68. Kate Bush, "Hounds of Love"

 


What brilliant timing, for ths album to arrive in our countdown just as the Kate Bush-assaince is upon us and just months after the single "Runnin' Up That Hill" hit the top 10 in the UK and America again for the first time since 1985, more than 30 years earlier. The general public did not, of course, wake up one morning seized en masse by a desire to hear Kate's soaring, anthemic single, the first track on this album, it was Netflix's somehow still-going series Stranger Things that used the song and propelled renewed ineterest in it.  Then it took over TikTok, which is sort of like today's crowdsourced MTV in its ability to drive a song's popularity, with hundreds of thousands or maybe millions of users grabbing parts of the song.

It's a great song, and one of only two I recognized from this album, which, believe it ot not, I had never heard all the way through until yesterday.  At first I was pretty sure it wasn't for me, but on second listen I liked it more.  I think it's more of a grower, as least for me, and if I continued to spend time with it, I would continue to like it more and more.

Besides that first track, which is an absolute banger, I liked the title track, a baroque, dramatic song that builds and rises and rides on Bush's dramatic, operatic vocal.  "Cloudbusting," the third single after the two songs we've already mentioned.  Driven by a riff played on strings, the meaning is obscure:

But every time it rains
You're here in my head
Like the sun coming out
Ooh, I just know that something good is gonna happen
I don't know when
But just saying it could even make it happen

But then you do a little checking and realize, of course, it's about "the very close relationship between psychiatrist and philosopher Wilhelm Reich and his young son, Peter, told from the point of view of the mature Peter.  It describes the boy's memories of his life with Reich on their family farm, called Orgonon, where the two spent time 'cloudbusting', a rain-making process which involved using a machine designed and built by Reich – a machine called a cloudbuster – to point at the sky."  Oh shit, it's so obvious now.

But this is part of Bush's appeal, isn't it?  The air of mystery thaat surrounds this album is virtually palpable, amd in the Internetless late 80's I imagine a lot of kids spent a lot of time trying to figure out what the fuck she was singing about.

It's also kismet, or the work of Rolling Stone editors, that this album follows Alanis' Jagged Little Pill, since Kate Bush was an obvious influence on Alanis.  Anyway, I can't see coming back to this album much but I'm glad I've heard it now.

Is this album in my personal Top 100? No.

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