Torn asunder:
Love, nature and surrender through symbolic images of gender in
Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love music video
From the very moment I was laid against the wall by Kate Bush’s alchemy of unabashed passion, surrealism, and unexpected lyrical subject matters, I was a devoted fan. That she was a complete auteur not only in lyrics but music production further certified my reverence. As a hermitted bedroom dreamer, my teenage years of angsty discomfort and fantasies took flight within the magic and arcane wisdom of Kate Bush’s universe.
Though one would think you’d exhaust the oeuvre of an artist’s output after so many years, there is always more to discover in the deep layers of her visual, lyrical, and instrumental work, some treasures of which I’m only accessing now viewing it within a new lens of contemporary wrangles and discourses.
From suggestions of homoerotic vanity on In Search of Peter Pan (“Dennis loves to look in the mirror, he tells me that he is beautiful”) under a male persona, to the yearning voyeurism of Kashka From Baghdad, spying on two homosexual lovers and seeing the happiness she (or rather her character) lacks in spite of social taboo, and the ambiguous suggestions of feminine within masculine in Eat The Music (“does he conceal what he really feels? Oh he’s a woman at heart, gotta love him for that / not only women bleed”) there is a lot of rather surprising gender play (and dare I say — even queerness) in her work, that in youth I heard with curiosity but perhaps not full cerebral, though probably instinctual, understanding — if such full understanding is ever possible or desirable. It is all the more exhilarating when through the myriad of interviews I’ve scoured online, I have rarely heard her comment on such topics as gender issues. Of course waves of gender subversion in music come in and out — notably with the early 70s glam rock performers like Bowie, Marc Bolan and Bryan Ferry, though their fragrance and flamboyance were somewhat sobered in heterosexual appeal, and such theatrics were considered fine for the stage if not every day life (1). Kate — both a beguiled fan of Bowie’s and in fact shared dance and mime tuition under the same legendary thespian, Lindsay Kemp — emerged in the period after the glam rockers, and in the middle of the also Bowie-galvanised, gender fluid new romantics, yet was not part of either movements. But where many musicians have peacocked subversive visual gender signifiers, Kate explicit lyrically and even taboo. Mentions of “hitting the vaseline” in Wow, (a then-known reference about gay men lubricating for anal intercourse) were certainly startling for a 20 year old pop star in 1979 (2), let alone stories of incest and suicide on The Kick Inside that seem to have gone relatively unquestioned.
Kate never explains her work too cerebrally anyway (for your work to simultaneously remain multi-layered and complex whilst affecting, yet not have to explain it too much, is something to strive for and that modern conceptual artists should learn from).
Not only does Kate occasionally take on male pronouns in her narratives as in Peter Pan, but has said in interviews that she often imagines herself as a man when writing (3) —
"When I'm at the piano writing a song, I like to think I'm a man…… most male music -- not all of it, but the good stuff -- really lays it on you. It's like an interrogation. It really puts you against the wall, and that's what I'd like to do. I'd like my music to intrude…..I think that anything you do that you believe in, you should club people over the head with it…. Patti Smith does, but that's because she takes a male attitude. I'm not really aware of it as a male attitude. I just think I identify more with male musicians than female musicians, because I tend to think of female musicians as...ah... females. It's hard to explain. I'd just rather be a male songwriter than a female."
That Kate finds it hard to tangibly explain suggests the feeling stems from an energetic, mysterious, subjective force (just as the “feeling” of gender is rather mysterious and spiritual), rather than conscious political gesture. Kate’s lack of talking elsewhere on this allows us only to speculate, but it is interesting to note before considering the themes of gender, strife and aspiration in the Hounds of Love period.
And sometimes, the character in the song simply demands for a gender switch (playing the son of Wilhem Riech in Cloudbusting, or astronaut in her cover of Elton John’s Rocket Man). Just as great theatre actors have always done— disregarding any such quality of yourself as gender to completely become and be possessed by another, it is this dedication to immersing yourself in the body of the character and forgoing yourself that can break boundaries, and shed light on the concealed and unadmitted aspects of the self.
The music videos for both Running Up That Hill and Hounds of Love (both of which Kate conceptualised, the latter she fully directed) present a passionate and conflicted interplay between male and female. Running Up That Hill asks to make “a deal with god, and get him to swap our places” for a literal transgender experience, in the hope that by inhabiting the body of the lover they could gain deeper understanding, and resolve eternal conflicts that arise from misunderstandings. “If I only could…..” Kate wishes — which may read in written text as anguished futility, but the passion of Kate’s voice lifts it into optimism and aspiration. A spirited desire to break the boundaries of the body.
That this imagery appears in both pieces suggests it was a subject significantly stirring Kate in this period (artistically or personally — again, Kate’s non-divulgence to tabloids can only leave us to speculate and gives great mystery to her work). In this piece specifically, I want to talk about the feral passion of the latter music video — Hounds of Love — and its ambiguous (and possibly shocking) imagery of control and consent, and symbolic use of gender.
As is the case with much art-making, many things are made intuitively and not consciously intended (and Kate herself has not talked much on the video for us to even know what was and what was not consciously intended). Thus, some of the analysis can reach only as far as conjecture. One sometimes finds symbols appear in a coincidental, unplanned fashion, perhaps in the manner of Carl Jung’s notion of “synchronicity”.
Consent, requiring permission, and respect for someone’s choices and agency, are human rights and necessities for a civilised, empathetic society.
But Hounds of Love dramatises the underlying truth that it is messy business, and that hands on bars are always at risk of flying off — precisely because love (and nature) happen to us with no regard (or disregard) for such a fine tuned human concept as our consent. It overcomes us, and if we deem the love or desire too dangerous, impractical or inappropriate (obstructing career or social life for example), we must try to hold back the storm through our own force of will, as we grasp to maintain our foothold in the social and technological world. (“It’s in the trees, it’s coming !”)
On contemplation of all these subjects through a new looking glass, I instantly recalled the energetic and provocative writer Camille Paglia (whom I have become a great admirer of in recent years). She has written on feminism, sexual consent, and very breathtakingly on the power of nature throbbing against the dam of social order. I cannot help but evoke a somewhat Paglia-like lens of analysis for this music video that seems to so perfectly visualise the subjects Paglia has written about; as I watch Hounds of Love unfold it is almost as if I can finally access symbols that mystified me now with a new analytical toolkit.
But where Paglia shocks due to proscribing a methodology around consent (emphasising a woman’s need for caution as simply pragmatic, which one could argue alleviates perpetrators of blame or accountability), Kate simply presents, showing the chaos in human relationships driven by our turbulent emotional life; that cruelty or coerciveness can also be entangled with pleasure and passion (for we are not foolproof, infallibly cold, perfectly kind machines, and are all guilty of even unwitting cruelty or sadism at some point in our lives), through the very subjective and personal mode of art without moral judgement.
As a teenager, I didn’t know why exactly the video began with Kate dressed as some kind of business woman, journalist or detective against a backdrop of pumping machines, but I was still dazzled (in fact, the video bases its surface aesthetic on Alfred Hitchcock’s spy thriller The 39 Steps).
The video begins with Kate as career woman, personifying wilfulness, agency and exercising control. There is a portrait of feminist ideal in her costuming and posture, handling her documents with poise. But also how the advent of technology has facilitated her liberation as a woman (represented by the pumping machine). Technology such as birth control and contraceptives, allowed for more sexual freedom outside child rearing and acted in tandem with feminist activism challenging the attitudes formed before such inventions, that were now antiquated (though still largely prevailing) in this new social and technological era-- in Western configurations of gender anyway. The mechanical pumping machine is highly visceral, setting the scene and remaining both its backdrop and galvaniser; it is the mechanism that facilitates this mode of Kate as modern career woman and somewhat liberates her from nature’s tyrannical control. But Kate’s clothing and persona here is almost drag-like; a caricature of a high flying woman in power; campy and put-on.
One could read this as a controversial statement that it is not a woman’s nature to be in the career world and that she has to play a masculine role almost (in drag). Since the corporate career system was created patriarchally and operates for optimal production that men can slavishly meet, it is true that many women’s biology can uproot their own hard-won control, and leave them in a precarious position in the inhospitable career world.
Whilst it treads on possible accusations of a sexist representation— in fact I believe many women’s endangered position due to biology possibly uprooting them in the male-oriented system, Kate utilises as a good metaphor for any gender’s (any human’s) potential to lose social control, and be dragged under into the current of destiny and nature; universal examples being ageing and no longer being able to physically perform, disease atrophying the body, hormones augmenting moods.
The wind rattles through her hair and the documents that she is engrossed in, like an ominous warning of inevitability and of natural destiny. Human bureaucracy is a feeble opponent against the ultimate force of nature that can so easily disrupt us.
Love and desire happen to you, like a gust of wind. You do not choose to fall in love or to be aroused.
And in this we see the very crux of the song — to run from the hounds of love. Hounds (love, nature) chase, ravage, and tear to shreds the orderly world you curate around yourself— as not only does the irrational passion of your own ravenous being gather momentum and derail the ordered, but so too do your lover’s hounds encroach, running wild among your own (and yours among theirs).
We see the “totalitarian” (as Paglia would say), all consuming force of love that threatens to steal her back to the dominion of nature in the physicality of the man that appears — his brow bones are heavy and imposing. His passion is unstoppable. His stare is cool, intense, and single minded — almost psychopathic: nature holds no bars and is neither sympathetic nor sadistic, it simply is. He will hound her. He symbolises the unstoppable and nonconsensual nature of love and lust, not between two humans who must negotiate and mediate their feelings, but between the human and the feeling itself.
The two male accomplices either side of him, agents of the social order, siese him in their grasp, guarding the temperamental and unpredictable natural force.
He turns back around for one last stare as if to say “I won’t stop”. He cannot be subdued or tamed. And Kate, suddenly betraying her business wear and overdressed in it, is glassy eyed. She has stared into the abyss of love and nature that is dangerous and wild and that we shield ourselves from— but that ultimately make us feel alive; that make clear to us what it is to be human; that the dark chaotic forces are bound up with the good, the ecstatic, the pleasurable, the sublime. The dark side is part of our very humanity— our savage animal being that we keep on a lead. The heart suddenly beats apparent. She is frozen and enchanted by this recognition of the dark animalism that has always been there dormant and part of her own nature, even as they take him away to protect her, breathing deeply under the shackling uniform of formal work clothing. The social workforce persona now seems silly and fragile; its false confidence and complacency ruptured, faltering now on shaky grounds.
Ever unstoppable, love and nature, a/k/a the dark heavy brow boned man, break free and steal Kate from the regimented world into the abyss. The two agents of social order chase after, and a crowd of people follow to watch this explosion of natural forces, just as people always gather in the public (or online) square, to voyeuristically witness the violent burst of repressed nature (e.g someone having a public outburst/a melodramatic display by lovers) wetting covert sadistic appetites perhaps, or reminding ourselves of the very beastly parts that comprise our humanity.
He pulls her through desolate and stark woods; the architecture of her carefully constructed beehive hairstyle for sophistication and formality has been ravaged and falls to pieces (order and control torn asunder) into flowing femininity.
She is pulled along and grabs for trees. He wraps a coat around her in a forced and domineering chivalry; she resists in a baffled and unyielding manner at his archaically paternalistic gesture and lets the coat fall off her — she never asked for this. She is kidnapped, but as abductee wavers between strong and resistant— grasping for trees to stop the pull, rejecting the coat — and surrendering to being swept along. Resisting a feeling often builds up its momentum with even greater gusto; temptation, desire, or ejaculation. The bubbling pot of sexuality is that which is suppressed in waking life; like a body of water will find a release somewhere. Holding your finger on the tap’s nozzle will either make it spray outwards or tight enough, burst the piping. The repressed unconscious erupts through sexual desire.
On arrival to a party, a confrontation with ritual paganism? They resume into a pairing of social normalcy and decorum; though Kate looks shaken and despondent, and she is now subjugated into a passive role. Forced through pomp and circumstance (as many women have been through history) the stormy man forcefully pulls her round so a partying man can heedlessly blow a party popper in her face. The people gather to make an archway for Kate and the stormy man to go under. The ceremony looks betrothed. She is unwilling and put upon, and he is in new territories too looking mildly confused (yet still wilful); nature’s process is often discombobulated in the social world. Just as someone undomesticated by human customs may look bewildered, shy and hesitant.
Hounds of Love does tread a fine line between simply metaphor and the interplay that has been and is often true between patriarchal male control and women. But it is refreshing, as whilst contemporary progressives argue for a utopian vision of love, gender equality and polyamory that they think is an easily achieved no-brainer, and conservative ones seem happy to enforce a patriarchal status quo as a one-size-fits-all without trouble— Hounds of Love transgresses both in its portrait of ambiguous truths, showing the altogether allure, pleasure, danger and conflict of two identities in sexual and romantic union. The flux of synergy/harmony and chaos/pain from two poles that create all life.
In a world that argues for a case, pure portraiture is both refreshing and shocking. Kate has said many times in interviews about her songwriting that when she takes on a role, she fully becomes that role without judgement of the characters. Much art and music in the modern era has become too infected with politics and making a political statement in a heavy handed way. Critique based on political or moral views of characters puts a blanket over them and suffocates the ambiguity and insights that Kate is able to access in her approach, by fully taking on the character like possession. As is the case with her most famed debut, Wuthering Heights, based on the Emily Bronte novel, where she fully invests herself in becoming the hot-headed, vengeful, possessive and pining ghost of Catherine Earnshaw.
The agents of social control return. But now, Kate fears them coming, even after abduction, resistance and being emotionally shaken. In fact, she wades through the circus of partying to find him. Is love like Stockholm syndrome?
“Oh here I go, don’t let me go, hold me down” Kate wills. At once she evokes that the breaking of your control and surrender can too be pleasurable or transformative, though laced with danger. “Oh here I go” is almost in third person— knowing that it is your body that is going to go, regardless of you— another force of its own.
Stormy nature and social control stand together. The agents of social control are willing to allow a mediated encounter with the storm of nature — i.e love through the institution of marriage or social formations of human relationships.
He offers out to her the chance to be bound by handcuffs: love binds you. You are slave to it once you have been bitten and the thrilling waves of drama, passion, chaos, fear, uncertainty, ecstasy and the sublime — all spectrums of love’s blinding light — unfurl within you. The agents of social order look on to make sure the passion is kept in order through ceremony.
She finally surrenders, as is usually inevitable, to the feelings summoned within her that are sensational yet pose danger. “Take your shoes off, and throw them in the lake”. Running wild; barefoot in the exhilarating chaos of nature. Giving into love.
And at the end, she is the one pulling him.
Though Hounds of Love does present a male and female character in imagery one may find rather archetypally gendered, I feel I must stress to say in this time of heavily politicised analysis — it is neither endorsement nor critique; just as your own very dream is neither endorsement nor critique, nor moral, but a psychedelic tapestry of symbolic images; a surreal dance of the unconscious that bleeds all elements of life— joyous, heart-wrenching, perverse, pleasurable, despicable, beautiful, sublime — into its composition.
In fact it one way it is less stereotypically gendered: the metaphysical norm in most mythology is that woman stands for nature and man stands for society. But in Hounds of Love, the man is the agent of nature (metaphysically female), and Kate is the agent of society (metaphysically male). A metaphysical sex change piece? It reflects the shifted poles available due to our technology and flight from nature.
But perhaps too in fact, they act as each other’s returners. The male character will return the woman to nature, and Kate at the end, pulling the man, takes on again her role as nature and begins pulling the man — and returns him to society.
Women contain the system of creation within them, that they keep at bay to work in the modern industrial structure and transcend nature’s laws and trappings. And men contain the seed that may eventually return them. It is this primal beauty and darkness that Kate is transfixed by with fear and allure when she first sees him and the wind forewarns her.
Like Carl Jung’s conceptions of the anima and animus (a man’s inner feminine, and a woman’s inner masculine respectively), two opposites have elements of each other within them. Though we all sit along a spectrum of gender, without the freedom that technology affords us, nature often does force us into practical and pragmatic roles as we focus our energies into battling the harsh elements and other ferociously competing animal species; whilst other qualities of the spirit must go unexpressed; sublimated. But this very spiritual confinement and unease is what Kate seems to be affected by and addressing in this period of her work.
As in the desperate plea in Running Up That Hill to swap genders, Hounds of Love, the single that followed it, fully consummates the incantation of the previous song (“come on baby, come on darling, let’s exchange the experience”). It is the thematic sequel and lives out the fantasy in a passionate mirage of chaos, metaphysical symbolisms of gender, conflict, and the wilful spirit that sometimes cannot bear to live in the containment of our vessels.
The rest of the Hounds of Love album ventures into more explicit and psychedelic spiritualism in its second conceptual side — The Ninth Wave, which takes us on a woman’s night in the water and a literal battle with nature in her struggle not to drown, through her various hallucinations — Waking The Witch imagining accusations of witchcraft and burning at the stake; Watching You Without Me outer body experience; Jig of Life a confrontation with the future self that will cease to be if present drowns; and finally The Morning Fog, with its heavenly dew, that could be interpreted as either that she did drown and found heavenly transcendence, or that she survived with a newfound appreciation of life’s beauty and ephemeralness.
Kate’s work often presents not a stance but the true dark ambiguities of life ever-present; that charm and afflict us eternally on the physical plane, whist we negotiate deals between the body, and the spiritual self.
(1) Interview with Princess Julia on glam rock and new romanticism
(2) Interview with John Sizzle on hearing the lyrics “hitting the vaseline” in the 70s on Wow
(3) Interview with Bush
http://gaffa.org/reaching/i78_mm2.html
Melody Maker - "The Kick Outside" by Harry Doherty - June 3, 1978
Thank you to Drew Jerrison (otherwise known as Stella Meltdown, my witchy and lusty drag queen partner in crime) of Profile Books for his proof read; and Tom Bland— magical poet and friend for encouraging and advising me.
For the introduction to the essay, thank you --
To John Sizzle, a brilliant queer cultural historian, for his 10-year-old recollection of Wow, as well as tales of being curb crawled as a young twink holding a cellophane wrapped Hounds of Love vinyl, which unfortunately could not make this essay!
And Princess Julia — legendary DJ, one of the original BLITZ kids, and our magnificent figure of the scene— for recalling her impression of Kate Bush, the glam movement, and the shock of Bowie awakening young misfit minds that would soon after galvanise the new romantic movement.