Resolved: for reasons that cannot be explained merely by acknowledging Kate Bush’s talent as a performer and songwriter, Ms. Bush is enjoying a new, intense flush of popularity in the demographic of college-educated cosmopolitan Americans between the ages of 20 and 35. Presented here are two attempts, one materialistic and one idealistic,, to explain this phenomenon.
A)
If talking about dating apps is the millennial talking about the weather, then “wow it’s like my phone is listening to me” is our version of “hot enough for ya?” Cite whatever studies you’d like that supposedly prove your phone is not listening to your conversations and transmitting the data to advertisers, the number of times people see ads for something you were just talking about is enough to keep the moderately observant paranoid for decades. Once is recency bias, twice is Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, three times is enemy action.
If Thomas Pynchon taught us anything it’s that paranoia is the predominant mood of the post-modern condition. It’s a thesis that seemed quirky in the 70s, but by now the idea that various shadowy cabals are manipulating your lived experience in plain sight is reiterated in a new news story practically every other day. Silicon Valley is the usual culprit, but of course various world governments and the traditional sinister industries of the US (energy, arms, pharmaceuticals) can’t be discounted. Disentangling every single plot out there to manipulate you into doing… something is a fool’s errand. Trying to parse the reasons and origins of even the commercial messages seen in even a single day would probably be enough to turn anyone Unabomber. So as the first of Pynchon’s proverbs for paranoids goes: “You may never get to touch the master, but you can tickle his creatures.” And the creature to tickle today is Kate Bush.
I sincerely and hopefully doubt Kate Bush herself, isolated and eccentric in some English manse, is actively behind the plot to engineer her new popularity among urban sophisticates, but again, it cannot be discounted. Who I think are more likely culprits are the devious engineers at the Spotify Entertainment Corporation, or at least the possibly sentient, possibly malicious algorithms that are their infernal offspring. Back in October I tweeted about the both eerie and smug sensation of hearing a song that I first heard on my Spotify Discover Weekly playlist, otherwise obscure, make an appearance out in the “real world.” It’s smug because I think people (or at least me) feel a small amount of shame about discovering music through unfeeling corporate algorithm, and not like underground DJ shows and record bin diving or however cool people are supposed to discover music. The realization that the person playing that great, old, obscure track—let’s say it’s Link Wray—is in fact just as much of a poser as you, is truly delicious. And it’s eerie because it reminds you that what Spotify chooses to serve up to you every week is not an exclusive treat based on your totally idiosyncratic and superior tastes: you were not, in fact special, but experiencing the same weltanschauung as thousands of other jaded literati and getting off on the flattery to your sense of aesthetics.
There are plenty of times this has happened to me, and I hope I’m not alone. I remember the chill that went down my spine when Season 3 of “You’re the Worst” ended with The Roches’ “Hammond Song,” an ethereal sadgirl harmony jam that had actually featured on one of the first ever Discover Weekly playlists I listened to. The music supervisor or episode director or showrunner, I am convinced, must have been the beneficiary of the same algorithmic quirk that I was. And when I look at the jukebox at my local aging scene-kid bar, Footsies, and see that they have physical copies of both The Best of Marshall Crenshaw (so I can play “You’re My Favorite Waste of Time”) and Pastor T.L. Barrett’s Like A Ship…. Without A Sail (so I can play the title track), I can’t help but look both ways over my shoulder and wonder if I’m being tested. If I selected either of those, I wonder, will I be asked to leave? Am I in danger of falling into some kind of trap for Spotify-using posers?
So yeah, I ‘discovered’ Kate Bush through my Discover Weekly playlist, so what. But what’s weirder, I think, is that I discovered her through “Suspended in Gaffa.” The song, a cracked waltz with a hooky but repetitive structure, is attention grabbing from the first bars. It is, if I may be so bold, far and away the best song on the album it came from, 1982’s The Dreaming. But The Dreaming was actually Kate Bush’s worst-selling album in her career at that point, and though “Suspended in Gaffa” was actually released as the album’s third single, it peaked at 33rd on the French charts. So why this song?
There’s a fascinating, extremely short blog post by Damon Krukowski, drummer of the band Galaxie 500 exploring, or at least also asking, this same question about Galaxie 500’s own song “Strange,” that is inexplicably popular on Spotify. He writes:
“Strange,” a track off our album On Fire, is streaming far more than any of our other songs – roughly ten times as often as the songs that surround it in its original sequence on the album (“Snowstorm” and “When Will You Come Home”).
What’s especially surprising about this is that “Strange” was not a single for Galaxie 500, and hasn’t historically been among our most popular tracks. Even Spotify’s own editors haven’t selected it for any of their curated playlists.
Yet anyone using Spotify is much more likely to hear “Strange” than any other Galaxie 500 song – it is the most frequently streamed of our songs via “Discover Weekly,” “Your Daily Mix,” and Spotify’s “Radio” feature. And I assume this will only become more and more the case. Now that Spotify’s algorithms have separated “Strange” from the rest of our catalogue, it is a self-fulfilling prophecy that it will be streamed more than others because it is frequent use of this track that causes it to be seeded it into more recommendations, which increases the frequency of its use…
So for some reason, Spotify’s algorithms looked into the catalogue of the Galaxie 500 and somehow divined that “Strange” an otherwise undistinguished B-Side, was the Galaxie 500 song that people wanted to hear. And what seems even more uncanny is that the algorithm was totally right! When people heard “Strange” they wanted to hear it again, and more so than other Galaxie 500 tracks! Full disclosure, I myself first heard Galaxie 500 through a Discover Weekly, and through hearing “Strange!” Is it going to far to suggest that a similar thing may have happened with the music of Ms. Bush, but on a larger scale?
In the end is this a lot of speculation and insinuation. I have no idea if other people who’ve started to go through a Kate Bush phase first heard her music on their Discover Weekly playlist, let alone whether it was by first hearing “Suspended in Gaffa” (unlike “Strange,” “Gaffa” isn’t Bush’s #1 most played on song on Spotify, or even in the top 10, but then Bush was a far more successful mainstream artist than Galaxie 500, so maybe the warping effect isn’t quite as evident). There are a couple of other explanations. Ezekiel “Shrill” Kweku, an editor for NY Mag’s Daily Intelligencer, had his twitter display name as “Running Up That Shrill,” for a time, and twitter comic/webcomic artist Branson Reese has been a fan and advocate, often pictured in a t-shirt featuring the cover of The Dreaming. In mid-January, august music mag Pitchfork ran a retrospective of Bush, spotlighting four of her albums in four separate reviews all posted on January 19th.
Maybe some of these events are causes and some are symptoms of latent Discover Weekly-ism. It’s possible, as always, that I’m merely projecting my fear that I’m actually a poser (nay, the greatest of all posers) onto a population that gets music recommendations from friends or the music press, like “normal” people. And of course, this is hardly a calamity, Kate Bush is good! It makes sense that people would like her (more on that in a second). But searching for computerized conspiracies is what I do now. Where once corporate rock radio was pocketing the bribes to pull the strings and create monocultural create taste, maybe now it’s a quiet, functioning server rented out by Spotify, and the scale it operates on is only you and a handful of people you follow on Twitter.
B)
This will eventually be about Kate Bush, but first I have to hold forth on a bunch of other stuff.A fun little mind game I’ve been playing recently is to imagine what the reaction would be like if Broken Social Scene’s You Forgot It In People were released today. If you’ve never heard YFIIP you should go do that now. It’s an expansive assembly of textures and wildly divergent soundscapes. It’s not even the best BSS album (that’s their self-titled), but it was their breakthrough and probably still their most-heard album. It’s a high water mark of a kind of indie rock that has mostly disappeared: ambitious, symphonic, kaleidoscopic—bigger and wilder than any album that’s captured attentions of the Pitchfork crowd in the last four years.
Mid-aughts indie rock as a genre didn’t even burn out, it just slunk away into darkness like a squashed revolution. Sufjan Stevens iterated on Illinoise with the digital-influenced Age of Adz, then retreated all the way back to intimate guitar folk. The Decemberists and The National are dad-rock. Bon Iver and Dirty Projectors became synth acts with sporadic releases. Fleet Foxes went into a long seclusion and came back two years ago with an album that was just as good as their first two. I have no idea what the reaction was because it seemingly failed to spark any kind of larger discourse at all. Animal Collective released an album last August, and basically no one noticed. Maybe there is no commonality between these artists other than that I, as a mid-20s white man, liked them at one point. I mean, that’s certainly not an explanation I can refute.
But I think there is a commonality, if not in sound than in project. I would argue that sonically these acts were providing something that was fundamentally distinct and unique in the musical discourse. They were linked by common fandoms, but The National does not sound like Animal Collective does not sound like Illinoise-era Sufjan. 2000-2012 is almost a revolutionary period in indie rock when internet distribution allowed a large number of completely disparate acts to all somehow find the same niche at the same time and sounds nothing like the grunge/post-grunge garage rock of the 90s, and has few recognizable descendants among today’s up and coming bands.
But as a revolutionary moment, it was a wheel that didn’t turn. The ‘big’ bands of the mid-2000s seemed to either lose steam or lose interest sometime before 2012, with Modern Vampires of the City seeming like the final ebbing of the tide. In their place was a void in indie rock. A twilight of the Brooklyn dudes. If we’re in a definite new era of indie music—we’ve gone beyond the threshold past which bands like Grizzly Bear and Titus Andronicus become “legacy”—then what’s the temperature, the shape, of the new epoch? Who has inherited the Earth?
There’s first off been a rise in, more or less, tribute bands. People savored every word when Pitchfork published a scathing take down of Greta van Fleet, a Led Zeppelin rip-off act who seem so unpalatable that I refuse to listen to a single second of their music. But there are other members of the indie scene who are basically pulling the same trick with more bona fides and less obviously mercenary intentions. Off the top of my head, Sheer Mag, White Reaper, and Diarrhea Planet all do what are often called “arena ready” guitar riffs in the press (with comparisons to Led Zeppelin and Van Halen usually following right after), while Mac Demarco, Parquet Courts, and Ariel Pink all do a kind of shaggy-psychedelic slacker rock. This isn’t meant to be dismissive, a lot of these artists have songs or albums or just general vibes that I like. But I do think they represent a backwards looking impulse, a retro-futurism, in music.
If the latter movement is somewhat reactionary—a back to basics revolt against what in the 2000s was called baroque or twee or “art”—then sad-girl guitar rock is a more straightforward inheritor of the 2000s mantle. Obviously sad-dude guitar rock has been a genre unto itself for nearly 60 years, so it’s not as if this is some unprecedented depredation of rock music. But I think most observers should be able to agree it is a wave. Julien Baker, Angel Olsen, Phoebe Bridgers, Frankie Cosmos, Courtney Barnett, Snail Mail, and Soccer Mommy might all be loosely categorized as relatively straight-forward rock, guitar driven, pleasant sounding, mid-tempo, woman-fronted acts with emotionally intimate or confessional lyrics. My personal tastes notwithstanding, the great flourishing of the female rock star is a pretty fascinating development in its own right, but its not something I have the expertise to opine about at more than a surface level.
But these two major tendencies still fail to satisfy a particular appetite in cultural space, and that’s what finally brings me back to Kate Bush. Because what Kate Bush is offering is what is distinctly lacking from modern rock music. Kate Bush has a sense of grandeur. Sometimes this is called “theatricality” in reviews and retrospectives, but I think what she offers goes farther that. Each Kate Bush album has the feeling of a project in an of itself. Released today, a song like “Wuthering Heights” would be impossible to take seriously, but the 40 years of remove allow modern audiences to hear the song for the first time with a sense of unironic whimsy. Listening to Kate Bush in 2019 is like appreciating Gilbert and Sullivan.
But also, no one makes music with the same élan that Kate Bush did. Modern synthpop isn’t as operatic as Hounds of Love. Nothing has the slinkiness of “Babooshka” or bizarre experimentality of The Dreaming or shameless theater-kid passion of “Wuthering Heights.” The horizon of imagination in indie rock is nearer than ever, and I think there is a craving for music that seems comparably unbounded and artists that seem to have both the space and fearlessness to follow their ambition and vision. In a way the movement that does are the modern pop-chic bands. Carly Rae is tip of the spear, if not the original, and there’s Robyn, SOPHIE, GFOTY—if you look now you can see Grimes in mid-transformation, like an intermediate Animorph. But while these artists capture the sense of whimsy and play that is missing from modern guitar-rock, they at the same time sacrifice, intentionally I would hazard, the vulnerability and earnestness of their rock contemporaries. Whether through musicianship, or songwriting, or performance, this was never a trade-off Kate Bush had to make. In whatever flight of fancy she was on, she remained unquestionably herself.
Read around the internet long enough and you’ll probably read about Kate Bush the same thing that gets written about a lot of artists—they were ahead of their time. But if Bush was ahead of her time, whatever “her time” is hasn’t come yet. Maybe Bush was a historical loop, closed off forever when Bush retreated into semi-seclusion at the start of the 90s. Maybe the historical moment of Bush’s descendants has yet to come. You could reverse alchemize Kate Bush by combining the delirious pop textures of SOPHIE and Carly Rae Jepsen with the direct emotional intimacy of the guitar-rockers. Was that the dialectic of Kate Bush in the first place? If so then Bush’s rediscovery would have been inevitable—her artistic genius even now feels like it comes from a theoretical future.
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