KATE BUSH – Minnie Mouse is Alive and Attending Drama Class

We need to talk about Kate Bush.

Kate Bush did 22 dates at London’s Hammersmith Apollo in 2014, her first live shows in 35 years, and the tickets sold out in 15 minutes. Now guess what you got for the hype? Dancers dressed as fish skeletons, a wooden puppet child walking round the stage,a band in beak masks, and a mini-play about sausages. I couldn’t have mocked it any better in my usual exaggerations, only this was reality.

She’s one of the artists who makes me think that I must be living in a some parallel universe, diligently doing her part to make this world intellectually insufferable. Since the end of 70s and to this day, there is a constant stream of hipsters raving about her pompous music and studied classicism, and another constant stream of annoying quirky singer / songstress types like Tori Amos, Fiona Apple or Florence and the Machine, all for whom Kate Bush was the blueprint. You might think it’s forgivable. That’s your opinion.

Especially Americans seem to have an inferiority complex regarding sophistication and so they regularly consider everything coming from England (home of red-faced meatheads) as the peak of art. And so an academic class which is less sophisticated than it thinks has included Kate Bush into their canon, a canon that more and more serves the purpose of social-medial name-dropping and good-taste-signaling.

My trauma with her began when in the 80s and 90s MTV was playing ‘Don’t Give Up‘, Kate Bush’s gruesome duet with Peter Gabriel in an endless loop along with R.E.M.‘s waterboarding score ‘Losing My Religion‘. A masochist drive and negative fascination glued to me to the screen each time I saw Bush and Gabriel tightly embracing like they were mates in a very very strange self-help group, only they were doing it in front of a screen showing different states of the sun and moon and while standing on a revolving state, circling around in slow-motion while singing „Don’t give up / ‘Cause you have friends“ . I still have an undiagnosed eye-cancer from it and developed a pronounced sense for surrogate shame.

Other music videos of Kate Bush always and necessarily involved chiffon scarves and flowing skirts held together by a belt, and the “crazy esoteric cat-lady from next door“ vibe didn’t stop there, but Kate would always start to dance exactly as you would expect the lunatic hobby-witch to dance: moving like she was having an epileptic seizure and with the charm of an amateurish highschool drama class attendant and her first attempts in borderline eccentricity which she falsely and eternally confuses with art. I’m not talking about one particular Kate Bush video here, but all of them.

Mime has always belonged to the theatre and was never cool, but always creepy- ask Chucky the killer doll. I absolutely hated David Bowie‘s early pantomime phase too, but at least he soon grew out of this theatrical shit, whereas Kate Bush is perpetually stuck in this infantile phase. Isn’t she ashamed and aren’t her fans ashamed because of the obviousness of this all?

Honestly, Kate Bush is not even a proper witch but at the same time worse than a witch because she is an esoteric witchlike creature full of lunatic pretense. What kind of self-understanding and life concept is it to eternally cover yourself in violet silk scarves and jump around on stage, mercilessly exposing and ridiculing yourself because everybody just knows that YOU ARE IMAGINING TO BE A FUCKING FAIRY.

The typical female Kate Bush fan is a Ballerina-hobbit who wants to give herself a thoughtful and mysterious aura by practising elusive and pretentious glances in front of the mirror and unleashing them on unsuspecting citizens in her home city’s bus line or grocery store. She lays in the grass with a book by Emily Brontë, takes a sip out of her Victorian coffee cup and sometimes every once in a while puts the book on her chest, takes a deep breath, and zooms into the grass, wondering about the microcosm around her- birds, bees, life. She’ll get lost in the pretense of a banal poetry, which must include some kind of ‘ghost’ or ‘ghostliness’ „Out on the wiley, windy moors / We’d roll and fall in green.“

The male Kate Bush fan is a proto-feminist type that will do anything to get into the pants of the female Kate Bush fan, and in the prospect of pussy is feminizing himself in a very unhealthy way if you ask me. He has chosen to play the role of the understanding, empathic good guy who has a thing for quirkiness and some herb-witch-lunacy. There is also a slightly creepy aspect to it when grown-up men are fantasizing about banging- excuse me, I meant ‘making super intense sensual love’- to a petite, pouting child-like fairy. I don’t know, man… I really don’t know. It’s no less creepy than the borderline pedophilia of Britney Spears‘ ‘Hit me baby, one more time‘. Kate Bush doesn’t work as a subject of sexual and amorous desires, but she’d make sense as a tarot reader or crochet machine. She’d also make sense as a garden gnome in your front garden.

Here’s the best way to deal with Kate Bush: I came, I saw, I fucked off.

by Saliha Enzenauer