[MUSIC] Kate Bush, "And So Is Love"
Sep. 4th, 2008 08:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldI first heard Kate Bush's song "And So Is Love", taken from 1993's The Red Shoes, through the portable CD player that I'd brought along with me for the train trip to and from a week-long student exchange program in Ottawa back in June 1997. And So Is Love was one of three albums I bought at a HMV in a neighbourhood in the Montréal that I had blitzed during train's stopover, items discounted to $C 6.99 or 7.99, one of the several with cases I'd looked at eagerly on the increasnigly rainy walk back to the train station..
The single was the first indication that I'd had, really, about the existence of Kate Bush, and amusingly enough this CD single was one of her last singles before 2005's Aerial. It was a compact enough piece of media, featuring in addition to the title song an exceptionally bouncy US mix of "Rubberband Girl" (US mix) and the 12" mix of "Eat the Music".
"And So Is Love" is a sad song, as you can tell for yourselves when you go to YouTube to listen to the song and watch the video. (The people who uploaded the video to YouTube have all disabled this video's embedding feature.) That's not an all surprising, since The Red Shoes is a sad album, inspired by Bush's sufferings following the deaths of her mother and her guitarist, among other people. Wikipedia's suggestion that "And So Is Love," is a song "about finding out that love, like life, is not perfect [and that] as we get older, we learn that our loved ones matter most" works for me.
Perhaps unfortunately, it didn't work for me at the time in the way that Bush might have intended, for my return to the Island intensified what remains my worst untreated episode of depression, complete with spells of keening in my family's pleasant bungalow basement. I was unhappy before I left, I was unhappy after I returned, but I was just unhappy with everything, and hearing that life was sad and so was love and that, now at the end of things there was nothing left to do but resign oneself to the steady wearing down of things. That sentiment persisted after the anti-depressants, which did allow me to stretch out my time in a terrified functional manner, since I could hope that "indeed there will be time/To wonder, 'Do I dare?' and, 'Do I dare?'" (and do I yet?).
Going back to that rainy afternoon in Montréal, I feel upset with how I was so fucking stupid as not to have clued into the album. Bush certainly didn't mean what I thought her to have meant, not least since her experimentalism aside she's a commercial artist; rather, the fact that I, a single teenage male, bought a Kate Bush single in North America in the late 1990s pointed to something completely different. My taste in music was probably the only thing particularly differentiating me from the heterosexuals in my cohort, I knew that difference existed, I knew that sort of difference existed in others with similar relationships to their cohorts and that these other people had certain erotic and other inclinations which differed and yet--It ended there.
So much for my pretenses to authenticity.
The single was the first indication that I'd had, really, about the existence of Kate Bush, and amusingly enough this CD single was one of her last singles before 2005's Aerial. It was a compact enough piece of media, featuring in addition to the title song an exceptionally bouncy US mix of "Rubberband Girl" (US mix) and the 12" mix of "Eat the Music".
"And So Is Love" is a sad song, as you can tell for yourselves when you go to YouTube to listen to the song and watch the video. (The people who uploaded the video to YouTube have all disabled this video's embedding feature.) That's not an all surprising, since The Red Shoes is a sad album, inspired by Bush's sufferings following the deaths of her mother and her guitarist, among other people. Wikipedia's suggestion that "And So Is Love," is a song "about finding out that love, like life, is not perfect [and that] as we get older, we learn that our loved ones matter most" works for me.
We used to say
"Ah Hell, we're young"
But now we see that life is sad
And so is love
Ooh baby for the sake of love
Ooh baby for the sake of love
And whatever happens
What really matters?
It's all we've got
Isn't that enough?
Perhaps unfortunately, it didn't work for me at the time in the way that Bush might have intended, for my return to the Island intensified what remains my worst untreated episode of depression, complete with spells of keening in my family's pleasant bungalow basement. I was unhappy before I left, I was unhappy after I returned, but I was just unhappy with everything, and hearing that life was sad and so was love and that, now at the end of things there was nothing left to do but resign oneself to the steady wearing down of things. That sentiment persisted after the anti-depressants, which did allow me to stretch out my time in a terrified functional manner, since I could hope that "indeed there will be time/To wonder, 'Do I dare?' and, 'Do I dare?'" (and do I yet?).
Going back to that rainy afternoon in Montréal, I feel upset with how I was so fucking stupid as not to have clued into the album. Bush certainly didn't mean what I thought her to have meant, not least since her experimentalism aside she's a commercial artist; rather, the fact that I, a single teenage male, bought a Kate Bush single in North America in the late 1990s pointed to something completely different. My taste in music was probably the only thing particularly differentiating me from the heterosexuals in my cohort, I knew that difference existed, I knew that sort of difference existed in others with similar relationships to their cohorts and that these other people had certain erotic and other inclinations which differed and yet--It ended there.
So much for my pretenses to authenticity.
