🚀 go-pugleaf

Love-Hounds Digest			    Friday, January 24, 1986, 12:15

Today's Topics:

		    Kate in the Wall Street Journal
		   Re:  KB in Tower Records' "Pulse"
			 SPIN rejection letter
			   Anyone heard of...
			 Did Kate put it there?
				 babble
			Today's dose of Katrivia
			    Re: KB interview

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Date: Fri, 10 Jan 86 02:43:28 est
From: nessus (Doug Alan)
Subject: Kate in the Wall Street Journal

"Pop:  Music for a New Year"
by Pam Lambert
Wall Street Journal 12/30/85

With "Hounds of Love" (EMI), Britain's Kate Bush compellingly stakes her
claim as a major voice in pop music.  On this album, her fifth,  Bush's
craft as a producer has blossomed to match her creative vision.  The result
is at once the artist's most accessible release -- and the brightest sound
I've heard in quite a while.

Bush took two years to make the record.  It shows.  Her four-octave range
and Fairlight synthesizer are the base for impressionistic aural landscapes
that at times swell to orchestral complexity, at others simplify to the
directness of a march.

Though the album opens with the exceptional "Running Up That Hill", whose
loping rhythms made it a natural first single, the second side is the real
showpiece.  A phantasmagorical seven-song voyage through the ebbing
consciousness of a drowning victim, it flows from dreamy numbness to terror
to something approching euphoria.  Which is just what Kate Bush is likely to
leave you feeling.

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Date: Fri, 10 Jan 86 03:04:42 est
From: nessus (Doug Alan)
Subject: Re:  KB in Tower Records' "Pulse"

> From: tsung@aero

>	Bush calls herself lucky as her wildest fantasy
>	is coming true:  the ability to remain true to her inventive mind
>	without worrying about its results being accepted by the commercial
>	world.

>	     Bush sings about that fantasy on _Hounds of Love_.  "You
>	want my reply?/What was the question?/I was looking at the big
>	sky."

> Well the last paragraph (about "The Big Sky") certainly made a lot of
> sense to me.

Actually I think the quote from "The Big Sky" is actually more of a jab
at some of the British music press, rather than the commercial world.
Except in the U.S., she's been remarkably successful commercially.  The
British music press, however, until recently, were often pretty nasty to
her.

> Say, do you think that The Ninth Wave could be about her own
> artistic/internal struggle?

I think it could be seen as being about any life crisis.

> It's that witch part above (and the discussion a while back of
> KB-the-witch) that gave me the idea.  For instance, the bit with the
> witchfinder is about KB not understood by outsiders (critics, etc),

Yeah, I think that "Waking The Witch" is in some ways another jab at the
British music press.  They sometimes called her a witch, or spaced-out
hippy, or whatever.  Being accepted by the British press might seem like
an old fashioned witch trial.  If you pass, maybe you've forsaken your
art for praise.  And if you fail, then perhaps you will never get the
recognition you deserve.

> and "Watching You Without Me" (she sees loved ones but they can't see
> her) is about her not understood by her close friends.  Just a wild
> speculation.

Seems quite reasonable to me!

> By the way, where does all that angry energy of "The Dreaming" comes
> from?  I don't think anybody can produce a work of such STRONG emotion
> without some stimuli of an equivalent magnitude.

Traumatic childbirth?  Existential despair?  I dunno.  I often get as
upset as Kate is on "The Dreaming" and nothing all that bad ever
happened to me.  Most of the time it's when I ponder the meaning of life
and stuff like that...

			"I don't know why I am crying
			 Am I suspended in Gaffa?"

			 Doug

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Date: Fri, 10 Jan 86 14:19:00 est
From: nessus (Doug Alan)
Subject: SPIN rejection letter

I got my rejection letter from SPIN for my KB interview.  Here's
what it says:

	Dear Doug Alan:

	What is this strange power Kate Bush has over the soles of men?
	I don't know, but I don't get it.  Anyway, I think an interview
	with the burning one at this time would be untimely.  Thanks
	anyway.

	Best,
	Richard Gehr

Oh well.  Maybe I'll try the Smallville Weekly Reporter....

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Date: Fri, 10 Jan 86 16:54:39 EST
From: hsut@purdue-ecn.ARPA (Tsun-Yuk Hsu)
Subject: Anyone heard of...



	Has anyone heard music from Univers Zero, Art Zoyd or However? Wayside
was out of some stuff I ordered (no Bill Nelson --- AAAARRGHHHH) and I
need some recommendations for alternatives. 

	Thanks in advance...

Bill Hsu

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Date: Fri, 10 Jan 86 17:10:17 EST
From: hsut@purdue-ecn.ARPA (Tsun-Yuk Hsu)
Subject: Did Kate put it there?


	Doug brought up some interesting points in his interview with Kate:
if there's a fairly transparent allusion or pun in some poem or lyrics,
is it REALLY there if the writer denies he put it there intentionally?
Harlan Ellison, for example, likes to claim that his stories are very
simple and straightforward, and complains that people read too much into
them. It's interesting that John Bush claims that the wordplay in his
lyrics is intentional, while Kate denies many of the puns Doug and other
lovehounders found in her lyrics. Maybe John Bush, being a poet in the
more traditional sense, is aware of wordplay and punning on a more
conscious level, while Kate does things more on a subconscious level.

	Another theory (close to what Structuralist critics think) which
sidesteps the problem of the author "subconsciously" putting things into
the text is that which sees texts as constructs, analogous to 
mathematical constructs. You can build a mathematical object (such as
some weird graph) and not realise all its properties at the moment you
created the construct. Same thing with poems and other text. Maybe Kate's
lyrics has all these puns which she was not aware of.

	Of course there are problems with this view being applied to
foggy, non-mathematical things like poetry. Using this approach, a critic
can almost say anything he wants about a text. If the author of the
text denies having put something in the text, the critic can always say:
"It is an inherent property of your text, you just didn't see it."

	BTW, Doug, I'd love to get some of John Bush's poetry too...


					Bill Hsu


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Date: Fri, 10 Jan 86 16:06:03 est
From: Tim Wicinski <wicinski@nrl-css.arpa>
Subject: babble


I wished I have heard the bangle's song that hofmann talks about, it
sounds like a winner.  

Too bad your leaving Henry, you always had a good thing to say (not like
me, who majors in major babble).

No, This person I know has not made the Robyn Hitchock tape. His
tape player broke down and he refuse to lend me the tape.  I think
he's being a prick about it, but he's a friend of DOug's so I'll be nice.

speaking of Doug's friends: Turns out that my old roomate was the
person responsible for turning doug onto kate.  kind of a small
world if I don't say so myself. 

Descendents are playing here next week, that should be a good show. 
Part of their merchandising includes coffee mugs with pictures of 
milo on them.




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Date: Fri, 10 Jan 86 18:43:32 est
From: nessus (Doug Alan)
Subject: Today's dose of Katrivia

As related to me by Del Palmer: Kate did indeed do the voice of the
priest / judge in "Waking The Witch".  Del didn't seem 100% sure what
they used in the final mix, but thinks it is Kate through a harmonizer
set two octaves down.  They also tried using slowed down tape, but that
didn't come out as well.  Originally they wanted a man to do the part,
but they couldn't find anyone who could do it right.

I think it's good that Kate sang the part of the judge, because it makes
it seem as if she's putting herself on trial in her mind -- which is a
really powerful image.

>From the mouth of Jay Bush: Originally his poem in "Jig Of Life" was
supposed to be read by some famous Irish person, but then they decided
to have him read it with a put-on Irish accent, and speed up his voice
to sound like an Irish woman (ed note: or maybe like Irish
chipmunks...).  In the end, they decided to leave it at normal speed.

>From the mouth of Paddy Bush: They will definitely do another concert
tour -- if not this year, then next.  And it will make the last concert
pale in comparison.  And they will bring it to the U.S.

>From the mouth of Kate: They probably won't be doing another concert
tour in the near future.  She feels she can reach a lot more people with
less effort through film or TV, but she hopes to do another concert tour
before she's old and grey.

I think that Paddy's going to put on a wig and leotard and leg warmers
and do it himself if Kate doesn't change her mind....

			-Doug

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Subject: Re: KB interview
Date: 10 Jan 86 09:21:08 EST (Fri)
From: J Eric Roskos <think!harvard!topaz!peora!jer>
X-From: J Eric Roskos <jer@peora.UUCP>

> I've written a little bit of (bad) poetry.  What's really strange is
> that often I just write what I think is nonsense.  A bunch of phrases
> that pop into my mind, with images and vague symbols -- but nothing
> coherent.  Then I might find the poem in a pile of junk a while later,
> and when I read it, I know exactly what it means.  So, did I put that
> meaning there unconsciously when I wrote the poem?  Or did I just read
> that meaning into the poem later?

It's hard to know.  I say this partly because it's hard for me to know
exactly what *I* was thinking when I wrote something, especially with
regards to meter.  Actually this makes me wonder sometimes about the
mechanisms of writing the poetry; it requires a particular frame of mind,
which is difficult to attain.  Thus I tend to suspect that it *does*
involve a sort of subconscious thinking, or at least a thinking in
parallel.  For example, in this part of a poem I wrote recently:

> No.  Not only is time stretched into
> This hour as empty as before,
> But I must measure it too?

I had two distinct meanings definitely in mind for the word "measure".
Yet, thinking about it later, it occurred to me that the opening line of
the poem, "Another hour outside of time" was also involved in these
lines, since an hour outside of time (besides being paradoxical in
itself, unless "time" means "history", which in a sense it did) would not
be measurable.  I am not sure if I intended this or not.

However, I've been thinking a lot about the interview and why she said some
of the things she said there; when I have time (i.e., when I'm not at work)
I will try to remember to write more about that...

							-- jer


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-- 
It's like a jungle sometimes, it makes me wonder how I keep from goin' under.

Greg Skinner (gregbo)
{decvax!genrad, allegra, ihnp4}!mit-eddie!gds
gds@mit-eddie.mit.edu