Alt-Pop Angel

I've had enough of politics for now, so it's time for another musical trip down memory lane. I've done this on a couple occasions during my now four years long run providing daily posts on Steemit and Hive. It's once again time to show how old I really am...

In 1980 I celebrated my 12th birthday and was very nervous about joining high school that year. My tests at primary school qualified me to join the highest form of high school in the Netherlands, which is called "gymnasium" here and is not to be confused with a school gymnasium for physical exercise. I didn't want to go there, but my parents as well as my primary school teachers thought I should, and what can you do as a 12 year old? So I had to join that school, with 8 hours of math class and 4 hours of ancient Latin every week; bwah... Let me tell you, I wasn't happy about that at all at the time, and I only lasted 3 years there; in the third year ancient Greek was added, which was too much for me; I downgraded one school-type to the "atheneum," which is basically the same but without the dead languages.

In 1980 I also discovered an Angel and fell in love with her as well as her music; I'm talking about Kate Bush, a British singer, songwriter, pianist, dancer, and record producer. She is a beautiful woman who made the most beautiful music. She's 10 years my senior, born in 1958, and is still alive today. When she was only 19 years old, she wrote her first song, "Wuthering Heights," which reached the number 1 spot in the UK charts in 1978, and set the tone for her typical style of ethereal music with her angelic voice, and herself dancing. With that song she became the first female artist to achieve a UK number one with a self-written song. The song was inspired by the 1847 Emily Brontë novel of the same name after seeing the 1967 BBC adaptation.

"Wuthering Heights" is sung from the perspective of the Wuthering Heights character Catherine Earnshaw, pleading at Heathcliff's window to be allowed in. It quotes Catherine's dialogue, including the lyrics "I'm so cold", "let me in", and "bad dreams in the night". Cathy is in fact a ghost, which the listener may only realise upon reading the novel. Critic Simon Reynolds described it as "Gothic romance distilled into four-and-a-half minutes of gaseous rhapsody"
_{source: Wikipedia}

"Wuthering Heights" wasn't the first song by her hand and voice that I heard though. The song I fell in love with was released in 1980, and was about the effects of war and about a mother who grieves for her young adult son, who was killed in action. It's called "Army Dreamers" and is another great example of Kate Bush's very own style of music, telling a story about one of humanity's uglier sides on a beautiful waltz. I found out on Wikipedia that "Army Dreamers" was considered inappropriate for airplay by the BBC during the first Gulf War; such overbearing and hypocritical nonsense... there, I couldn't leave politics out of it in the end...

Recently Kate Bush has been rediscovered, thanks to the Netflix hit series "Stranger Things." Her song "Running Up That Hill" is prominently featured in the series' fourth season:

In Stranger Things (Season 4), Netflix’s recent sci-fi mystery which is set in the imaginary city of Hawkins in Indiana, it’s the palpitating synths, snare thumps, heaving and eerie strings, that draw one into the world of Vecna, the monster that roams the musty and macabre ‘upside down’ or the alternative dimension that runs under the city.

[...]

So when Max Mayfield, one of the gritty teens ‘trying to save the world’ gets stuck in Vecna’s alternative reality, there is only one way to get back – a familiar, happy and cherished memory that can be her safe place and would draw her back to reality. To impel her to find a way back from ‘Vecna’s curse’, her friends play her favourite song – Running’ up that hill by British alt-pop musician Kate Bush – on loop.
_{source: The Indian Express}

I'll leave you with that song. These three are just a few examples of Kate Bush's incredible musical and vocal talent, and she's always lived a rather secluded life. She's only done a single life tour, "The Tour of Life," which ran for six weeks in April and May 1979, covering Britain and mainland Europe. I was only 11 years old then, too young to attend and I hadn't even discovered her yet. I hope this little trip down my memory lane has helped some of you discover or rediscover this 1980s angel.

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