15. Get Out Of My House

Kate Bush: The Dreaming (EMI, 1982);
composed by Catherine Bush

Sometimes I think the dumbest word in the language is “experimental,” only because it is misapplied so often – and in art, pretty much always. An experiment tests a hypothesis; genuinely experimental music tests whether the music actually exists and requires an audience to answer that. Someone as obviously gifted as Kate Bush has already answered those existential questions as well as the practical ones, and does not need you to tell her how good her work is, gratifying as that might be. The open question of how large a paying audience it has is the record company’s problem. In the case of Bush’s fourth album, EMI shrewdly viewed this as a sunk cost, because “Running Up That Hill” was made possible by music influenced by Public Image Ltd. no less than Peter Gabriel, and far superior to both. At a time when digital technology was still overwhelming the content it was being used for, Bush simply revved up the content almost beyond her own ability to embody it personally. On this closing track, she ends a relationship by using a Fairlight sampler to turn her voice into twenty braying mules going berserk. The only real question is what must exist.

Note: 25 secular essays about 25 songs, each one exactly 200 words long, appearing one per day (on average) during Advent (or the moral equivalent).