Why hasn't anyone published a book-length study of Kate Bush's music yet? We've seen a couple of biographies come and go, and if we're lucky, Ann Powers' book-length examination of Bush's album
The Dreaming will be published sometime before the end of the decade. But in the meantime, Bushology remains a critical backwater for no good reason. Kate Bush has given us nearly 4 decades' worth of rich material to ponder – including more than a few persistent earworms.
In fact, it's her very first single, “Wuthering Heights,” that's taken up residence with me this week, thanks to a late-night posting of the video by a friend on social media (you know who you are). “Wuthering Heights” made a big splash in the U.K. in 1978, quickly hitting number one and sitting atop the charts for a solid month. Not bad for a 19-year-old musician singing about a 19th century novel.
If you never read “Wuthering Heights,” don't worry. Neither had Bush; she was inspired by just one scene from a BBC miniseries version of the book. All you really need to know is that Catherine (“Cathy”) is the aristocratic lover of the uncouth Heathcliff. Class and family ensure that they are unable to marry, and thwarted love turns them cruel to each other until eventually Catherine pines away and dies. All of this happens, by the way, before Bush sings the first note. The song itself is sung by Cathy's ghost, who is trying to quite literally grab Heathcliff's soul so that they can be together forever in the afterlife. Thus all the references to how cold and lonely Cathy feels, on the other side of Heathcliff's window. Cathy needs Heathcliff's human warmth because she, herself, has passed on. Yes still she pursues their doomed love.
It's apparently somewhat of a sport to speculate why Kate Bush never translated her successes on the British charts into similar achievements across the Atlantic. I tend to think that it hinges on the wat that Kate Bush eschews the confessional in favor of the theatrical. She doesn't spill her guts out in an easily-consumable celebrity-culture sort of way. She's more interested in exploring and inhabiting other people's stories. And she does so in a very heightened fashion, influenced by ballet and the mime work of Lindsay Kemp, who also worked with David Bowie in the
Ziggy Stardust era. In the “Wuthering Heights” video, she performs a highly stylized dance routine that ends with her waving her entire body like a willow tree as she slowly recedes across the moors toward the horizon. She widens her heavily lined eyes, poses her hands, swirls around in red silks. If she wasn't dead serious about it all, it would be terrible. But she's all in, and so instead it's weirdly compelling – or pretentious and offputting, depending on whether you can stomach the artifice or not. Bush's idiom is anathema to anyone who thinks that music should be authentic, rough-hewn and, well, masculine. She's a drama-school girl, dreamy and experimental through and through, and mainstream American audiences tend to shy like a spooked horse from that sort of material.
But that's exactly the appeal of Kate Bush's ouvre – its melodrama, its artifice, and its simultaneous sincerity. The best of Kate Bush is as deeply sensual as it is unabashedly earnest, unselfconscious and willing to risk being ridiculous in the service of forging a unique and compelling emotional connection with the listener. It's not easily consumed, digested, and disposed of; it's the haute cuisine of popular music, the kind where garnishes are placed with tweezers and plates are dressed with hieroglyphic squiggles of mysteriously savory sauce.
And then there's that voice. In later years it would learn to hop octaves and reveal rich and velvety depths, but on “Wuthering Heights”, Bush's 19-year-old instrument is high-pitched and eerily bright, appropriately otherworldly. You love it or you hate it – or, ideally, you're unsettled yet irresistibly drawn to it, like the ghost of your one true love, come back in the dead of winter to stake a claim on your soul. The simple piano accompaniment stays politely out of the way, transitioning to a guitar solo that fades out as Cathy's ghost drifts back to the underworld. Some earworms work because they completely and comfortably fill their allotted sonic space; “Wuthering Heights” works because it's uncomfortable, strange – and repeatedly rewarding.