Last week was Kate Bush’s birthday, so in tribute to her, I’ve decided to write a little bit about what one of her songs means to me. It’s a little more personal than I’ve tended to get in this blog.
Sometimes there are moments of clarity that, even though they arrive like a lighting bolt, are put into action slowly because you are too frightened by what they mean. Music has brought me more epiphanies than just about anything else. Sometimes they’re unpleasant epiphanies, ones that could have saved me a lot of heartache if only they had arrived sooner or if I had been bold enough to take action in the moment they arrived.
I had been married to my first husband for only about a year when I noticed that “Love and Anger” by Kate Bush was trying to tell me something. He was driving us somewhere and a compilation that I’d made with this song on it was playing. I was singing along, as I love to do, and something clicked in my brain: he and I weren’t “building a house of the future together” in either a literal or figurative sense. We were holding it together, but not well. The mind and the heart are stubborn, though, especially when you’re afraid of big life changes and have just made one of the biggest. Almost immediately, I pushed that revelation aside. I decided that what was really speaking to me in the song was this:
It lay buried here. It lay deep inside me.
It’s so deep I don’t think that I can speak about it.
It could take me all of my life,
But it would only take a moment to
Tell you what I’m feeling,
But I don’t know if I’m ready yet.
Of course, the thing that I wasn’t ready to tell was not something about myself, but about what I knew to be the truth about him and me. “A little piece of rope won’t hold it together.” That rope was little more than a cheap wedding ring bought in a witchy jewelry boutique, a ring that was intended to be replaced eventually by a custom-made permanent ring but never was.
It’s a song that I had known since I was 16, but as is so often the case with songs that are written by adults about adult concerns, I just didn’t get it then. You can interpret the song as a message of hope, as long as the narrator is speaking of love that can weather those struggles in the story. In our case, there was not really love after all, but there was plenty of anger. Deep down I knew it, but I had just made a life-wrecking mistake and I didn’t know how I could repair the damage. Sometimes an epiphany in a song shakes you so much that you can’t deal with it. I wasn’t well for a long time, but when that rope finally snapped from years of fraying, suddenly I was better again.
There’s always something to be said for learning from one’s mistakes, and I still love this song. In fact, I’d say that I love it more than ever. It reminds me of what I don’t have to endure anymore.
Aesthetically, the song is lush and so is the video. It was the first time I had ever seen Sufis dancing and it made an impression. Twenty-five or so years later, this song and video have lost none of their beauty.
I Eat the Music 