filmlover's Full Review: The Dreaming by Kate Bush
The Dreaming lives up to its name. Although it could have just as easily been called Welcome to My Nightmare if Alice Cooper hadn’t used the title first. It is, without a doubt, Kate Bush’s most ambitious and phantasmagoric song-cycle to date. In addition to the ingeniously quirky musical layerings—which ricochet off each other as a richly textured sonic palimpsest—The Dreaming features some of her most oddly penetrating and sophisticated lyrics. She plays with the tenuous elasticity of language and sound—handily dismantling conventional ballad narratives and melodic structures in the irreverant, mad-logician style of Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, and James Joyce. Her increasingly subtle and intuitive facility with cadence, alliteration, fractured syntax, shifting personae and ambiguous points of view, all serve to open up new avenues of meaning and expression. Indeed, on this album, she gives voice and insight to some truly weird, disturbing experiences hitherto unknown in popular music.
As it has been well documented, Kate started out in 1974 as the sixteen-year-old musical protégé of Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour. Three years later, following the sudden success of her breakout single, “Wuthering Heights,” she became a hot property in more than just the commercial sense. Certainly, when I listen to The Kick Inside or Lionheart, I feel the presence of a very lovely, very talented, and (apparently) very sexually aware teenage girl. I’m not talking about the glib, cynically calculated postmodern jailbait provocations of a Britney Spears, but rather the plangent, deeply felt passions of a smart, sensual Celtic beauty just past the age of consent.
What do you do when you’re suddenly confronted with such powerful, overwhelming emotions? How do you deal with them?
It is probably safe to assume that, at the time, Kate didn’t really know how to handle such feelings either, whether they came from herself or from fans and strangers. With the third album in 1980—the transitional, forbiddingly titled Never For Ever—the strain of being an art-rock wunderkind and unwitting industry sex symbol had taken its inevitable toll. Kate duly retreated into the studio, bought a Fairlight synthesizer, wrangled creative control away from her record company and became her own producer. By the ripe young age of twenty-two, she had evolved into a mature and independent artist.
Kate’s lyrics became less gushing and more cryptic, and the subject matter was decidedly darker—infused with a very real sexual panic and fear of death. “The Infant Kiss” told a tale of illicit feminine desire for a little boy, while “Army Dreamers” and “Breathing” painted harrowing scenes of apocalyptic war and destruction. Only “Babooshka”—the sly Chekhovian tale of a woman who seduces her bored husband by posing as someone else—afforded Kate her one glorious moment of Britney-esque exhibitionism, with a video of our heroine bumping and grinding suggestively in a rather scanty Amazon warrior-goddess costume.
The fourth album, The Dreaming, released in 1982, picks up where Never For Ever leaves off and carries the new approach to another level. Here, the main theme is the quest for truth and autonomous identity in a world fraught with intellectual trickery, emotional manipulation, sexual danger, and mortal risk.
The first song, “Sat in Your Lap,” is unusually noisy and dissonant (the heavy, thudding backing track wouldn’t sound out of place on Public Image Ltd’s Flowers of Romance album). Kate depicts the pursuit of knowledge as a Faustian bid for power and mastery, and poses a number of intriguing questions and paradoxes along the way:
Is true wisdom something you innately possess like a Cartesian or a Zen master, or something you can only acquire through hard experience and observation? How can we know something at all? What is the price of knowing? Is it always a good thing and does it necessarily bring happiness and fulfillment? Or is knowledge merely a taunting illusion—a mirage that perpetually recedes beyond our grasp?
“I’ve been doing it for years, my goal is moving near,
It says ‘Look I’m over here’ and then it up and disappears.
Some say that knowledge is something that you never have
Some say that knowledge is something sat in your lap
Some say that heaven is hell, some say that hell is heaven.”
Much like Plato, Kant, and Schopenhauer, Kate seems to find that the mission for enlightenment ultimately entails a withdrawal from the world—a flight into contemplation and asceticism:
“Give me Karma Mama
a jet to Mecca, Tibet or Jeddah,
To Salisbury, A monastery,
The longest journey, across the desert,
Across the weather, across the elements,
Across the water.”
Kate must have also spent a lot of time at the cinema when she wasn’t fiddling about in the studio, since most of the songs and their peculiar themes seem inspired by movies. Driven by a jaunty vaudeville piano, the second track, “There Goes A Tenner,” tells of a botched heist. As our humble narratrix, Kate seems to be playing the Anna Karina role in Godard’s Band of Outsiders. She and her existential bank-robbing compadres get all their attitudes second-hand from old Hollywood gangster flicks:
“Both my partners
Act like actors,
You are Bogart
He is George Raft
that leaves Cagney and me.
(what about Edward G...?)”
The third track, “Pull Out the Pin,” delves further into the savage ironies of war. Kate gets behind the keen, sharp, serpentine eyes of a Viet Cong assassin as he stealthily snakes his way through the jungle to plant a grenade where it counts and meet with the final moment of truth. Our expectations are upended with a vivid, Joseph Conrad-style travelogue of American neocolonialism that would send Franz Fanon and Edward Said into frissons of agitation. The song is tense and dramatic, complete with theatrical sound effects like whirring helicopter blades à la Apocalypse Now:
“You learn to ride the Earth
When you’re living on your belly
And the enemy are city births
Who need radar?
We use scent
They stink of the west
Stink of sweat
Stink of cologne and baccy
And their Yankee Hash
The next one, “Suspended in Gaffa”—set to a bouncy, lively, waltz-time rhythm track, like a children’s song—seems to describe the stultifying effects of adolescent narcissism, frustrated desire, and arrested development (“we’re only bluffing/We’re not ones for bursting through walls...”). By the end, Kate confesses:
“I’m much more like
that girl in the mirror,
Between you and me
She don’t stand a chance of
Getting anywhere at all,
Not anywhere at all,
No, not a thing,
She can’t have it all.”
As in “Sat in Your Lap,” our heroine wants more than she seems worthy of and finds herself in a double bind of emotional confusion. She hankers after forbidden pleasures that take on crypto-religious meanings. While she declares, “I won’t open boxes that I am told not to/I’m not a Pandora,” she also sings of a garden that is “half of a heaven.” The mythic garden could be the Garden of Eden or the Garden of Tantalus, where spectres of unknown delight haunt the mind and torment the senses. It could also be a reference to the Garden of Gesthemane where Jesus was betrayed. Indeed, there is a clever Joycean inversion of Jesus’ famous sermon, “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” In her search for fulfillment, Kate has difficulty separating illusion from reality:
“I try to get nearer,
But as it gets clearer
There’s something appears in the way
It’s a plank in me eye
With a camel who’s trying to get through it,
Am I doing it?
Can I have it all now?
I pull out the plank
And say thank you for yanking me back
To the fact
That there’s always something to distract
But sometimes it’s hard to know if I’m doing it right.
Can I have it all?
Can I have it all now?
We can’t have it all.”
The title song, “The Dreaming,” is clearly the album’s centerpiece. This atavistic potlatch-cum-danse macabre could be a musical pastiche of Walkabout and The Last Wave. The searchlights of a dented van pierce the ancient night, near the motorway that cuts through the Australian desert outback where, to unwary drivers, “many an Aboriginie’s mistaken for a tree.”
This may well be the closest Kate has come to a flat-out political statement. The chilling Fanonist exegeses of ethnic extermination and neocapitalist plunder are summed up with mordant cockney-rhyming aphorisms: “The civilized keep alive the territorial war” and “Erase the race that claim the place/And say we dig for Ore.” Like the Native tribes of the Americas, the Aborigines are baited and destroyed through the false idols of alcoholism and drug abuse: “Dangle Devils in a bottle and push them from The Pull of the Bush.”
The wholesale roadside slaughter of kangaroos (cf. Godard’s Weekend) mark the wounds inflicted upon nature by a postindustrial consumer-capitalist leviathan that swallows up everything in its path: “see the light ram through the gaps in the land.” Punctuated by a truly epic screeching-tires-and-CRASH! percussion effect, “BANG! goes another Kanga/On the bonnet of the van.”
And here we fade out and segue into “Night of the Swallow”—possibly influenced by Matthew Arnold’s poem, “Dover Beach”—which has Kate stealing away on borrowed Icarus wings (“with a hired plane”) to the isle of Malta...rising higher and higher on the ecstatic din of Irish fiddles meshed with Uillean pipes.
The next one, “All the Love,” disarms the listener with a casually fatalistic quatrain worthy of Emily Dickinson or Sylvia Plath:
“The first time I died
Was in the arms of good friends of mine.
They kiss me with tears.
They hadn’t been near me for years.”
This lacerating song takes on the Ibsenesque themes of bleak emotional isolation, bitter disappointment, failure to connect, and the longing face we tend to hide from the world (“All the love, all the love, all the love you should have given...”). As is often the case, the epiphany of a barren, unfulfilling life doesn’t occur until it is too late:
“Only tragedy allows the release
Of love and grief never normally seen
I didn’t want to let them see me weep,
I didn’t want to let them see me weak
But I know I have shown
That I stand at the gates alone.”
Ahh...the exquisite ache of loneliness and regret eternal:
”I needed you to love me too, I waited for your move....”
The penultimate “Houdini” contains one of Kate’s most provocative conceits. After freshening up with a séance, the escape artist extraordinaire prepares to immerse himself in a water tank bound and chained. His ever-adoring assistant (our heroine) gives him a good-luck open-mouthed kiss and passes the secret key, with his patient tongue “teasing and receiving.” The tantalizing suggestion of the cover photograph pretty much completes the scenario. Once again, desperate emotions and sensual anticipation are intertwined with a fear and defiance of death:
“I’d catch the queues watching you
Hoping you’d do something wrong.
Everybody thinks you’ll never make it—
But every time you escape,
Rosabel believe, not even Eternity—
Can hold Houdini.
Rosabel believe.
Through the glass I’d watch you breathe
Bound and drowned
And paler than you’ve ever been.
With your life the only thing in my mind—
We pull you from the water.
On the earlier “Leave It Open,” Kate resolved to keep her mind exposed and her ego in her gut; on “Get Out of My House,” she holds the rest of her body off limits with the help of a smarmy French concierge. This last song about rape and resistance may have come to her after a second viewing of Rosemary’s Baby or an advance screening of The Entity:
“No strangers feet
Will enter me
I wash the panes
I clean the stains away.
This house is as old as I am
This house knows all I have done
They come with their weather hanging round them
But can’t knock my door down.
With my key I (lock it)
With my key I (lock it)
This house is full of m-m-my mess
This house is full of m-m-mistakes,
This house is full of m-m-madness
This house is full of, full of, full of, full of fight.
With my keeper I (clean up).”
I must say, Kate does this type of neurotic Victorian Gothic madwoman-in-the-attic number a damn sight better than any of her mewling-and-puking Lillith-Fairy progeny (I won’t name names since we all know). As with “Night of the Swallow,” a zoomorphic transmutation provides the magical escape hatch:
“I will not let you in
I face towards the wind,
I change into the Mule.
Having said all that, let me quickly reiterate that The Dreaming is a masterstroke of sonic and lyrical experimentation which remains our heroine’s best work.
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