FEATURE:
50 Words for ‘No’
PHOTO CREDIT: Guido Harari
Kate Bush and the Struggle with the American Market
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NOT to duplicate what I have written previously…
PHOTO CREDIT: RexUSA
but I have been researching Kate Bush for a new project that I want to put out next summer. It is concerned with the fortieth-anniversary since she recorded her debut album, The Kick Inside. As per of that, I was seeing how that album was received in America. I don’t think Bush was known widely across the country that early in her career. I am going to drop in a recent podcast from the U.S. where British journalist Jude Rogers discussed Bush’s 2005 double album, Aerial. Whilst it has (clearly) not dented her influence and popularity, it seems strange that there is this gulf between British/European audiences and those in America. As I have said before, Bush did not really appear in America much through her career. Pre-Internet, there would have been few channels to discover her music. Unless a radio station or T.V. show was not playing her music, it might have been difficult to hear her stuff. One can labour and discus why she was so much more revered here than in the U.S. Look at the world today and there are plenty of American artists who take inspiration from Kate Bush. From St. Vincent to Rufus Wainwright, her music reached the U.S. and compelled a lot of artists. I have discussed chart positions a few times through the years. Recently, I revisited that subject and stated how there was unpredictable trend regarding her success. The singles from The Kick Inside and Lionheart did well – if you average them out – in the U.K. and Europe. The Dreaming did not fare so well regarding chart positions and, actually, one would have expected some of the singles from Hounds of Love to do better than they did!
Not that Bush herself would sweat too much about the singles’ positions - so long as people bought and liked the albums. The U.K. has been her biggest and most consistently successful market. There are reasons why Bush did not promote in America too much. When The Tour of Life started in 1979, it was intended for the U.K. and Europe. I feel extending it to America would have been exhaustive and problematic! At that point (1979), she did not have enough recognition there to sell a lot of tickets. It is odd that America did not pick up on her. She recorded an alternate video for Wuthering Heights for the U.S. – the U.K. version was deemed as too weird and intense. That single did nothing there. In fact, if one looks at the singles’ positions, she did not find success until Hounds of Love’s Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) reached thirty. Alongside some low-charting singles (The Man with the Child went to eighty-five; Rubberband Girl to eighty-eight), here is a market that was probably up for grabs but never taken. Bush did promote Hounds of Love in America; the first album of hers to really make an impression. It was curious listening to the Late Era podcast. Aerial reached the top-fifty in the album charts in 2005. Looking through the discography, and the width between the U.K. and U.S. is immense!
Whereas all of her studio albums reached the top-ten here, only six charted at all in America! From The Dreaming hitting a lowly one-hundred-and-fifty-seven to The Red Shoes getting to twenty-eight, it has been a rather unpredictable and fallow canvas. It is clear that there was a period where Bush ignited interest in the U.S. after a while. Hounds of Love reached thirty and, a year later, she released the greatest hits album, The Whole Story. EMI saw that there was this interest from America. In 2021, well over four decades since Bush entered with Wuthering Heights, I scratch my head and wonder whether America just didn’t ‘get’ Bush…or whether she and EMI were not concerned about success there. Bush wouldn’t be such an icon and popular if American fans and musicians had overlooked her. Today, there is so much love for her. New generations are discovering her music and one can hear American artists come through who have clearly been influenced by her music! Even so, there is far less recognition of Bush in America compared to the rest of the world. I feel it was her post-Hounds of Love released turned the tide slightly. I like the fact her albums from Hounds of Love got into the top-fifty. 2011’s 50 Words for Snow did well here and Europe (it also got to twenty-two in Australia). It only reached eighty-three in the U.S. It is not a disaster though, considering Aerial made the top-fifty (just), what happened in 2011 to result in a low chart position!?
To me, it is more to do with the tone and sound of the album, rather than there being a decline in interest. Looking at other albums, there are one or two that charted. The Whole Story, luckily, charted – it would have been a bit mystifying if the U.S. market turned away only a year after showing affection towards Hounds of Love! Her live album, 2016’s Before the Dawn, was a very minor success. Of course, one cannot define an artist’s worth by chart positions and sales alone! I like the fact that one of the albums considered to be among her weakest, The Red Shoes, charted highest in America! One can say that a relatively invisibility in terms of promotion and live appearances was a factor. Bush hardly performed a lot in the U.K. and Europe, mind. Maybe American audiences are calibrated slightly differently regarding their preferences. Writing for The New Yorker, Margaret Talbot discussed her experiences with Bush’s music. There are a couple of passages that struck me. One refers to a perception of Bush’s music and her as a person; the other, how Talbot sort of lost connection with her music in the 1990s:
“Thomson contends that, at a time when musical camps were more fiercely armored than they are now (remember when people had to choose, absurdly, between punk and disco?), Bush got a bad rap from some music journalists for being a dreamy middle-class girl rather than an angry working-class bloke. There was grumbling about her tweeness, her witchy, unapologetic femininity. “Most of her records,” the jazz critic Richard Cook, writing about Bush in Sounds magazine, complained, “smell of tarot cards, kitchen curtains and lavender pillows.” That said, John Lydon—a.k.a. Johnny Rotten—loved her music. In a BBC documentary about Bush, from 2014, he allows that “a lot of my friends at the time couldn’t bear” Bush’s high-pitched, passionate warbling on “Wuthering Heights” and other early songs. “They just thought it was too much”—and, indeed, Bush is the high priestess of too much.
I’d more or less fallen off the Kate Bush bandwagon in the nineties, so there were two albums in the boxed set that were almost entirely new to me: the two-disk “Aerial,” from 2005, and “50 Words for Snow,” from 2011. Neither is much like her earlier work; they are quieter, smoother, more jazz-inflected, less ahead of their time than outside of it. They can sound a little hermetic—and, listening to them, you do sometimes wish that Bush, who has said in interviews that she doesn’t consume much contemporary music, fired up the old Spotify now and then. She doesn’t throw her voice up and down and all around with the same wild-child exuberance. (The childlike notes come from her son, whose singing and speaking voices are on both records.) But both albums are powerful mood pieces, full of lovely moments. “How to Be Invisible,” from “Aerial,” has a bluesy, sexy, echoey guitar line and some of Bush’s finest lyrics, describing an introvert’s spell for going unseen (“Eye of Braille, hem of anorak, stem of wallflower, hair of doormat.”) “The Coral Room,” from the same album, is a heartbreaking hymn on the workings of memory, the passage of time, and her love for her late mother. The album “50 Words for Snow” is lush and sombre, with melodies that eddy and drift, and a thirteen-minute song about a woman’s affair with a snowman, which somehow manages not to make you laugh.
I shall finish up in a minute. Kate Bush will never lose popularity in America. Stations play her music and there will always be awareness of what she has performed and recorded. Not concerned too much with cracking America, the lack of big sales and chart positions there is not something that hurt her or caused too much concern with the label. What intrigues me is whether there was a single factor as to why U.S. buyers did not take to Bush earlier in her career. It can be quite difficult predicting which artists will succeed (in the U.S.) and which will struggle. Each country is different in terms of musical tastes. Perhaps Bush was seen as ‘too British’ or odd. Maybe her subject matter was not that accessible or she was, by not touring, seen as a bit distant and aloof. I don’t think any of those explanations fit. In 2011, an interesting NPR piece reacted to journalist Lee Zimmerman laying out reasons as to why America didn’t care for Kate Bush:
“At least, that's the claim set forth by Lee Zimmerman of the Broward/Palm Beach New Times. In a blog post published on Bush's birthday, he laments the lack of traction that the British singer/songwriter has experienced in the United States.
So now that I've lovingly shut down all of Zimmerman's arguments, how to explain Bush's relative lack of success in this country? Well, she certainly didn't fit any of the molds of what women were doing in pop music in the 1980s; only Madonna (who, for whatever it's worth, is a mere 17 days younger than Bush) was as chameleonic, but she was both more overtly sexual and more cannily club-oriented in a particularly dance-crazy decade. And Peter Gabriel notwithstanding, art rock wasn't exactly a ticket to mass success.
But it might be that Bush never broke through in the U.S. because she just wasn't that interested in it. Columbia certainly was, wanting to prove with The Sensual World that their new investment wasn't just a one-hit wonder. But looking back at Bush's career, there's a nagging sense that if American success was truly something she'd wanted, she would have booked those tours, done that press and schmoozed radio and MTV. She didn't, and as a result or not, she remains the province of a small group of highly devoted American fans”.
There is a slightly snobbish and dismissive tone to the article. There is this split between the buying public in the U.S. and the critics compared to artists there and other fans. Those who understand her music and truly invest are deeply passionate and extoll her brilliance. Many Americans have been less patient and willing to give necessary focus to a truly groundbreaking artist. I don’t think it is patriotism that accounts for Bush’s success in the U.K. It annoys me that there has been this comparable lack of commercial success in America. I don’t think she will travel or promote there before her career is through. If some critics are crude and a little ignorant, one only need to look at social media to show that plenty of Americans hold Kate Bush very dear to their hearts. Even though her albums and singles have not charted hugely well through the years in the U.S., musicians, fans and admirers in the country will remember her and play her music…
FOR generations to come.