Kate Bush Research Articles

Television music curation in the playlist era

Today’s technologically eclectic media landscape – dominated by streaming algorithms, curated playlists and TikTok-spawned virality – has elevated the role of the television music supervisor. Film and television soundtracks, previously influenced by mixtapes and compilation CDs, have become inexorably shaped by the rise of streaming. Digging the infinite crates of the internet for rare and recycled tracks from yesterday and today, music supervisors for shows like High Fidelity (2020), The Bear (2022–present), Atlanta (2016–22) and Russian Doll (2019–present) have sculpted distinct sonic identities that grab viewers on-screen and retain their attention through their ‘Official Spotify Playlists’. This article traces the possibilities of the soundtrack in the playlist era through case studies of HBO’s eclectic anthology series High Maintenance (2012–20), as well as the unprecedented resurgence of Kate Bush via Netflix’s Stranger Things (2016–present).

How Wild Can It Be?

How Wild Can It Be?

Animating the Kinetic Trace: Kate Bush, Hatsune Miku, and Posthuman Dance

Abstract This project emerges from a recent research-creation project involving MikuMikuDance (MMD), a freeware animation program where 3D models can be maneuvered, posed and choreographed into various dance sequences through the use of motion data and digital manipulation. In a dance translation that involves the choreography for Kate Bush’s song, “Wuthering Heights,” a Microsoft Kinect, and the freeware interface MikuMikuDance, created for Japanese virtual idol, Hatsune Miku, dance is revealed to be both rooted in the body and distributed across collective bodies and screens. By relinquishing biometric control, and allowing data to “dance,” this project eschews mimetic realism for an attempt to learn the machine’s “truth,” and proposes failure as a mode of resistance to systems of control, making way for an assemblage of relational bodies that dance within and through one another.

‘Y’all don’t wanna hear me, you just wanna dance’: A cognitive approach to listener attention in OutKast’s ‘Hey Ya!’

In his article on ‘musical stylistics’, Morini demonstrates (with reference to a song by Kate Bush) that lyrical and musical content can work in harmony to produce consonant meanings and stylistic effects. Our article develops Morini’s musical-stylistic approach by employing cognitive theories to track how music and lyrics can work together in a different way. ‘Hey Ya!’ by OutKast (2003) employs a knowing dissonance between the song’s lyrical content and its rhythm and key, the reconciliation of which leads to a drastic and surprising re-reading of the song’s meaning, often documented in online articles and listener discussions. Combining a cognitive poetic approach with theories of ‘habituation’ and ‘fluency’ in music psychology, our analysis centres around the shifting position of the song’s lyrics within the Figure and Ground of the composition, in order to account for listener (in)attentiveness. This leads to a consideration of the attentiveness of readers to lyrical content in music more generally, and its implications for stylistic analysis of the genre.

Wittgenstein

Wittgenstein Andre Bagoo (bio) They bought Wittgenstein an outfit to wear on chilly nights. Both men felt he liked it so much (he jumped wildly when presented with the unicorn-patterned onesie) they went back to the pet shop for seven more: one for each day of the week plus a spare for laundry days. They took pictures of him in his pajamas for his Instagram, tagging the pet shop. In all the posts, he stared at the camera. He was a black and white mongrel, between a husky and a pariah, very foxlike in the face, the kind of dog you might see running up and down the pavements of the city looking uneasily from side to side wondering where its next meal was coming from, except he had been rescued by them. On nights when Enzo was at work, James would take pictures of him tucked into his dog bed with blankets and cushions and send these pictures to Enzo, saying GOODNIGHT XO. On nights when Enzo was not at work, they would tuck Wittgenstein in together, a process that involved cuing up and singing "So Long Farewell" from The Sound of Music. They called the part sung by the youngest von Trapp, Gretl, "Wittgenstein's part." In the new apartment, the location of which they chose solely because of him (the landlord was pet-friendly; it was close to several parks and pet shops), they developed a morning routine with Wittgenstein taking his place in the breakfast nook, being fed bits of sweetbread and ham. When Enzo left for work, he would tell Wittgenstein he was now "in charge," while James would open the window overlooking the plant-lined driveway so Wittgenstein could position himself to watch. As he drove past the window, Enzo would cry "Wittgenstein! Wittgenstein! Wittgenstein!" and the pet would start twirling like a hurricane. They decorated the apartment sparingly, opting to match the existing palette (which happened to suit Wittgenstein's fur). They went to Mode Alive on Frederick Street in Port of Spain and picked out large wooden signs coated in chipped paint. One said LOVE IS ALL YOU NEED; another DOGS WELCOME, PEOPLE TOLERATED; and another TO ACCOMPLISH GREAT THINGS WE MUST NOT ONLY ACT, BUT ALSO DREAM; NOT ONLY PLAN, BUT ALSO BELIEVE. They briefly worried about whether people would think these signs corny, then dismissed such thoughts. Enzo felt having textual elements in the décor matched the fact that James was a writer, while James liked the way the signs were distressed, reminding him of the country house he'd spent August vacations in as a child — a rustic place he associated with love, the kind of place he hoped they might one day retire to together, spending days reading classic West Indian novels under mango trees and nights drinking wine under the starlight amid wildflowers and small golden frogs. They carried their haul to their truck lower down the street, strolling through the shadowless heat of the city. When they got home, James searched the internet and discovered the [End Page 101] sign about dreaming and believing was a quote from a once-famous French writer, and it seemed the sign was meant to hang over his writing desk, he was meant to be a writer, and they were, all three of them, meant to be together in this new place which they had moved into after only knowing each other for six months because James had been evicted from his old place and they both liked the idea of raising Wittgenstein together. They didn't think it too risky to move in so soon. This was how things had worked out. It was meant to be. In the initial months, the apartment filled with music. They blasted "Dog Years" by Maggie Rogers. They played "Dog Days Are Over" by Florence and the Machine (though observing that their dog days were, luckily, not over). When they went to a yard sale on Alfredo Street, they found old CDs. They picked out Hounds of Love by Kate Bush and began playing that on loop to the chagrin of their neighbors Frank and Betsy, who often glimpsed them frolicking...

Investigating ‘fame-inism’: The politics of popular culture

This special section of Feminist Theory emerged from the interdisciplinary workshop ‘The Politics of Popular Culture’, organised by the Centre for Gender and Women’s Studies at Lancaster University in March 2015 as part of Hear Me Roar, Lancaster’s first feminist arts festival. This festival brought together diverse performances and audiences embracing very different approaches to and understandings of feminism. The shows ranged from the Rose Theatre’s rehearsed reading of a previously unperformed Restoration Comedy by Elizabeth Polewheedle, to the participatory ‘Bush Rush’ in the town square which invited everyone to join in a mass performance of the choreography for Kate Bush’s celebrated single Wuthering Heights. Reflecting this context, the workshop invited participants to explore ideas around gender, performance, activism, mediation and spectatorship.

Beyond the Dawn: Authenticity, Documentation, and Kate Bush

Beyond the Dawn: Authenticity, Documentation, and Kate Bush

What is a Question?

What is a Question? Roshanak Kheshti (bio) A bird call, the smell of toasted pine needles on a California hillside, a gunshot, a viral video, church bells, the taste of a ripe peach [End Page 32] plucked from grandmother’s tree—what Kate Bush calls the “sensual world”—occurs as an intensity that sometimes goes unnoticed and sometimes gets rationalized into a prompt, a provocation, a question. On her October 1989-released LP, which begins with “The Sensual World” and ends with “This Woman’s Work,” Kate Bush proposes a sensual world without words, where rationality is somehow swerved around singing: “You don’t need words … stepping out off the page into the sensual world.” Using the medium of pop music, Bush raises the question that music has raised for centuries: must we rationalize into well-formed questions what the sensual world asks in non-rationalizable terms? What are the intensities that get sensed, circulating through us in ways that never result in the “feeling of having a feeling” but simply resonate through, on top of or near our bodies?1 Are these interactions questions too? And how do we know when we’re being asked? If these are indeed questions being asked by the sensual world, then perhaps what “an investigative question is or should be in the arts today” is a distillation of intensities resonating through us in the situatedness of our times and spaces, as well as our social and political worlds. The artist/scholar, then, is tasked with taking an account of these intensities (in a way that can best approximate an originary form/content whose roots and routes are often inaccessible), while also synthesizing them into an outcome that does something in the world, engaging matters of political intensity in forms that are best suited to do that work. Just as the intensities produced by the sensual world cannot have a predictable effect, neither can the objects, impulses, and expressions created by arts workers have a predictable effect in circulation. This critical stage in the life of the work is what makes it a dynamic expression of the here and now enfolded into the sensual world in circulation. How might the aesthetic object/impulse/expression created—the formal question—be informed by the questions asked of me by the sensual world while also generating new sensual questions to be circulated in the world? What work would I will the formal question to do in the world? And how can arts workers be open to the dynamic and ongoing transformations our questions undergo as they boomerang back to us, often unrecognizably returned as intensities resonating as questions posed yet again by the sensual world? Like [End Page 33] the Trio Bulgarka, who offer choral color and texture to “The Sensual World” by breathing their crescendo around Bush’s crystalline and melodramatic voice, all the while enmeshed in the song’s ensemblic particularity, the arts worker must figure the specificity of a question in the context of questions posed by an ensemblic whole.2 Roshanak Kheshti ROSHANAK KHESHTI is Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, San Diego. Her first book, Modernity’s Ear: Listening to R ace and Gender in World Music (2015), traces the feminization of listening through ethnographic and commercial audio recording, archiving and distribution practices. She has published numerous articles on film, popular music, sound, sexuality and Iran in such journals as R adical History Review, Sounding Out!, Feminist Studies, Theatre Sur vey, American Quarterly, Hypatia, and Parallax. Notes 1. Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 13. 2. On the “ensemblic” see Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics Of The Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 41. Copyright © 2017 Johns Hopkins University Press

Playing with time: Kate Bush's temporal strategies and resistant time consciousness

AbstractThis article focuses on two of Kate Bush's post-Aerial(2005) albums:Director's Cut(2011) and50 Words for Snow(2011). In these albums Bush plays with the temporal qualities of recorded music to create the conditions forself-reflexiveinternal time consciousness to emerge within the listener. I argue that self-reflexive internal time consciousness is a process that enables a listener to gain some understanding that they are embroiled in an act of perception forged via active engagement with recorded music. Bush creates these conditions in two principle ways: InDirector's Cutshe disturbs the memory of previous recorded versions that are re-visited on the album so they can be mobilised as new, interpretative-perceptive acts. In50 Words for Snowshe uses duration as a structure to support the construction of extensive perception. Bush plays with time on these albums because her conceptual music relies upon the uninterrupted unfolding of consciousness as it becomes interlaced with her recordings, understood in the Husserlian sense of temporal objects. Implicit to her temporal strategies is a critique of contemporary listening conditions and how they undermine the very forging of the perceptual act.

Henry Lives! Learning from Lawson Fandom

In an age when many fan activities are undertaken via online networks, devotees of long-dead Australian author Henry Lawson are predominantly bound by face-to-face participation in shared commemorative events. Traditionally seen by fans and readers as 'the Mate of Australia', Lawson is a figure who has inspired a constellation of transformative fan practices ranging from impersonation to extreme outback pilgrimages. Based on interviews with fans and participant observation, this article will show Henry Lawson Society events are intrinsically interactive, encouraging all members to participate in a variety of modes, through visual art, music, poetry and theatre. I argue that Henry Lawson fans are productive rather than critical, circulating their homages within a well-defined community of interest. I argue that Henry Lawson fans re-deploy texts in creative ways in order to make sense of their own social experience. Through a study the fan activities of passionate amateurs - such as Henry Lawson Literary and Memorial Society members - 'nonauthorised' ways of interpreting texts may be discerned, providing alternatives to the 'suspicious reading' of critics.

Weaving “Eroticism, Cosmology, and Politics” in Early Female Technopop: Three Discourses with the Informatics of Domination

The “informatics of domination,” a term coined by feminist author Donna Haraway in her seminal 1985 work, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” refers to an emerging techno-social world order especially threatening to women. In her manifesto, Haraway credits feminist authors who “weave eroticism, cosmology, and politics from imagery of embodiment” with helping to dismantle the informatics of domination. Musicians, too, have had something to contribute to the cyborg agenda. This article will illustrate how three female technopop artists, Laurie Anderson, Björk, and Kate Bush, “write the body” through their music videos to participate in a critical discourse with the informatics of domination.

‘Don't let me go! Hold me down!’: inspiration, voice and image in Kate Bush's ‘Hounds of Love’

AbstractAlthough Kate Bush's reputation as a significant musical pioneer has been accepted by most critics and academic commentators since her return to music in 2005, most readings of her work have been highly ahistoric. This paper explores how, with the release of her fifth album, Hounds of Love, in 1985, her popular appeal was widened into a genuine acceptance of her idiom by contemporary cultural commentators. In particular, the paper focuses on the rival inspirations and the shape, form and delivery of the title track, ‘Hounds of Love’ and its ‘alternative’ version, released on a 12” disc. The paper concludes by analysing the visual presentation of the song through the promotional video (directed by Bush herself) and her two mimed performances and offering a contextualised explanation for Bush's perceived ‘authenticity’ as an artist and performer.

Sing Us a Song, Piano Woman: Female Fans and the Music of Tori Amos AdrienneTrier-Bieniek. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2013.

Sing Us a Song, Piano Woman: Female Fans and the Music of Tori Amos Adrienne Trier-Bieniek. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2013.Adrienne Trier-Bieniek's Sing Us a Song, Piano Woman: Female Fans and the Music of Tori Amos offers a visionary glimpse into the myriad of ways that Amos's recorded and live performances positively impact her fans. The book blends primary and secondary sources in order to jump start a conversation about women, music, and fandom (13). The Introduction of the text outlines Tori Amos's career, provides an explanation of research methods, and offers insight into each of the book's six chapters. Throughout the text, feminist theorists (including Judith Butler and Laura Mulvey) provide context alongside Trier-Bieniek's analysis of first-person female fan interviews. Rather than examining popular musicians who promote style over substance (e.g., Britney Spears), the focus of this study surrounds the complex ways in which Tori Amos and her ethos impact the ways in which fans relate to, discuss, and deconstruct her music.The book chronicles six chapters, the first of which being 'Cock Rock' and 'Teenybop.' Here, Trier-Bieniek establishes the role of gender in the industry through a historical lens and presents connective links between various female singer-songwriters. Especially relevant is the section where Tori Amos sites Joni Mitchell and Kate Bush as early influences on her personal craft. Additionally, female fans expound via first-person interview content on how their connection to music is gendered (26). The book delves into the issues surrounding contemporary and feminism in the next section.Chapter 2, Challenging the Pop Culture Portrait of Female Fans, focuses specifically on history with respect to specific female artists and feminism. Andocentric paradigms are contrasted with the ways in which Amos gives voice to women's concerns within her lyrics. Trier-Bieniek posits, Tori's fans recognize that by situating women at the center of her songs (as well as drawing on her own experience as a woman in a male-dominated field), she goes against previous studies of culture that have focused on and used men as representatives for both genders' musical preferences (42). After accepting that production fights against patriarchy and noting how the aims of feminism can be expressed through music, the text turns its attention to the social roles of Amos's female fans.Chapter 3, Musical Healing, examines the ways in which female fans respond to Tori Amos's opus as a means for self-reflection and internal growth. …

Towards a musical stylistics: Movement in Kate Bush’s ‘Running Up That Hill’

A very recent trend in stylistics proposes the extension of its field of enquiry to accommodate various forms of multimodal art. Reflecting as it does the growing semiotic complexity of contemporary aesthetics, ‘multimodal stylistics’ is a welcome development. So far, however, its proponents have concentrated on genres in which texts are complemented by, or realized through, the visual medium – films, stage plays, television series and illustrated books. In this article, a multimodal stylistic analysis is attempted on a genre which has attracted little critical attention in linguistics – modern pop-rock music. A 1985 song by singer-songwriter Kate Bush, ‘Running Up That Hill’, is studied linguistically and musically. Employing a blend of stylistic and musicological techniques, and some of the insights provided by newborn multimodal stylistics, the author explores the complex ways in which meaning is created in a pop-rock song.

If you could start all over again

HOLLYWOOD, EVERY now and then, churns out a lm about role swaps or age swaps. Some magical happening occurs and swoosh, an adult becomes a child and a child becomes an adult, and much hilarity ensues as they struggle to cope with their new roles. Interestingly, it always seems to be the child who copes best with their new status, and the adult turned child who ends up in a kerfu e. is line of thought follows a classic bit of association. An event triggering a memory, triggering an idea, completing a circle. e trigger, in this case, was a moment from the closing ceremony of the London Olympics. ere was a brief, and given the rest of the show (my opinion only, of course), an all too eeting broadcast of Running up that hill by Kate Bush. A good friend of mine had recently surprised me by saying that he had been listening to a great deal of the songstress recently, which is one of the reasons why it stuck in my memory, post closing ceremony. e other being that it is a really good song (stick with me here). So, with the song still fresh in my memory (no mean feat these days), I decided to listen again, and being one for a decent lyric, I was struck by the line ‘... if I only could, I’d make a deal with god, and get him to swap our places...’ It was while listening that I was reading Michael Rosen’s excellent blog (always thought provoking), which questioned whether the present government’s thinking on maths was up to scratch and t for purpose. is led, in my head at least, to an image of certain ministers and education secretaries being swoooshed/zapped in some lm, as per above, into nurseries and primary schools to live their lives as children again – I know, I should get out more. e point being, is this: Is what the ministers in charge of steering educational policy proclaim as being best for children and right for them, all that important to a child? What would the ministers-turned-children’s experience in a setting or primary school be? Would their viewpoint change? Now, this might seem a bit far-fetched, or even irrelevant (or irreverent), but there is an important consideration here. In determining what we think is right for the future of the country, are we providing the best experiences for children today? Can forward thinking on an economic and political scale, be compatible with ensuring the happiness, care, emotional support, love, challenge, opportunities and varied experiences that help children to grow up contented, well-rounded, creative and expressive? I am not saying that the two are incompatible, merely that at all times we need to ensure that future expectations do not take away from the enchanted and extraordinary world of childhood – if you were a child again, you would want to be a child, not a future something or other. ere needs to be a balance, because a world without balance will always teeter on the edge of chaos. e Olympics has taught us that given the right support and the right environment we can achieve phenomenal things, whether it is winning gold medals or volunteering and helping others, and all things in between. We should all be mindful of legacy. Editor Neil Henty MSc eye@markallengroup.com

Oh Blessed Holy Caffeine Tree: Coffee in Popular Music

Oh Blessed Holy Caffeine Tree: Coffee in Popular Music

Kate Bush, The Red Shoes, The Line, the Cross and the Curve and the Uses of Symbolic Transformation

In Kate Bush’s 1993 album, The Red Shoes, and her film, The Line, the Cross and the Curve, she engages with the symbolism of The Red Shoes fairytale as first depicted in Hans Christian Andersen’s 1845 fairy tale and later developed by the Powell and Pressburger film (1948) of the same name. In Bush’s versions of the tale she attempts to find a space of agency for the main female protagonist in a plot structure over-determined by patriarchal narrative and symbolic logic. I will argue that it is through her own use of mystical symbolism — the Line, the Cross and the Curve — mediated through the deployment of ritual magick and kabbalistic ritual — that she breaks the ‘spell’ of the red shoes story where the main female character can escape the gender specific ‘curse’ of the red shoes.

What is Your Essentialism is My Immanent Flesh!

This article examines one of the main epistemological frameworks that feminist theory has used for the past 30 years: essentialism and anti-essentialism. It explores what is at stake by continuing to use such perspectives within the late days of the early 21st century, and how it is linked to a performance of critical sophistication which has specific political consequences. Instead of seeing the body as essentialist, the author draws on two examples — popular musician Kate Bush and ontological ideas about the Goddess — to present the body as immanent flesh. This has implications for thinking through different forms of relational and critical perspectives circulating in the current climate, and the author argues that the recent (re)introduction of affect and the increasing interest in haptic knowledges is part of the immanent flesh’s potential for transforming (feminist) knowledge and the wider world.

Speech Is Dead; Long Live Speech

Speech Is Dead; Long Live Speech

Narrative Theory as an Analytical Tool in the Study of Popular Music Texts

Narrative theory and popular music are not the most obvious of bedfellows: the former lends itself primarily to the elaboration (or analysis) of extended narrative structures, while the latter tends to manifest itself in three- to four-minute songs describing essentially static cameos, vignettes, or states of mind. That popular music texts may nevertheless contain elements of narration is hardly in doubt, however, as is shown by such songs as The Beatles’ ‘Norwegian Wood’ (1968), Kate Bush's ‘Wuthering Heights’ (1978), or The Buggles’ ‘Video Killed the Radio Star’ (1979). But narrative structures truly come into their own at the point where albums begin to function as significant units of music organization. Referring primarily to Genesis's The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway (1974) and The Who's Quadrophenia (1973), this article explores the ways in which music, lyrics, prose, art work, and other elements can be used to create and describe both single and multiple narratives.