Get Out of My House

[Brian Dillard <dillardb@pilot.msu.edu>]

Joe wrote:
------------
Hell, I've read people who thought "Get Out of My House" is about being
raped.  And, until I found out the real inspiration for the song, I
believed what I had read.
-----------

Can I just say that in general I am surprised and a bit saddened to find
that so many of Kate's comments about the *inspiration* for her songs
has led people to narrow *interpretations*? This is not meant at all to
be a personal attack against Joe or anyone else. But in general  I
wonder why people want so much help and _direction_ in how to engage
Kate's music.

Why in the heck _can't_ Get out of My House be about rape? The text--and
music--are ambiguous. Kate uses a barrage of imagery to open up themes
of invasion and protection and transformation:

          "No stranger's feet/will enter me/
          I wash the panes/I clean the stains away/
          ...they come with their weather hanging around them/
          But they can't knock my door down/
          With my key I lock it."

The ambiguity - indeed, the _poetry_ - of these and the other lyrics is
that they mean many things at once. Kate is in the house. Kate _is_ the
house. Kate and the house have the same relationship as a witch and her
familiar. The house is being invaded--by a man (we hear a man's voice
saying, "Woman let me in"). Kate attempts to batten down the hatches,
but then her flight takes a different form--transformation, first into a
bird, a delicate creature of the air, and then into a beast--the Mule.

This song is about invasion, emotional, territorial, physical, and the
many responses one can take to counter that invasion. Depending on one's
personal background, one can bring to the song any number of "takes" on
the nature of the invasion--including rape (and I will count on the high
level of compassion and intelligence on this list to keep this from
sparking off a discussion of how women are _so_ obsessed with rape!).
The universality of the song lies in the fact that everyone at some
point or another feels invaded, seeks protection. Like "Lily," "Get Out
of My House" offers a highly mystical, poetic insight of how to
accomplish that protection.

The reason I consider Kate such an amazing songwriter is that she is
able to take a scenario--whether it's from myth, biography, history or
fiction--and use it to evoke a wide range of thematic issues open to
multiple overlapping interpretations. I think it's sad to see these
multiple interpretations close up into a simple 1:1 relationship of
kate's inspiration : universal interpretation once kate explains what
led her to write the song. Perhaps we'd all have a richer experience of
engaging her work if we let the work stand on its own without kate, its
"mother," hovering over it.
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Brian J. Dillard     dillardb@pilot.msu.edu   773.348.9319
+++ "State of emergency ... that's where I want to be."  --Bjork +++
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P.S.  I don't necessarily think it's homophobic or heterosexist, but I
do think it's at least _interesting_ that so many people are willing to
recognize the pun in Cloudbusting about "son"/"sun" but so many people
are insistent that Kate simply _couldn't_ have intended the "coming out"
line to be another play on words. Given her well-documented engagement
with queer issues and people, why is it such a stretch to think the song
drew from more than one source of inspiration and that she simply chose
in interviews to talk about the _main_ source of inspiration--Reich's
book. After all, in "GOOMH," she makes reference to the Mule, which many
of us take to be a possible Asimov reference, even though Foundation and
The Shining are two different works.