Hounds of Love

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Kate Bush, "Hounds of Love," (download until 1/25/09), from "Hounds of Love."

It sometimes surprises me which musicians do and don't remain somewhat in popular consciousness and which do not. The persistence of the Ramones, for example, surprises me, until I remember that Johnny Ramone was a right-winger and I become certain--someone ought to do the research on this--that some of those psy-ops funds the Defense Department has went to funding those Ramones t-shirts the kids get at Wal-Mart these days. The Pentagon pays for movies, you know, so don't tell me this is far-fetched.

So why not Kate Bush? Maybe because musicians who were English English, who have some sense that English and United States American are not interchangeable and that a special relationship is more a marriage of convenience. Ray Davies doesn't get a whole lot of attention at this point either--when did you last see a Kinks shirt at Target? No place for them in Bush's--ah, Blair's--ah, Bush's England.

If you were to describe Kate Bush's music to me now--not to me in 9th grade, when I first got into her--I'd either start laughing or give a nasty grimace depending on my mood. Nothing on the surface would appeal to my sense of self. Dramatic singing, and not the cool, on-the-edge-of-your-seat, Jimmy Scott kind, but the she-needs-to-settle-down kind. Lyrical references to dreams and memories of childhood. Celtic flourishes reminding us all of the dancing Druids at Stonehenge. Painstakingly "layered" recordings in which overdub after overdub is piled onto tape so the fact that none of the individual parts needs to actually be good goes unnoticed. None of this actually makes me want to listen to Kate Bush.

But listen I do, because Kate Bush has two things in her favor. The first is that she's really good. The second is more important in a way, because there are lots of really good musicians I really don't want to listen to: she's completely honest. Honesty can't be faked, we understand--if you believed Bush at any point, then you're a sucker who needs to own up to it--and it's especially so in music. Ages ago I read a review of Jonathan Richman which said that he was one of the two great adult children of Rock, capital "R," alongside Kate Bush. Probably not fair to either one of them, but it should be stressed that while the near constant references to childhood one gets on "Hounds of Love," song and record, would be unbearable if they weren't completely honest.

The tune itself, again, doesn't sound appealing to me were I to describe it to myself. "Overdubbed cellos hitting the root and the fifth over and over again to give it a kind of refined sound that appeals to people who are uncomfortable with saxophones." Not my cup of tea, especially because people do this kind of thing all the time to get a kind of Eleanor Rigby sophistication without the actual musical sophistication that George Martin brought to that string arrangement. "Just hit the root and the fifth on a couple cellos over and over, man, nobody will tell the difference." And the truth of it is that almost nobody does, and it gets over. So it is with some astonishment that I say that the strings are absolutely perfect on this tune. "Hounds of Love" has got to be the one case where the "root and fifth over and over on a pair of overdubbed cellos" trick actually was called for and worked to great effect.

It should also be mentioned, remembered, then probably quickly forgotten, that when digital sampling as a musical technology first came out it was embraced pretty quickly by two camps: hip-hoppers and English progressive rock types. We all understand that it was the hip-hoppers who really worked wonders with the technology and the progressive rock types really just found a new technique to distract from the fact that they really didn't have anything to say about anything and give their waning, 1978-9 careers second wind or shot in the arm depending on their habits to get them to 1982-3 before calling it a day and waiting for the reunion tour. A pox on the Fairlight CMI and the awful musical distractions it encouraged, but dammit if Kate Bush didn't use it the most unobtrusively and tastefully among the English folk.

And the Celtic thing--not as prominent here as in a lot of other stuff on the record--it's hard for a recovering Irish-American, meaning someone who went through, through a "discover your ethnicity, white man" phase long enough ago that he can consider himself respectable again, to take Northumbrian pipes on a pop record. But when it's honest, it's honest, and it's very different to do the Celtic thing when you were born on Celtic land and your mom was Irish and actually did traditional dance. It's legit.