THE KICK INSIDE: An Erotic Attachment...The Kick Inside album is boldly sexual. Moving captures the erotic fascination between strangers, between stage-star and fan, "the dancer and the watcher in harmony like lovers" (
Sounds, 1980).
The Saxophone Song continues the erotic experience: "a sensuous shining man being taken over by the instrument... with nobody listening except me in a corner... I'm very basic. I wasn't thinking of it as phallic when I wrote the song, but I do now when I see a sax player" (KT;
Sounds, 1980). It's like swimming with dolphins, with whales, with KaTe with Freud... And
Strange Phenomena taps into Freud's concept of The Uncanny: an instance where something can be familiar, yet foreign at the same time, resulting in a feeling of it being uncomfortably strange (here Freud prefigures the concept that Jung would later call "synchronicity").
She had insisted that
Wuthering Heights be the first single, as much for business reasons as artistic ones.
"I felt that to actually get your name anywhere, you've got to do something that is unusual, because there's so much good music around and it's all in a similar vein. It was, musically, for me, one of my strongest songs. It had the high pitch and it also had a very English story-line which everyone would know because it was a classic book... I so want
The Man With the Child In His Eyes to do well. I'd like people to listen to it as a songwriting song, as opposed to something weird, which was the reaction to
Wuthering Heights." (
Melody Maker, 1978).
The Man With The Child In His Eyes seemingly captures an erotic attachment between a fascinating young girl and a very understanding adult man, telling her about the sea. The song could even be a disturbing roleplay on
pederasty, that aristocratic moral and educational institution of ancient Greece.
The eerily-pitched vocal on
Wuthering Heights constantly turns in on itself to mirror the obsessive eroticism of desire. It is wraithlike in its high register, and childlike in its pleading cry to be recognised.
"Throughout her career, Kate Bush has explored and celebrated female archetypes and iconography, scouring mythology, history, literature, Arthurian legend and Jungian psychology for provisional identities, and using femininity as a cipher of masks and poses. As Joy Press observes, Bush has discovered that she has her own turmoil, her own demons and even her own version of the Dionysian fire that characterises rock rebellion and its relationship to the Romantic" (Whiteley, 2005).
The B-side to
The Kick Inside continues the fascination with adolescent sex. The pounding piano on
Feel It stiffens the hairs and erects the nipples, just like
that poster! Kate Bush performs the song alone, using the voice of a little girl and sounding too young to have had any sexual experience (Frith, 2007). Just lust.
Oh To Be in Love exploits an exploited situation and leaves the protagonist asking a lot of questions.
L'Amour Looks Something Like You continues to shine on the wine of desire. Indeed, a lot of wine seems to have been drunk while writing these songs! Her "dying for you just to touch me" echoes
Moving's "Touch me, hold me. How my open arms ache! Try to fall for me". The songs bring spice long before the Spice Girls!
Them Heavy People is like a wake up call, opening the doorways to NFE, TD, HOL, etc. But as the album closes, the penultimate and ultimate tracks return to that room in KaTe's mind...
Lost in your men and the games you play...Room For the Life offers a feminist take on the womb as power,
a womb of her own... French feminist Simone De Beauvoir observed in her landmark 1950s book,
The Second Sex, "Women who are primarily interested in pleasing men . . . are distressed to see themselves deformed, disfigured. . . Pregnancy seems to them no enrichment, but a diminution of the ego." The early twentieth-century dancer Isadora Duncan's account of her pregnancy exemplified de Beauvoir's claim: "The child asserted itself more and more. It was strange to see my beautiful marble body softened and stretched and deformed. . . . More and more my lovely body bulged under my astonished gaze . . . Where was my lovely, youthful Naiad form? Where my ambition? My fame? I felt miserable and defeated."
But KaTe's
Womb For the Life chorus resists identifying with either the male norm or the hard-lined second wave feminist norm. As Daphne de Jong stated in 'Legal Abortion Exploits Women': "The womb is not the be-all and end-all of women's existence. But it is the physical center of her sexual identity, which is an important aspect of her self-image and personality. To reject its function, or to regard it as a handicap, a danger or a nuisance, is to reject a vital part of her own personhood. Every woman need not be a mother, but unless every woman can identify with the potential motherhood of all women, no equality is possible. American Negroes gained nothing by straightening their kinky hair and aping the white middle class. Equality began to become a reality only when they insisted on acceptance of their different qualities - 'Black is Beautiful.'"
KaTe celebrates the
Girl Power to be mined from the indisputable life-producing difference between male and female.
Room For the Life is pro-life and, like the album as a whole, welcomes the Age of Single Mothers and Easy Couplings.
I ASKED her whether she thought of her music as being distinctively female -- taking 'Room For The Life' from 'The Kick Inside' an example.
KaTe: "People thought that song was feminist which disappointed me. It was actually saying we should go a bit easier on men because we are the ones with survival inside us, we carry the next generation, we have the will to keep going, we keep bouncing back. I don't know it that's anti-liberationist but I wouldn't say femininity was very strong in my songs. I've always felt there was something lacking in my feminine ... role, do I mean? Being brought up with two brothers I'd sit philosophising with them while my girlfriends wanted to talk about clothes and food. Maybe it's the male energy to be the hunter and I feel I have that in me" (
Sounds, 1980).
KaTe's early years sound like the Marxist utopia, where the individual would at last be able to "hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner... without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic [philosopher]" (
German Ideology, 1846). And the
Room For The Life philosophy tells women not to pander to the male norm or lose themselves competing in male terms, but to find empowerment from within, from being woman - 'Woman is Beautiful'!
"I think it's awful what's happening to people's sense of their own sexuality. Women are made to feel awkward about expressing themselves as women in a man's world, so, subconsciously, a lot of the time, they're behaving like men because they don't know how strong they're supposed to be. Then again, women's lib has left men in a lot of areas where they don't know how to behave in case they get called sexist, a pig, or whatever. We are different, and we should be helping each other. Unfortunately there was such a lot of shit to get through that it was a battle, but I don't think it need be... I must say, for me, the comedy in this country has been really educational. You know, Ben Elton and The Comic Strip--all those people you can't really call alternative comedians anymore because they've become mainstream. I think they've really done a lot to stop it being fashionable to be humorous with sexist overtones. It used to be very hip to make fun of women. Old comedy was all about treating women as a threat and, therefore, making fun of them. And I think they've really changed a lot of that. They've done so much for men and women because now, in most circles, among people our age, if you make a sexist joke, it's really considered tasteless. I think that's a fantastic step forward. And to see people like Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders out there doing comedy being women as women is brilliant. They're just out there doing it and, the more women can be strong enough to do that, the more it'll help everybody. It used to really scare me the way women were portrayed in comedy, and the way they behaved: either they were bitching off other women and being sexist themselves, or they were allowing themselves to be used as sex objects, either positively or negatively--they were either very beautiful or very stereotypically ugly. Women would just be batted around from these extremes, but that hold's been broken now and, as comedy's so much part of our nature in this country, so much a part of our roots, to break old things like that is an incredible step" (
Melody Maker, 1989).
The Kick Inside song also tackles pregnancy. But of the perverse kind. Indeed,
The Kick Inside song brings out another theme of
The Kick Inside album, that of polymorphous perversity. The moving stranger, the saxophonist's instrument, the man with the child in his eyes, her brother... all are capable of arousing the protagonist's sexual curiosity.
Polymorphous perverse is a psychoanalytic term for human ability to gain sexual gratification outside socially normative sexual behaviors. Sigmund Freud used this term to describe the normal sexual disposition of humans from infancy to about age five. For Freud, "perversion" is a non-judgmental term. He used it to designate behavior outside socially acceptable norms.
Freud theorized that humans are born with unfocused sexual libidinal drives, deriving sexual pleasure from any part of the body. The objects and modes of sexual satisfaction are multifarious, directed at every object that might provide pleasure. Polymorphous perverse sexuality continues from infancy through about age five, progressing through three distinct developmental stages: the oral stage, anal stage, and phallic stage. Only in subsequent developmental stages do children learn to constrain sexual drives to socially accepted norms, culminating in adult heterosexual behavior focused on the genitals and reproduction. Lacking knowledge that certain drives are forbidden, the polymorphously perverse child seeks sexual gratification wherever it occurs. Freud taught that during this stage of undifferentiated impulse for sexual pleasure, incestuous and bisexual urges are normal. Education however quickly suppresses the polymorphous possibilities for sexual gratification in the child, eventually leading, through repression, to an amnesia about such primitive desires. However, some adults retain such polymorphous perversity:
ALVY: You are extremely sexy.
ANNIE: No, I'm not.
ALVY: Unbelievably sexy. Yes, you are. Because ... you know what you are? You're-you're polymorphously perverse.
ANNIE: Well, what does-what does that mean? I don't know what that is.
ALVY: Uh ... uh, you're-you're exceptional in bed because you got -you get pleasure in every part of your body when I touch you.
ANNIE: Ooooh!
~ Annie Hall (Woody Allen, 1977).www.youtube.com/watch?v=BayFaUXwrAk2:27-3:19...The Sensual World is, according to Kate, something of a departure of her in that besides being her most personal, it's also her most "female" album. What does she mean by that?
KaTe: "Well, I'm not sure what I mean, except that's how it feels to me," she laughs. "I suppose what I'm trying to say is that some of the songs feel like I'm writing them as a female, which is not necessarily something I've felt strongly before" (
Music Express, 1990).
The Sensual World is, according to KaTe, her most "female" album. But
The Kick Inside is also a very "female" album. And on TKI, KaTe said: "the first album is very much like a diary of me at that time" (
ZigZag, 1980). I guess you could say that TKI is the child and TSW is the woman in those eyes you get hung up about...
Refs:Daily Mail,
"How the Spice Girls have killed feminism, subverted morality and embarassed us all", by Fay Weldon, 7 Dec 2007
de Jong, Daphne, "Feminism and Abortion",
Sisterlife, Spring 1986, p. 5.
Melody Maker,
"The Kick Outside", by Harry Doherty, June 3, 1978
Melody Maker,
"The Language of Love", Steve Sutherland, October 21, 1989
Music Express,
"Woman's Work", by Mary Dickie, Jan. 1990
Sounds,
"Labushka", by Phil Sutcliffe, August 30, 1980
ZigZag,
"Fire in the Bush", by Kris Needs, 1980(?)
Whiteley:
"Too Much Too Young: Popular Music, Age, and Gender" (2005)
Frith:
"Taking Popular Music Seriously" (2007)