KATE BUSH – Hounds of Love (Part 1)

This week, Kate Bush is releasing her tenth studio album and first in six years, 50 Words for Snow. So are we covering it? Hell no! That would be too easy. Instead, we’re going back into the crate to dust off our copy of her seminal, groundbreaking masterpiece Hounds of Love. And man does that sucker hold up! Brandon kicks things off for Turkey week with a letter to his old friend, Sarah B.

Kate Bush – “Cloudbusting”

From: Brandon Hall
To: Sarah Braunstein

So, like, of course we save an album as dense and complex as Hounds of Love to discuss on Thanksgiving week when neither of us are going to feel capable of doing an adequate job dissecting one of the great pop records of all time. But her newest album in six years, 50 Words for Snow, comes out this week and I wanted to take the opportunity to revisit Hounds of Love, her 1985 masterpiece. I started reading a bunch of stuff that’s been written about the album since it was released and realized that, fortunately for us, hardly anyone’s done an adequate job discussing this avant-garde, theatrical, pop record jam-packed with literary and musical allusions. Part of me feels like we should discuss this in a different medium, the conversational essay feeling so lacking in the wake of its subject matter – maybe we should write poems back and forth to one another or trade garage band songs. Honestly, I’ve been listening to this album almost nonstop for a couple weeks now and I feel like I need a couple more months to really parse this thing out.

For instance, did you know the song “Cloudbusting” (and its accompanying video starring a dapper Donald Sutherland) is about Wilhelm Reich? Do you know who Wilhelm Reich is? I didn’t. But Wikipedia tells me that he was an Austrian-American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who, after fleeing Nazi controlled Germany where he was publicly attacked in a Nazi newspaper in 1933, was imprisoned in America for his controversial studies, which included building a rain machine – the “cloudbuster,” which may have actually worked – and what was derisively referred to as a “sex box” in a bunch of puritan-tastic conservative 50s propaganda. Then, in 1956, 6 tons of his books, journals, and publications were burned under the auspices of the FDA before he died in prison! Dude escapes Nazi Germany only to be imprisoned and have his books burned in America. By the mother fuckin’ F. D. A.

That’s one song. A particularly awesome song. And they’re all like this. Sublimely catchy, intellectually prodigious, danceable pop songs that doctoral candidates could write essays about. Oh, the line of dialogue that opens the titular track (and my personal favorite on the album), “It’s in the trees! It’s coming!”? That’s from a 1957 horror film Curse of the Demon by Jacques Tourneur. I’m telling you, this shit runs deep.

This is a “Crate Digging Dialectic” but I am ashamed to say I didn’t have it in my crate until a few weeks ago. There’s something about being a lover of art, regardless of the medium, that makes unfamiliarity a source of embarrassment. It’s more pronounced, perhaps, with music because it’s so ubiquitous and easy to consume, but anyone who’s been in a conversation with literature nerds only to sulk home and immediately get on Amazon to pick up those books by Calvino and Coetzee and Baudelaire so as to never feel so inadequate again knows the feeling. After spending every waking moment of the past fourteen days with this album, I’m willing to argue that one cannot be a “well-read” appreciator of pop music without knowing Hounds of Love. The music of Bat for Lashes, Lykke Li, Lady Gaga, Zola Jesus, Chelsea Wolfe, Fever Ray, et al. doesn’t exist without Kate Bush, regardless of whether they’re aware of her influence or not. (For the record, Bat for Lashes is definitely aware of her influence. In fact, the similarities in their styles is even more striking than I had anticipated.)

So before I turn it over to you to get your take, I thought I’d give just a little background to set up the rest of the conversation for all of us born in the 80s who clearly missed the boat. Hounds of Love is Bush’s fifth album and the one that really made her famous in America; its first single “Running Up That Hill” pounded its way into the American Top 40 and dominated the British charts for weeks. She recorded and produced the album by herself over the course of two years in the 24-track studio she built in the barn behind her family home and handed it to EMI as a finished product. It was the first album she recorded outside the constructs of the studio, giving her complete editorial control and the freedom to take as much time as she needed. The results and benefits of her new found freedom should not be understated. The album is split into two suites, Side A: “The Hounds of Love” which includes tracks 1-5 and all four of the album’s singles, “Running Up That Hill,” “Hounds of Love,” “The Big Sky,” and the aforementioned “Cloudbusting” and Side B: “The Ninth Wave” which takes its name from Tennyson’s poem, “Idylls of the King” and is a song cycle that Bush describes as “about a person who is alone in the water for the night…it’s about their past, present and future coming to keep them awake, to stop them drowning, to stop them going to sleep until the morning comes.” Bush has said that she feels the two sides constitute two separate albums. Reading this helped me understand the album so much more, because the two sides do feel drastically different, and I was ready to decry the whole’s lack of coherence.

Silly me.

Over to you, Sarah. How has the album changed your life? Also, it’s been mentioned that Hounds of Love may have been a turning point in pop music. Can you point to any evidence of that? And doesn’t it hold up well? I mean, Jesus; it sounds perfectly contemporary and still even a little weird. And one last question: all the artists I mentioned as being influenced by Kate Bush are female. Those are just the people that came to mind. Could you help me in pointing out some men that seem equally influenced by the majesty of the Bush?

(That was a crude joke. I apologize. It’s getting late.)

“It’s in the trees! It’s coming!”
Brandon