NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #31/NN_1992_31.iso/spool/rec/music/gaffa/3928

Text File | 1992-12-26 | 9.3 KB | 173 lines

x-gateway: rodan.UU.NET from love-hounds to rec.music.gaffa; Sat, 26 Dec 1992 21:18:15 EST
Date: Sat, 26 Dec 1992 21:15:02 -0500
Subject: **** Kick Inside and Dreaming published reviews ****
From: [e-mail] (ronald hill)
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        These are two reviews I got from the Night Scented Stock BBS in
Canada.


             KATE BUSH: UNCAGED BIRD (THE KICK INSIDE REVIEW)

                   by Peter Reilly/STEREO REVIEW/1978

   A lot of people are not going to like what they hear Kate Bush
saying in her new album THE KICK INSIDE, about being a woman in the
Seventies. And perhaps even more are going to object to the way she
says it, for in many of her songs she treads on a territory
(sex-as-sex-as-sex) long held to be a male preserve. She does so with
the same brisk authority and self-possession that has characterized at
least some British women since the days of Emmeline Pankhurst,
suffragist -extraordinaire-, and for this reason she will surely offend
a great many men.
   But probably as many women will be equally upset by Kate Bush's
candor and honesty, though for a much different reason, the gallingly
accurate one given by Germaine Greer in her book "The Female Eunuch".
Greer says that as far as women's rights and equality are concerned,
they are an accomplished fact, that indeed for the last fifty years the
cage has been open, -but the bird has refused to fly out-. Bush's
frankness and sense of what a female friend of calls "gut nooky" will
hardly endear her to  those women who still cling to the perch while
making complaining Tweetie-Pie denials of their own sexuality.
   What is different, however, about Kate Bush -- and what makes her
songs important -- is not agitprop but excellence. With such songs as
"Room For The Life", "Feel It", or "L'Amour Looks Something Like You",
listeners know that they are in the presence of a real person, a real
woman who lives in the here-and-now dealing with life as it is being
lived, not as it is -supposed- to be lived in the perfume ads. Bush's
females are fully as hungry as males are -- not in the angry, doomed,
and rather dreary way of the romantic-gone-wrong of LOOKING FOR MR.
GOODBAR, but simply as healthy, alive human beings with sensual and
sexual appetites to satisfy.  And they are as guiltless about
expressing their hunger as most males have been for years.
     Consider this from "Feel It": "Feel your warm hand walking
around/I won't pull away, my passion always wins/So keep on a-moving
in, keep on a-tuning in/Synchronize rhythmn now..." Or this from
"L'Amour": "I'm dying for you just to touch me/And feel all the energy
rushing right up-a-me/ L'Amour looks something like you." Bush performs
these songs with a direct sincerity in an appealing, rather quavery,
high-pitched voice that communicates not lubricity but the joy of
satisfactory love-making. What we have here is not the eye-rolling
lewdness of Xaviera Hollander (the greatest management consultant of
modern times), the kinkiness of a Pauline Reage, or even the brittle
comedy of sexual manners of an Erica Jong, but a human being telling
about one aspect of her humanity.
   There is a great deal more to Kate Bush and her album than matters
sexual, however, and aside from two clinkers -- "Wuthering Heights", a
weary rehash about "cruel Heathcliff", and "James And The Cold Gun", a
song about 007 that seems as deliberately nonsensical as the plots of
some of the Bond films -- all her songs have a lively sense of
truth-telling about them. In the lovely "The Man With The Child In His
Eyes", the protagonist confesses. "And here I am again my
girl/Wondering what on earth I'm doing here/Maybe he doesn't love me/I
just took a trip on my love for him." Probably the strongest song in
the album is "Room For The Life", which in one way is a call to those
still-caged Tweetie-Pies and in another is a simple statement of the
perils of freedom, liberation, and independence in the life of any
Seventies woman: "NIght after night in the quiet house/Plaiting her
hair by the fire, woman/With no lover to free her desire/How long do
you think she can stick it out/How long do you think before she'll go
out, woman/Hey get up on your feet and go get it now/Like it or not we
keep bouncing back/Because we're woman."
   Nobody's said it better than that in quite a while -- not even
Katherine Hepburn, who was asked a few years ago if she missed having a
home life because of the demands of her career and replied, "Well, we
can't have it all, can we?" Kate Bush seems to know and to believe and,
most important, to communicate that what women can have, if they are
honest with themselves, is quite enough. You've come a long way,
Emmeline baby!


(SysOp note: "James And The Cold Gun" has nothing to do with James
Bond)



                       KATE BUSH - THE DREAMING

            by Colin Irwin/MELODY MAKER/September 11th 1982

   Under the premise that the Great British Public instinctively turns
its nose up at anything that's a little unexpected, or which doesn't
meet its carefully coiffured preconceptions, then this album will be an
overwhelming flop.
   The people'll be guided in their dismissive diagnosis, of course, by
the all-wise radio producers who will flick quickly through it for the
new "Man With The Child In His Eyes", fail to find it, assume Kate's
gone off her trolley, and make a grab for the safety of Haircut One
Hundred.
   Reputedly two years in the making, the first album produced by Kate
herself, no expense or musical craving spared...the result is mind-
boggling. Even by the mannered, eccentric standards she's set herself,
this is still an odd one; you may have thought "Babooshka" and "The
Wedding List" on NEVER FOR EVER a little weird, then "Get Out Of My
House" and "Houdini" here are positively manic.
   Always an artist of extremes, Bush has allowed her highly theatrical
imagination to run riot, indulging all her musical fantasies, following
her rampant instincts, and layering this album with an astonishing
array of shrieks and shudders.
   Initially it is bewildering and not a little preposterous, but try
to hang on through the twisted overkill and the historic fits and
there's much reward, if only in the sense of danger she constantly
courts.
   Consider the options for a glamourous girl singer with an acute
sense of melody; consider that she's taken the riskiest, most
uncommercial route; and consider whether this album should be regarded
with patience and admiration, even when it occasionally slips right
over the top.
   Two of it's ingredients, "Sat In Your Lap" and "The Dreaming", have
already been issued as singles and sunk without a trace, which is not
only significant but tragic. "The Dreaming" is the perfect example of
the passion for percussive torrents that's overtaken her (and the
influence of African music?) yet it's one of her more restrained vocal
performances on the album where her dynamic singing is one of the prime
features ("Get Out Of My House" has her roaring and ranting like a
caged lion, "Leave It Open" has her yelling like a demented mynah
bird.) Elsewhere, on "Houdini" and "All The Love", she'll break us in
gently, even tenderly, before the fuse runs out and we reel in awe and
amazement at the sheer power of her rage.
   There's only one even vaguely conventional track, the lively
"Suspended IN Gaffa", though there's something strangely disconcerting
even about that and the only light track is "There Goes A Tenner",
which is even mildly funny as Kate relates a tale of skullduggery with
an exaggerated cockney swagger.
   The lyrics, naturally, are another thing altogether. An analyst
would surely come up with an interesting conclusion for her obsession
with lurid drama, so vivid and colourful it could be traditional
balladry.
   "There Goes A Tenner" is about crime; "Pull Out The Pin" is a
graphic account of terrorism and war; "All The Love" and "Houdini"
blaze in one different aspect of death, the latter in a particularly
complex but clever way. Personally I reckon the girl watches too many
B-movies.
   The epic track, though, the cornerstone of the album is "Night Of
The Swallow", which shows both her growing maturity as a writer and her
arrival as an outstanding producer. Another complicated song (surprise,
surprise) it moves gracefully through many changing moods and patterns;
it's a work of both beauty and anguish, poignancy and eeriness. These
twists of mood are enhanced by the use of sublime Irish music (Liam
O'Flynn and Donal Lunny of Planxty, Sean Keane of the Chieftans)
interspected with the rugged main action.
   Like most of the other tracks, I'm still not entirely sure what the
hell's going on or what it's all about, but the puzzle's intriguing
enough to entice you back until you unravel it. It's the sort of album
that makes me want to kidnap the artist and demand the explanation and
inspiration behind each track.
   If you're out there, Kate, do me a favour and give me a bell, huh?




---
[e-mail] (ronald hill)
NetRunner's Paradise BBS, San Diego CA