Never for Ever Land

And in this week's episode...what happens when artists you love (or at least loved once upon a time) do things that embarrass you deeply. For while this song is beautiful on its own, if for nothing else than the fretless bass work and how that plays against the chorus in-outs that work more as sound than meaning, well, there's the rub isn't it? For the meaning is the big problem here. Yeah, it's sweet of Kate to care about a fetus worried not just about mom's smoking but also about nuclear fall out (talk about your prenatal worrywort!), but to literalize that, especially as Kate in the plastic bubble--that's just too much.

Then again, perhaps I react so strongly to this video because it's so dang earnest. She just means it all so much. Just see it in how her eyes roll from side to side. But it's hard not to imagine a growing up Kate as the girl in class who wrote the name of the boy for whom she pined in her notebook and then drew over the letters so often that she then obliterated what she wrote. By definition a crush must hurt, sure, as some other women would later sing, but you don't have to bring the pain yourself.

Bush tends to do this in video after video, each one seemingly directed by a mime who has learned the joys of props. These props get even more spectacular, and can include Donald Sutherland.

It's not that her songs aren't grand, of course. They have to be to fit that voice. But I guess I come from the school where you want to cut that grand, not make it grander. Where you don't gild the lily or bronze the orchid. Where just wonder should be enough.

Instead I'm left to wonder how one can be talented enough to come up with the song but not wise enough to know when to stop. But who am I to say anything, holding onto these memories and snippets of videos for decades, turning them about in my head as if figuring out why I hold them matters, as if they will help solve me for who I am someday, bits and pieces of fretless bass--something that should be grounding but yet seems to float--and images I know are wrong but can't get past, either.