Issue 6: Kate Bush, Karaoke and the Art of the Cover
Hello my darlings,
Welcome back to my biweekly newsletter where I share short, poorly edited notes about stuff I find interesting.
I’ve been thinking a lot about Kate Bush since Stranger Things shot her back into the public consciousness.
The other day, I heard a kid singing “Running up that Hill” to himself while waiting for a turn at bat in the park near my house. I find this delightful. Until recently, the song kids in my neighbourhood sang most often was “All Star” by Smash Mouth. Now they’re walking around with a femme weirdo in their heads. This bodes well for the future.
Then, of course, I heard just the plaintive “you and me” part of the song backing one of those heartwarming family ticktock videos and I felt less delighted. I began to wonder what our culture is going to do with Kate Bush now it’s got its eyes on her.
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I was a good deal younger than the Stranger Things gang in the 80s. I grew up with Kate Bush in the background. She was something my Mom was into. When I did came into my own taste, I was vaguely aware that Bush was a forerunner to some artists I loved–Tori Amos, Bjork, and later Cat Power, Joanna Newsom.
It was actually my partner who sparked my enthusiasm for her. When we were desperate for content while living in Japan in the late-2000s (those being the days before Netflix), he downloaded every one of her videos. At first, I was bemused, but over time I fell almost as deeply in love with her eerie swooping voice and expressive dance moves as he was. What I’d never understood about Bush from hearing her on the radio was her theatricality. Her videos were like short plays. With each new character, what had seemed merely quirky took on surprising narrative depth.
One afternoon while on vacation in Kyoto, we ducked into a karaoke booth to dodge the rain. To pass the time, we took turns choosing songs for the other to sing. He chose “Wuthering Heights” for me. I didn’t know the tune well enough to sing with the backing track, so he sang instead in a pitch perfect falsetto. What should have been goofy was tear-inducingly beautiful. Thus, a karaoke legend was born.
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Covers are the inevitable outcome of the kind of popularity Bush is enjoying today. Consider Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide” or Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” Both songs have gone through periods of incredible popularity in the last decade or so. Both have inspired endless covers, some of which have been good, many of which have been truly terrible.
Cohen poses a particular problem to a cover artist because he’s been translated through so many lenses, it’s easy to forget the 1984 original. When people cover Hallelujah, they’re almost always covering Jeff Buckley’s 1994 version of the song rather than Cohen’s. They’re drawn in by the simple guitar riff and haunting intimacy of Buckley’s voice, made ethereal by a slight echo.
In a traditional sense, Buckley is a better singer than Cohen who sing-talks against a gospel choir, always on the verge of leaving the tune behind altogether. Cohen’s original is a deconstruction of a hymn, a wry poke at the sacred from a seductive outsider. Buckley’s is closer to an actual hymn–it has a rawness but it’s also more melodic. Those who cover him usually focus meaning in the hallelujah chorus and forget about the profane verses, flattening the song’s complexity into something merely pretty.
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Listening to covers of "Running Up that Hill" one after the other, I began to formulate a theory about what makes a good cover. Like most of her songs, it's a dramatic monologue that could have multiple meanings. Maybe it's a short story about the bargaining phase of grief. Maybe the narrator believes it would be easier to die herself than to live with the absence of the person she's singing to.
There are a few good covers of “Running of that Hill”—songs that are fun to listen to. Meg Myers' cover with its rich sound and Car Seat Headrest with its Casio keyboard and lazy vocals of a winking indie boy are both very listenable. The worst are the ones that don't really know what to do with the song’s hypnotic background. Chromatics turn it into plodding electro you want to turn off half way through.
But the best of the lot was the one by Placebo. Brian Molko (a bisexual icon) has a lovely fragility to his voice. He gets the grief of the song alongside the love and defiance. The heartbeat rhythm underpins its intensity. This, I believe, is what makes a good cover. The song remains as complex as the original but the new performer makes that complexity their own.
This all leads me to my favourite Kate Bush cover of all time–The Futureheads’ version of “Hounds of Love” which translates the exhilaration and terror of new love into lush 2000s indie rock.
What are your favourite cover songs? Why do they work for you? Drop me a line via Twitter to let me know. If you'd like to read more or subscribe, you can do so here.
~Erika