The first few seconds of the video are usually enough to stun the
classroom into silence. Some students will shift uncomfortably in their
seats. Some may be counting the minutes until this digression ends. Some
will laugh. One or two may be transfixed. One might even be
transformed.
On the screen in the front of the classroom, a teenage Kate Bush
stares goggle-eyed, her arms like wings. She dances. She cartwheels. She
sings, in a high trilling voice, “Heathcliff, it’s me! I’m Kathy!”
I teach literature and creative writing at a small college in New England, and every time I’ve taught Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, I show the video for Kate Bush’s 1978 song of the same name (there are two versions: one features Bush indoors in a white dress, another has her outdoors in a red dress).
The video is more than a digression—and more, I hope, than a
professor’s attempt to impress his musical tastes on his justifiably
skeptical students. But if every syllabus participates in the
construction of a canon, and in doing so defines the terms of cultural
literacy, then I want my students to participate in building a culture
that highly values Emily Bronte and Kate Bush, and that
recognizes the ways in which Bush has spent decades defining a space for
women artists as visionary creators.
I’m not alone in hearing echoes of Kate Bush’s voice echoing across
the culture. Though she has always been much better known in the UK, her
American fans make up in ardor what they lack in numbers. To celebrate
the November release of a career-spanning Rhino Records boxed set, Margaret Talbot unpacked her decades-long connection to the songs of Kate Bush, whom she identifies as a forerunner to Perfume Genius, St. Vincent, and Mitski. Earlier in the year, Wesley Morris lovingly deconstructed the use of “Running Up That Hill” in the FX series Pose. ... [mehr] https://lithub.com/on-kate-bushs-radical-interpretation-of-wuthering-heights/
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