort are other
> songs that feature male characters. Actually, I didn't know what MSFC
> was about until about '89, when a friend talked to me about Kate's
> explanation of the song. I had thought until that point that it was a
> beautiful song about a mother's acceptance of her daughter. heh heh heh.
> . .
>                                                       ~Jack~
> 
> 

Hate to disagree, but the English degree in me can't let this one slide. 
(I'm ignoring the latest strains of thought that Under Ice and Dream of
Sheep are about drugs.  Much the same way I ignore Grace Slick's
assertations about Alice In Wonderland.)

The protagonist's gender is mentioned twice in  The Ninth Wave; in Waking
the Witch and in Jig of Life.  In Waking the Witch "her" accuser refers to
the protagonist as "girl" and "woman."  (Uh, Damn you woman!)  In Jig of
Life we begin, "Hello old lady," and proceed to find out her "future"
visitor is herself as an old woman.  The woman she will "be in the mirror"
some day.  Her future self has come to declare, "Come on, let me live,
girl."

I think your observation that the "person" in the Ninth Wave is not Kate is
quite good.  Internal evidence in the piece does not support the
protaganist being male.  

Now if you can make a case in the lyrics that the protaganist was planning
a trip to Sweden for some radical surgery then "Jig of Life" might support
your point. <evil grin>


-- 
Alan Chamberlin
http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Plains/8939
----

"Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat them."
Santayana

"History can teach us nothing."
Sting