FEATURE:
“I Press Execute”
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush captured in 1989 by Guido Harari
Kate Bush’s Deeper Understanding
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I have been focusing on album anniversaries…
for the past few weeks, so I am changing tact and I am writing about one of Kate Bush’s best-loved songs – and one I have not really talked about over the years! When it comes to Bush’s albums, I am well-versed in her earlier stuff, but there are gaps in my knowledge when we talk about albums like The Sensual World. I am listening to The Sensual World a lot more now, but it is still an album that is a little fresh in some places, in so much as I have not heard the songs for a while. Deeper Understanding is a song that has quite a long and interesting history. The song originally appeared on The Sensual World in 1989, and it was reworked in 2011 for Director’s Cut. One reason why Deeper Understanding is so interesting is that, back in 1989, the song discussed how technology was playing a huge role and how it was sort of taking over in terms of communication. Kate Bush herself discussed the roots of the song:
“This is about people... well, about the modern situation, where more and more people are having less contact with human beings. We spend all day with machines; all night with machines. You know, all day, you're on the phone, all night you're watching telly. Press a button, this happens. You can get your shopping from the Ceefax! It's like this long chain of machines that actually stop you going out into the world. It's like more and more humans are becoming isolated and contained in their homes.
And this is the idea of someone who spends all their time with their computer and, like a lot of people, they spend an obsessive amount of time with their computer. People really build up heavy relationships with their computers! And this person sees an ad in a magazine for a new program: a special program that's for lonely people, lost people. So this buff sends off for it, gets it, puts it in their computer and then like , it turns into this big voice that's saying to them, "Look, I know that you're not very happy, and I can offer you love: I'm her to love you. I love you!" And it's the idea of a divine energy coming through the least expected thing. For me, when I think of computers, it's such a cold contact and yet, at the same time, I really believe that computers could be a tremendous way for us to look at ourselves in a very spiritual way because I think computers could teach us more about ourselves than we've been able to look at, so far. I think there's a large part of us that is like a computer. I think in some ways, there's a lot of natural processes that are like programs... do you know what I mean? And I think that, more and more, the more we get into computers and science like that, the more we're going to open up our spirituality.
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in the studio in 1985/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush (from the book, Kate: Inside the Rainbow)
And it was the idea of this that this... the last place you would expect to find love, you know, real love, is from a computer and, you know, this is almost like the voice of angels speaking to this person, saying they've come to save them: "Look, we're here, we love you, we're here to love you!" And it's just too much, really, because this is just a mere human being and they're being sucked into the machine and they have to be rescurom it. And all they want is that, because this is "real" contact. (Roger Scott, BBC Radio 1 interview, 14 October 1989)”.
There are these artists, like David Bowie and Kate Bush, who seem to predict the future and really had their finger on the pulse! Bowie was on Newsnight in 1999 and he told Jeremy Paxman how the Internet was going to be more powerful than we could ever imagine, and it was going to revolutionise the way people communicate. Paxman sort of scoffed and thought he was a bit crazy, but Bowie was right! Even back in 1999, there were signs that the Internet was a huge thing, but I was not aware then that it would take over. A decade before Bowie’s prediction, Bush would have been aware of the importance of computers and, whilst they were pretty basic and clunky, she knew that something was happening and that humans were turning to machines for things that they could not have foreseen or imagined years before!
In a feature from 2015, The A.V. Club talked about how Kate Bush, in a way, foresaw the Internet’s arrival and impact:
“Al Gore gets a lot of flack for saying he invented the internet, because everybody knows it was actually Kate Bush. (To be fair, Gore never made that exact claim to begin with—just something close—but that’s beside the point.) First released on her 1989 album The Sensual World, “Deeper Understanding” tells the story of a lonely person‘s love affair with their computer, which they use as a substitute for the family to whom they no longer feel connected. “As the people here grow colder / I turn to my computer / And spend my evenings with it / Like a friend,” Bush sings, a sentiment that should ring true with anyone who’s spent a lonesome, possibly intoxicated evening watching other people’s engagements and birthday parties tick by on Facebook. (So, everyone.)“.
I think Deeper Understanding sounds great on The Sensual World. Kate Bush was producing her own albums, and I think The Sensual World was the last album for a while where the sound is amazing and you pick up a lot of emotion and natural strength from the songs. The Red Shoes in 1993 is a slightly more artificial and compressed sound, and Bush would take songs from both albums – including Deeper Understanding – and redo them on Director’s Cut.
Deeper Understanding opens the second side of The Sensual World, and it is the side that would work its way to This Woman’s Work – perhaps the best-known and adored track from the whole album. Bush shows her constant diversity and flexibility in terms of song inspiration and themes, and I am not sure that Deeper Understanding translated too well to Director’s Cut. Given that, in 2011, social media and the Internet was universal and dominant, the song did not carry as much weight as it did back in 1989! I like the effects and vocals on the original. The 2011 re-record has a more robotic and machine-like ghostliness (voiced by her young son, Bertie), and it is definitely heavier on Director’s Cut compared to The Sensual World. Regarding the rebooted Deeper Understanding, Michael Cragg wrote in The Guardian (in 2011):
"The 2011 retwizzle is two minutes longer, seems to have a new vocal and, naturally for the music climate of today, a lot of vocal processing and vocoder. The chorus is much more explicitly meant to be a conversation between human and computer: "I bring you love and deeper understanding" croons the machine like a malfunctioning ZX Spectrum. It's not a disaster, in fact once you get used to the vocals it's still a great Kate Bush track, but if revisiting songs is going to mean adding an extra minute and a half of harmonica solos to each one then we may have problems." The New Yorker added: "Where the original chattered and cracked, this version susurrates and warps, a bit more like life online".
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush captured in 1989 by Guido Harari
I do like that Director’s Cut exists, as it allowed Bush the chance to rework songs that she felt lacked something on the original albums. Even though she produced the albums she is slightly unhappy with, there might have been suggestions from the record company regarding sound and recording, or Bush might have felt rushed or that, in hindsight, she could have done things differently. I think only Top of the City (originally on The Red Shoes) sounds better in its new form. The remainder of the album is interesting, but Deeper Understanding was always going to be a challenge in terms of its impact and importance today. As we are more immersed in technology now than in 1989, I guess the prophecy of the lyrics is less eye-opening, and some of the computer sounds are pre-broadband and have quite an aged and nostalgic feel – whether that was the vibe Bush was going for?! On Deeper Understanding – The Sensual World version -, there is a definite warmth and beauty, but the lyrics point at something quite sad and dark. One can almost hear Bush fading away and grasping for some real connection, as she herself is slipping into the machine. As a producer who had a love of experimentation and was used to using an array of technologies in the studio, she herself must have been conscious of her own reliance on computers and, ironically, she may have felt that the 1989 version sounded a bit unnatural or overly-worked – keen to strip it down and let it breathe in 2011!
I want to end with an interesting feature from 2010 that discussed Deeper Understanding’s lyrical meanings:
“Reducing any Kate Bush song to a descriptor as simple as “bleak” is, of course, kind of dumb. Bush has always packed dizzying dimensions of nuance and emotion—and sometimes a subtle irony—into her songs. All of these qualities intertwine complexly throughout “Deeper Understanding.” Over a mechanistic, precisely calibrated opening, Bush whispers as if in the throes of infatuation: “As the people here grow colder, I turn to my computer / And spend my evenings with it like a friend / I was loading a new program I had ordered from a magazine / ‘Are you lonely, are you lost? This voice console is a must.’ / I press ’execute.’”
The levels of loss and meaning she sinks into the one word, “execute,” the terrifying yet exhilarating finality of it, is just one of many moments of the song’s hushed genius. And the irony Bush employs is far beyond satire or social commentary. Dwelling magically within, around, and above her dual subjects—that is, a girl and her desktop—she sings, “Well I’ve never felt such pleasure / Nothing else seemed to matter / I neglected my bodily needs / I did not eat, I did not sleep / The intensity increasing / ‘Til my family found me and intervened.” Bush’s character-in-songs bears her inhuman romantic interface with a detachment that underscores her paradoxical reality: Only an inanimate object can move her.
As poignant and breathtaking as “Deeper Understanding” was when it was released, it’s taken on a slightly different tone now that the Internet has become, quite literally, many people’s best friend—a place we comb daily for truth, companionship, and insight, all the while acutely aware that staring at a screen for hours on end is a pretty perverse way to go about it. Funny enough, Bush did revisit the themes of “Deeper Understanding” during the nascent Internet Age. But she didn’t do it alone. She contributed backing vocals to Prince’s 1996 song “My Computer,” a song whose melancholy if playful scenario (“I scan my computer, looking for a site / Somebody to talk to, funny and bright”) echoes Bush’s own apprehension and wonder—a paralyzing awe in the face of this brave new world in which we all, quite literally, withdraw in order to connect”.
Through investigating Deeper Understanding, I have spent more time connecting with The Sensual World and other songs on the album. In the coming weeks, I will spotlight one or two other songs from the record – including This Woman’s Work, and Love and Anger -, and, in the process, turn people onto an album that they might not have been aware of. It is spooky to think how forward-thinking and aware Kate Bush was in 1989! Even she could not have envisaged how computers changed the world in future years. Every line and lyric of Deeper Understanding strikes a chord, but I think the opening lines are particularly stirring and true today: “As the people here grow colder/I turn to my computer/And spend my evenings with it/Like a friend”. Those words might have seemed like slight exaggeration in 1989 but, in 2020, we can all see just…
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1989/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush (from the book, Kate: Inside the Rainbow)
HOW right she was!