Kate Bush

Or even 13, I've read. It's my favourite Kate Bush song.

Is it wrong to prefer the recorded WH from '86? OK fine. It's wrong.

nah, the Whole Story version is the first one I heard and I kinda prefer it

I also prefer it.

In general though I'm kinda a hater of pre-Hounds Kate. I like "Sat In Your Lap" and "Breathing" and a handful of other deep cuts but most of it does not appeal to me even remotely. Hounds onward is some of my favourite music that exists

I remember picking up The Dreaming on vinyl and listening for the first time to the entire album and thinking "Get Out Of My House" was an apt final track for a record that I wanted to throw goodbye off the balcony and never see again

the dreaming is fantastic but i have little use for the first two albums

aerial is her best though

I struggle with The Dreaming, but it remains a listenable working-shit-out album: listening to her figure out how to adapt her visions to Fairlights produces 3/4ths of a good album. "Get Out of My House" is one of my keepers, actually.

I also have problems with the albums before it.

but then I love The Red Shoes dearly.

I had just been getting into A Kick Inside for the first time when the Stranger Things news broke, so I scooped up a copy. I've tried a number of times to get into Kate Bush, but hadn't made much progress beyond Running Up That Hill and Cloudbusting.

And of course, like most people, the early pandemic days for me were soundtracked by this dude's cover of Wuthering Heights

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1fd8tbSa50

i get issues with her earlier vocals but i think the kick inside still slaps from front to back

I'll always have time for the first three albums since hearing my sister blasting them in her bedroom was how I came to know that Kate Bush was a worthy focus for my young attention

The Whole Story really is one of the tightest comps ever.

Should've had "Hammer Horror" on there, but otherwise it's great.

a Kate Bush ballot poll would be awesome (unless it was done, the search only shows album polls)

“Running up that hill” is obviously a classic but Cloudbusting and Hounds of Love are such underrated singles

lol this was basically my FB post about the RUTH phenomenon — along the lines of, "Good news kids, it's only the third-best single on the album!"

We Become Panoramic - THE KATE BUSH RESULTS THREAD (ilm artist poll #24)

thank you, i was including "ballot poll" in the search which is why it didn't show up

i love when a revival like this happens and i think it should be a lot more common for catalogue music to be treated with the same prestige as "new" music. play it on the radio, boom it in your jeep, etc.

what's funny is how kate bush was introduced to me as a hiphop/r+b fan when maxwell covered "this woman's work." then a few years later, outkast starts saying they've always been huge fans, etc. i loved her instantly when i first heard hounds of love ~2007 and "running up that hill" easily resonated as deeply as any contemporary music. amazing when something is so undeniably classic and just keeps transcending.

I love her early voice a lot and of course the donkey shouting is one of the things that places her above other artists. I wish there was more songs doing whatever she was doing on Wuthering Heights, it sounds like some posh medieval mystic rather than the period she's singing about. There should be some quasi-power metal Kate out there.

Mike Read and Steve Wright (the double act back then) were playing "Wuthering Heights" a lot on (Reading) Radio 210 but then stopped as the single release got postponed for some reason.

Then it came out, and off it went!

I adore The Dreaming, it is certainly my favorite of hers tbh. “Here Comes a Tenner” makes me lose it every time, and “Suspended in Gaffa”?!?! Fuck! I love all her records but The Dreaming is definitely the one I think about the most, maybe.

Here’s Layer Meat doing a pretty amazing version of “Suspended in Gaffa” at Night of 1000 Kates this past spring. https://layermeat.bandcamp.com/

lol obviously i got the titles wrong, apologies I am excited and drank some wine

The concept side of Hounds is really fucking good.

in my personal pantheon The Dreaming is also very high, this is prob related to the 'first one you heard" effect, I bought it shortly after release (same day I bought my first Bauhaus record irc, "The Sky's Gone Out")

and yeah side 2 of Hounds is amazing

that being said, Aerial still looks like the best to me from this current vantage point

not a spoiler: RUTH has been used twice so far in Stranger Things, I thought it was the first usage that went viral but the second usage is :O and makes more sense

Oh yeah, I'm another Dreaming fan.

Yeah, I got into The Dreaming long before I got into Hounds. The title track is probably my favorite.

The Dreaming is a tough one for me because on the one hand so much of it is impressively groundbreaking (and "Suspended in Gaffa" is probably top 5 Kate for me) and then on the other you have the title track which is both extremely racist (perhaps not considered so at the time but it has not aged well) and also just plain cringeworthy. plus there's the Rolf Harris factor

Is it really racist? I think it's calling out the dehumanising erasure inherent in the "conquest of the outback" and exploitation of Australian land. I don't think it's possible to read the song as characterising Aboriginal people in any way, it's a portrait of the racist/colonial mindset. That said, I'm happy to learn if I've read it in an ignorant or insensitive way.

"The Dreaming" was part of that whole wave of mysticizing Australian indigenous people, along with like The Last Wave and (weirdly) The Right Stuff. But more than either of those it's literally about white people erasing existing people and wildlife, so I feel like it's in a different category. I love it as a song, it's terrifically eerie.

I finally came around to The Dreaming and Hounds only a month ago, so this whole thing with RUTH is a delightful surprise. It kind of makes a lot of sense to me that RUTH would be the track to find a second life like this because it's probably the only Kate Bush song I instantly loved. I think The Whole Story was the only disc I had for a long time, and even then it was something I admired more for its ambition than something that really connected with me. But now that I've gotten into those two albums, I feel like they're much more rewarding than listening to her stuff separated out as singles - those two LP's really are more than the sum of their parts.

the original title of "the dreaming" (the track) had a racial slur in it and made it as far as getting a promotional release under that title

it was well-intentioned in trying to discuss colonialism but its attempts to take influence from indigenous australian music just come across as embarrassing

Wow, had no idea. I just looked it up - I'm actually not familiar with that slur at all, though I wonder if I've heard it at least once in something like an Australian film without realizing it?

oh god it's not the "b" slur is it?

nope, one of the others, that wasn't well thought through

meh, Fleetwood Mac's hit song from 1982 is an ethic slur and they never even renamed it

ethnic

The concept side of Hounds is really fucking good.

I went into The Dreaming the way you go into the second novel by someone whose first blew you away and face great disappointment. And thus both Kate Bush and Jeanette Winterson led me to love only one of their works for a long time.

Both the literary-ness and David Gilmour's involvement made Hound of Love feel in the same genre as Pink Floyd's concept albums, but it hit me in a way that those didn't.

*Hounds

xxp B word's new to me...really awkward to know that baggage given the other uses for that word. Reminds me of the original name of Paul Kelly's band and how it gained some unfortunate baggage when heard by American ears (hence a different name when promoted in the U.S.)

I only realized this week that classical guitar legend John Willians (not the film composer) is playing on "The Morning Fog", which is cool but raises questions for me. How did he get connected with the project and ... why get John Williams and then have him play what afaict are some basic arpeggios on a 2 min song that work perfectly well but could have probably been done by any working classical guitarist?

he wanted to meet Kate Bush!

I won't repeat the word but it relates to the first line of The Dreaming's lyrics. Not exactly the same word but the same sentiment as that which the song is calling out. Commonplace during my childhood, people laughed when explaining the meaning.
also xp John Williams is Australian so I suppose that's a theme

a sky of honey is her best extended concept piece

I have no real problems with Kate's early music or her vocal mannerisms from that period. But a good deal of that could be tied to nostalgia.

I was 7 when The Kick Inside came out and I remember that among my parent's generation, it was one of those records that nearly everyone had in their little collection of vinyl in the sideboard, to put when friends came over for a drink. Along with Oxygene, The Best of Bread/Dr Hook/Cliff and The War of the Worlds.

About 20 years ago I revisited Lionheart and still feel it is passed over somewhat unfairly, there are passages in those songs that are just so incredibly beautiful.

Her comeback gigs, I was lucky enough to see the first night and The NInth Wave was incredible, it was actually difficult to keep my shit together, and when she sang 'little light....' I just caved completely.

meh, Fleetwood Mac's hit song from 1982 is an ethic slur and they never even renamed it

― Jaime Pressly and America

Hold me?

The second one.

"Running Up That Hill" was #2 in this week's UK Singles midweek chart. It reached #3 in 1985, making it her biggest UK hit after "Wuthering Heights".

I had never really paid that much attention to the lyrics of "The Dreaming." It mostly sounded like nonsense to me except "See the light ram through the gaps in the land" and "pull of the bush." Nor did I really hear it as cultural appropriation or a half-assed attempt at making "indigenous" music. Now that I've read them, I can see that they are open to criticism, but I think the song was probably a well-intentioned, if misguided, attempt to call out colonialism.

Oooh, had no idea that one was a hit. Not the only hit with that title btw Crystal Waters and Shakira also have hits with that title and those are more recent hits. There also a very popular flamenco pop band from France / Spain that use it as their name.

In spanish the translation is not a bad word per se, it depends a lot of the context. But ime there’s very few racial slurs in Spanish language, and become only offensive by intent when joined by other adjectives or via ignorance.

For example the word for Chinese is Chino. Noone would get offended by the word Chino, but older generations use Chino to also describe Koreans or Japanese, where it stops being an inoffensive term and becomes problematic.