It’s Request Week on Good Ones, and today’s request comes from subscriber Katie Carguilo.
The UK has always done a terrible job of creating and exporting genre-compliant pop music.
The Beatles and The Rolling Stones dominated popular music stateside for one main reason: they were bad at trying to do the thing they were trying to do. Music has existed in conscious written form for at least a millennium, but all it took was the American interpretation of folk music styles from around the world to give us jazz, blues, and then rock ‘n roll, and then, poof! But while American popular artists were doing what they could to rewrite the same song over and over, England was hearing all this stuff for the first time at the same time. It’s easy to break the rules if you never learned them in the first place.
Explaining Kate Bush is a colossal undertaking. As a singer/songwriter, it’s clear her early career benefitted from a run of David Bowie personalities cannibalizing piano ballads and rock music through the early 70s. Her high range offered a feature to focus on to try and categorize her work, and yet, her albums show deep literary references as inspiration, electronic instruments layered into rich acoustic tones, and programming employed to defy song structure in a way that popular music wasn’t quite ready for. Kate Bush as protege for electro indie synth rings true if most American audiences were ready for her to be a cult following, and yet, from the first paragraph on her Wikipedia page:
Catherine BushCBE (born 30 July 1958[1][2]) is an English singer, songwriter, and record producer. In 1978, aged 19, she topped the UK Singles Chart for four weeks with her debut single "Wuthering Heights", becoming the first female artist to achieve a UK number one with a self-written song.[11] She has since released 25 UK Top 40 singles, including the Top 10 hits "The Man with the Child in His Eyes", "Babooshka", "Running Up That Hill", "Don't Give Up" (a duet with Peter Gabriel), and "King of the Mountain". All 10 of her studio albums reached the UK Top 10, including the UK number-one albums Never for Ever (1980), Hounds of Love (1985), and the compilation The Whole Story (1986). She was the first British solo female artist to top the UK album charts and the first female artist to enter the album chart at number one.[12]
Kate Bush is one of the most successful and popular singers of all time, in the UK. With that framing 1988’s “This Woman’s Work,” it begs the question as to where this seemingly innocuous piano ballad comes from.
The song starts with an extremely signature vocal melody over soft piano chords, and as is signature in a Kate Bush song, her vocal melodies drives the entire track more than any instrument ever could. The song builds in a beautiful way, showering haunting strings and synth chords over the piano that Bush trades lines with through the entire track. The power of the chorus echoes as “I know you have a little life in you yet/I know you have a lot of strength left” leads further forward in a dramatic crescendo until Bush herself is literally screaming in the backing track.
It’s a gut punch of a track, the sort of lyrically ambiguous narrative that tackles the emotional weight of struggling in life. It’s a rainy afternoon blanket, it’s an early morning anthem, it tells you everything you need to hear and lets you suffer it inside or belt it out to build power. “This Woman’s Works” exists to give credence to the pain we all feel.
Except…
Well. Kinda. “This Woman’s Work” was written in 1988 by Kate Bush for the John Hughes movie She’s Having A Baby. In the film, Kristy (Elizabeth McGovern) is pregnant and has complications that threaten her life and the baby’s life, while Jake (played by Kevin Bacon) relives all the moments in their life together, in despair, unable to actually do anything but wait. Kate Bush was commissioned to write a song for the film, so “This Woman’s Work” was scored to overlay on that scene, with happier flashbacks coming to Jake as he waits for news on the health of his wife and baby. Kate Bush wrote the song to be representative of Jake’s perspective, which means that the next time you hear it, you should imagine Kevin Bacon’s voice instead of Kate Bush’s. It’s the art version of Will Smith rapping the plot over the credits for both Men in Black and Wild Wild West.
Also, Maxwell covered the song, for some reason.
Getting a perspective on Kate Bush’s commercial success in the UK helps reason out why she would be tapped to write a song for a major director’s Hollywood picture.
Actually hearing how beautiful and independent the song is just brings us back to square one and trying to figure out how to try and understand the scope of Kate Bush’s work.
“This Woman’s Work” on Apple Music.
“This Woman’s Work” on Spotify.
Advanced Reading
The birthplace of rock ‘n roll (aka these United States) never fully grasped what was possible within the genre until we had dumb Brits from industrial towns trying their best to stick to 1-4-5. That sense of traditionalism carries through all of our original art — the original folk blues gave us a chord progression interpreted from African roots (delivered by enslaved and formerly enslaved Africans) that gave us everything we know in popular music. The secret shame of Elvis and his management team profiting off of black music goes further back from that. There would be no Toby Keith without Hank Williams and there would be no Hank Williams without Robert Johnson (or Lead Belly, or Jesus let’s keep on going). Early cowboy music was based around Hollywood tin pan alley musical songwriting, so your Gene Autry and Roy Rogers were closer to Irving Berlin until folks like Ernest Tubb borrowed a chord progression and Hank Williams went ahead and just made the white version of the blues.
Even our best attempt at redefining the world of rock ‘n roll happened around 1975 when The Ramones decidedly and consciously wanted to strip the swung eight note pattern of rock ‘n roll music and speed it up to generate punk rock. For two decades straight The Ramones took that goddamned 1-4-5 and absolutely just wrung the shit out of that chord progression squeezing every last drop out of it. But, even then, the world’s second punk band, The Sex Pistols, immediately ignored musical directive of the genre and got their eight notes swinging like drunk sailors in a bar decided that “hey, why not use any three chords that we want?”
It’s difficult to hold something so precious when you have zero ties to it. The critical theory being proposed here would declare that The Rolling Stones were a form of outsider art. While that’s not quite the case (I’m not sure anyone’s trying to compare “Ruby Tuesday” to Basquiat), it rings true to a degree that we can see in music.
All bets were off in the 70s, however, as progress trucked on, and we ended up with American bands pushing the concept of genre fusion. The Allman Bros. Band and the just called The Band band gave us a broader interpretation of what rock ‘n roll could be, and enamored with the possibility, British guitar-man Eric Clapton transitioned his hard blues rock background to get a little rootsy with Derek and the Dominoes and his later solo works, and popularized this sort of rock music in a way that was unbelievable.
One of the ultimate spirals that we run into is the return of George Harrison to the forefront. As part of the machine that redefined what the early days of rock and roll were, Harrison’s solo career throughout the 70s gave us one of the best versions of this Americana rock ‘n roll. Clapton may have stolen Harrison’s wife, but, for the avid listener, Harrison stole Clapton’s genre dominance, even if he didn’t get the recognition for it.