FEATURE:
In Reaction to Alexandra Diamond-Rivlin’s Article for The Guardian…
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1989/PHOTO CREDIT: Kevin Cummins
How Kate Bush Can Change a Life
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THIS will be fairly brief for me…
ILLUSTRATION CREDIT: Martin O'Neill/The Guardian
but I happened upon an article that The Guardian published online yesterday that was written by Alexandra Diamond-Rivlin. She discussed her experiences of coming out as a trans woman. I am of the mindset that there are some simply brilliant women in music who are changing lives and are actually connecting with people who may otherwise feel isolated, alone or unheard. Their music has the power to save lives and speak to people when nothing else can. That is phenomenal! However, there are so many major artists, of all genders, who are all about hype and popularity. Not really about the music and all about the celebrity and unimportant aspects of music. Naming nobody specific, but giant names that get all this discussion and discourse after releasing a so-so album. There are so many other artists whose music goes deeper and is much more effective, and yet they have to struggle for a fraction of the coverage that a global megastar would. I have written about this before – recently in fact! – and how Kate Bush can change your life. How she has impacted and affected mine. Also, how much of an idol and icon she is among the L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+ community. Kate Bush is especially noteworthy and important when it comes to communities that are still marginalised, maligned and attacked – and pushed to the fringes. I was moved by Alexandra Diamond-Rivlin’s beautiful, thought-provoking, personal and extraordinary words. It was a specific Kate Bush song that transformed her life. For me, in terms of an awakening and transformation – not like Diamond-Rivlin’s -, it was about a realisation of what music could be, and how it went beyond mainstream Pop. I first heard Kate Bush when I was very small and Wuthering Heights’s video was the first thing of hers that I saw (that song was her 1978 debut single and included on the album, The Kick Inside). I am planning a Kate Bush book at the moment and, hopefully as part of that, I will write why Kate Bush is so pivotal to me – and how she changed my life.
However, not many people talk about how an artist like Kate Bush can change someone’s life. It might only take one song. Something about the words being sung that can connect and have this hugely transformative power. I want to share a few observations and reactions to what Alexandra Diamond-Rivlin wrote in her extraordinary article:
“It wasn’t safe for me to discover The Sensual World, the eponymous track on what Kate Bush described as her “most female album”. The song was intended to be a rejection of the masculine influence that had unwittingly shaped the artist’s previous work, and an ode to something taboo within the female experience. Based on Molly Bloom’s soliloquy in James Joyce’s Ulysses – a stream of consciousness in which the character reflects on her experiences of nature, sex and love – Bush wanted to celebrate the experience of life inside a woman’s body, and the ways it gives her spiritual and sexual pleasure. I knew that, for someone like me, who was already being bullied, to openly love a song like this could make me an even more obvious target to those who saw femininity as a sign of weakness. More daunting than that, it might force me to confront my own repressed desires”.
I have written a lot about The Sensual World and how it departed from The Dreaming (1982) and Hounds of Love (1985). Albums that were percussion-heavy and had this masculine energy, The Sensual World (1989) was also an album where Bush sang with the Trio Bulgarka. They are a female Bulgarian trio whose music was introduced to Kate Bush by her brother, Paddy. The fact that a song like The Sensual World and its sense of desire, liberation and that desire (from Kate Bush) to “celebrate the experience of life inside a woman’s body” is something that affected Diamond-Rivlin. It made me wonder about Bush’s discography and how so many of her songs affect and change so may people. So often, especially when it comes to mainstream music, it is about streaming numbers, the grand and the spectacle of things. We do not talk enough about the granularity and how certain songs and words can be as impactful and important as a major gig or entire album.
Whereas Kate Bush, when she was making The Sensual World, was in a stage in her life – having turned thirty in July 1988 – when she had different priorities and wanted to maybe returned to a sound and dynamic (when it came to exploring femininity and herself through a more female-focused lens), she was also doing so at a moment when there was still huge sexism and criticism levied at her. Maybe producing a more feminine album would incur the same ridicule and misogyny she faced back in 1978 when The Kick Inside came out. However, in a 1990 interview with John Diliberto, Kate Bush remarked the following: “I just felt that I was exploring my feminine energy more -musically. In the past I had wanted to emanate the kind of power that I’ve heard in male music. And I just felt maybe somewhere there is this female energy that’s powerful. It’s a subtle difference – male or female energy in art – but I think there is a difference: little things, like using the Trio. And possibly some of the attitudes to my lyric writing on this album. I would say it was more accepting of being a female somehow”. Bush said this about The Sensual World’s title track in an interview with BBC Radio 1’s Roger Scott in 1989: “I think for me that’s an incredibly important thing about this planet, that we are surrounded by such sensuality and yet we tend not to see it like that. But I’m sure for someone who had never experienced it before it would be quite a devastating thing. (…)”.
It is heartbreaking as well as uplifting reading Alexandra Diamond-Rivlin’s words about having to live a life of secrecy and repression. As someone who wanted to come out as a trans woman earlier in life but perhaps felt that she could not through fear of bullying and alienation, there is also this sense of a song providing comfort and revelation. Diamond-Rivlin shares how she, as a teenage boy, would be mocked for having a high-pitched voice and camp mannerisms. She said “Still, it felt safer to be a feminine boy than a boy who wanted to become a woman”. That is something a lot of young people still face. The anti-trans movement and rhetoric. How so many high-profile people share their repugnant and hateful comments about trans women especially, it is such a bleak experience for those who want to come out and be accepted. Even if musicians like Sophie-Ellis Bextor and Kate Nash have either spoken out about transphobia or showed their support for the community, the reality is that there is widespread transphobia. Our own country (the U.K.), in April, determined that the legal definition of ‘woman’ under the Equality Act 2010 refers to biological sex, not gender identity. It was crushing and a massive step back to a darker age. At a time when there is more awareness and acceptance of the L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+ community, the reality for trans women is so challenging! It adds extra weight and power to Alexandra Diamond-Rivlin’s recollections, experiences and perspectives. It makes me wonder whether Kate Bush knows about an article like this one and experiences that so many other trans people share.
Attending a single-sex school in Plymouth, Diamond-Rivlin shared how “One morning, while we ambled along the grassland, one of the girls shared her headphones with me and played her favourite music. That’s when the discovery was made”. How lyrics in The Sensual World such as “to where the water and the earth caress … now I’ve powers of a woman’s body” were almost like splints of light in the darkness. If there were breathless expressions and formless words, there were lines that definitely stuck out and were heard clearly by Diamond-Rivlin. It was a life-changing moment of epiphany (and almost spirituality) where this ethereal voice from a Pop artist in 1989 leapt through time and space to connect with this new and young Kate Bush listener. The final paragraphs are perhaps the most indelible and standout. This passage elicited a big reaction in me: “Something shifted in me that day. Bush’s ode to womanhood felt like an invocation of all the things I knew I could be: euphoric, audacious and free. I started to view my femininity not as a flaw, but as an affirmation of life; a way of indulging in the intense pleasure of the world, nature and my body”. When Diamond-Rivlin remarks on her femininity as a teenage boy as not being a flaw (others saw it as that and, worst, something to be attacked), instead, it was “as an affirmation of life”. Something enormously positive. If Kate Bush was entering her thirties and wanted to embrace her sensuality, womanhood and this new phase of life, little did she know that this song would affect someone who was struggling to come out as a trans woman and had this secret ally and supportive prayer from an iconic artist.
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush shot for The Sensual World’s single cover in 1989/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush
The final words from Alexandra Diamond-Rivlin are beautiful: “I danced in recognition of my own sacred womanhood. And waiting patiently for that reverie to become my everyday reality, I was able to refuse the voices that told me it never would”. This is emblematic of the power of music and how a single song can literally change a life. This is common for those who hear Kate Bush’s music. Unique And different experiences of people being in this positions where they are struggling to be who they want to be or are in a bleak place and something in one of her songs will break through that darkness and make them feel heard – and accepted. It makes me hope Kate Bush does read that article on The Guardian’s website and Alexandra Diamond-Rivlin’s incredible writing. I also wonder what Diamond-Rivlin thinks of Bush’s reworking of The Sensual World, titled Flower of the Mountain, on 2011’s Director’s Cut. This is where she finally got permission from the James Joyce estate to use Molly Bloom’s soliloquy from Ulysses (though the novel had fallen into the public domain and out of copyright by that point, so being refused permission would have been redundant). I do wonder if we will see more articles from those who have been affected by Kate Bush’s music. It would be great if there was a book when we got a collection of articles and essays from different fans and the song/moment that changed their life. At a time when there is still too much stock in the empty and overhyped, we do not talk enough about the personal and more important. How fans’ lives can be immeasurably altered for the better by the music. A title song from the '80s by Kate Bush impacted a person many years later. It is a wonderful and powerful thing! Alexandra Diamond-Rivlin’s incredible article should, I hope, lead others to share how Kate Bush’s music…
IMPACTED them.