Two Steps On The Water
December 17, 2019 3:08 PM Subscribe
Folk Horror and the work of Kate Bush Daniel Pietersen's presentation of his paper on Folk Horror elements in the works of Kate Bush was presented at the Edinburgh College of Art's Kate Bush Symposium
Lord of the Reedy River
Interested in learning more about Folk Horror? Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange by Adam Scovell.
Lord of the Reedy River
Interested in learning more about Folk Horror? Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange by Adam Scovell.
I think of many things when I consider Kate Bush. Horror is not one of them.
posted by Splunge at 3:54 PM on December 17, 2019 [1 favorite]
posted by Splunge at 3:54 PM on December 17, 2019 [1 favorite]
(well, there's 'Hammer Horror' from Lionheart)
posted by ovvl at 4:50 PM on December 17, 2019 [2 favorites]
posted by ovvl at 4:50 PM on December 17, 2019 [2 favorites]
'Running Up That Hill With Scissors' always horrified me.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 4:59 PM on December 17, 2019 [5 favorites]
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 4:59 PM on December 17, 2019 [5 favorites]
Breathing has pretty horrific imagery.
Trapped Under Ice is pretty horrific.
And I think I'm going to be permanently scarred by seeing an ad for some foot fungus formula, with bare feet having a colored liquid poured over them superimposed on the title, The Red Shoes.
posted by Chuffy at 5:02 PM on December 17, 2019 [3 favorites]
Trapped Under Ice is pretty horrific.
And I think I'm going to be permanently scarred by seeing an ad for some foot fungus formula, with bare feet having a colored liquid poured over them superimposed on the title, The Red Shoes.
posted by Chuffy at 5:02 PM on December 17, 2019 [3 favorites]
"Folk horror" is one of those things where I think discussion of the...genre, I guess? is hampered by the fact that a really bad name was picked to describe the material in question. If I were space pope, I would force people interested in the subject to spend some time coming up with a better name that doesn't contain the word "horror" at all. Alas, I am not space pope and people aren't asking me to name genres of things.
Is Kate Bush horror? Maybe not - neither are a lot of other works that always get counted under the umbrella of folk horror - but her work might be kin to other work that is.
posted by darchildre at 5:10 PM on December 17, 2019 [1 favorite]
Is Kate Bush horror? Maybe not - neither are a lot of other works that always get counted under the umbrella of folk horror - but her work might be kin to other work that is.
posted by darchildre at 5:10 PM on December 17, 2019 [1 favorite]
Well, there's the video for Experiment IV...
posted by lefty lucky cat at 5:12 PM on December 17, 2019 [2 favorites]
posted by lefty lucky cat at 5:12 PM on December 17, 2019 [2 favorites]
Some of Bush’s work is horror, definitely. “Experiment IV” comes immediately to mind.
posted by GenjiandProust at 5:13 PM on December 17, 2019 [1 favorite]
posted by GenjiandProust at 5:13 PM on December 17, 2019 [1 favorite]
Aaaargh. As a person who is quite into both Kate Bush and folk horror, there is, in fact, an argument to be made for her work as at the least heavily genre-adjacent, and this article is not that, because, frankly, it is sloppily reasoned and poorly cited.
The definition of folk horror provided isn't narrow enough to differentiate folk horror from other subgenres, which hampers the critical argument significantly-- I mean, in the author's linked companion piece, 'Just Saying It Could Even Make It Happen', he argues for 'Experiment IV', which is a subgenre miscategorization of a level I find it difficult to believe. 'Experiment IV' is SF horror of the specifically fifties-moving-into-seventies style of riffs on the Quatermass series, and has no significant landscape elements, no isolation from wider societal influence, and no grounding in deep-time mythology-- so it doesn't qualify even according to his own criteria.
And he discards 'Waking the Witch' as too obvious to discuss? WTF? Unpacking that song's relationship to folk horror is Kate Bush's major claim to this genre-- okay, along with 'Hounds of Love', which he does talk about, but he seems unaware of the Australian slasher-horror film literally called The Hounds of Love, and I think it's relevant!
Basically, this kind of makes me want to write some kind of dissertation on the topic myself, because the idea is so interesting and the execution so lacking, but nobody is going to give me any money to do that, so I am not going to be able to anytime soon.
Aaaaaargh.
posted by Rush-That-Speaks at 5:15 PM on December 17, 2019 [17 favorites]
The definition of folk horror provided isn't narrow enough to differentiate folk horror from other subgenres, which hampers the critical argument significantly-- I mean, in the author's linked companion piece, 'Just Saying It Could Even Make It Happen', he argues for 'Experiment IV', which is a subgenre miscategorization of a level I find it difficult to believe. 'Experiment IV' is SF horror of the specifically fifties-moving-into-seventies style of riffs on the Quatermass series, and has no significant landscape elements, no isolation from wider societal influence, and no grounding in deep-time mythology-- so it doesn't qualify even according to his own criteria.
And he discards 'Waking the Witch' as too obvious to discuss? WTF? Unpacking that song's relationship to folk horror is Kate Bush's major claim to this genre-- okay, along with 'Hounds of Love', which he does talk about, but he seems unaware of the Australian slasher-horror film literally called The Hounds of Love, and I think it's relevant!
Basically, this kind of makes me want to write some kind of dissertation on the topic myself, because the idea is so interesting and the execution so lacking, but nobody is going to give me any money to do that, so I am not going to be able to anytime soon.
Aaaaaargh.
posted by Rush-That-Speaks at 5:15 PM on December 17, 2019 [17 favorites]
From the transcript:
‘Prelude’, from 2005’s Aerial, lasts for just over a minute. It consists of birdsong – blackbirds then wood pigeons – and a piece of delicate piano which slowly leads to the appearance of that most horrifying of entities; a small child.
Righhhht.
(I agree, actually, that there is a strong sense of the uncanny in the work of Kate Bush, and imagine this would've been a fun talk to sit through)
posted by misterbee at 5:16 PM on December 17, 2019 [5 favorites]
‘Prelude’, from 2005’s Aerial, lasts for just over a minute. It consists of birdsong – blackbirds then wood pigeons – and a piece of delicate piano which slowly leads to the appearance of that most horrifying of entities; a small child.
Righhhht.
(I agree, actually, that there is a strong sense of the uncanny in the work of Kate Bush, and imagine this would've been a fun talk to sit through)
posted by misterbee at 5:16 PM on December 17, 2019 [5 favorites]
Well, now that I think about it, Red Shoes is based on a rather horrifying story.
posted by Splunge at 5:24 PM on December 17, 2019 [3 favorites]
posted by Splunge at 5:24 PM on December 17, 2019 [3 favorites]
Next up: a deep dive into mental health treatment in the UK, based on Them Heavy People. I'll get the ball rolling here...
Seriously, some academics out there - step away from the damned keyboard, stop beanplating and just enjoy the music for what it is.
posted by zaixfeep at 7:40 PM on December 17, 2019 [2 favorites]
Seriously, some academics out there - step away from the damned keyboard, stop beanplating and just enjoy the music for what it is.
posted by zaixfeep at 7:40 PM on December 17, 2019 [2 favorites]
And he didn't even mention 'Lily', which... I mean, in folk horror, as a genre, forms of Christianity that are considered archaic and tortuous by the current mainstream are absolutely one of the kinds of mythic survival that can spring up out of the dim past and eat your face. Cf. the recent The VVitch, among many others. One can maybe argue that 'Lily' isn't supposed to be horror at all, but honestly, if you're summoning archangels with salt and fire, literally, in our current day and age, no matter how benevolent your intentions a good chunk of the population will feel you have absolutely managed to be creepy.
GAH. This article. I wish it were better at being what it wants to be because I DO NOT HAVE the time/brain to write a better one, but apparently this is my Wrong On The Internet thing, like the xkcd cartoon, where I am late for dinner and fail to go to bed because I cannot existentially handle inadequately reasoned discussions of Kate Bush.
posted by Rush-That-Speaks at 7:58 PM on December 17, 2019
GAH. This article. I wish it were better at being what it wants to be because I DO NOT HAVE the time/brain to write a better one, but apparently this is my Wrong On The Internet thing, like the xkcd cartoon, where I am late for dinner and fail to go to bed because I cannot existentially handle inadequately reasoned discussions of Kate Bush.
posted by Rush-That-Speaks at 7:58 PM on December 17, 2019
Alt-f babooshka.
Guess they left that horror show out of the symposium.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 9:53 PM on December 17, 2019
Guess they left that horror show out of the symposium.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 9:53 PM on December 17, 2019
I recently re-discovered Kate Bush and struggle to identify the genre of my current project, so this is quite timely!
Is 'folk giallo' a thing? "Nightmare pop?"
posted by aspersioncast at 5:50 AM on December 18, 2019
Is 'folk giallo' a thing? "Nightmare pop?"
posted by aspersioncast at 5:50 AM on December 18, 2019
Mrs Bartolozzi definitely has a nightmarish quality to it, though it feels more like Mike Leigh than Robin Hardy.
posted by rhamphorhynchus at 7:08 AM on December 18, 2019
posted by rhamphorhynchus at 7:08 AM on December 18, 2019
I've linked it before, but Mark Fisher's piece on Aerial, "Look at the Light" is my favorite thing written on Kate Bush, and I think his discussion on the uncanny in that album is relevant here:
What is fascinating about ‘Sea of Honey’ is its exploration of the Mother’s bliss, which has by definition been excised from a history of rock that has endlessly staged the cutting of the apron strings, the rejection of the maternal. There’s something oppressive and cloying about this domestic space, something suffocating and greedily insatiable about the protected interiority Bush creates. The ‘domestic idyll’ is literally agoraphobic, troubled by an Outside it seeks to keep at bay. ‘How to be Invisible’ is a spell in which ultra-ordinary objects are brandished as protective charms, preservatives of a domesticity that has withdrawn from the wider social world. Yet the heimlich, the homely, is always, also, the unheimlich, the unhomely, the uncanny. In ‘Mrs Bartolozzi’, a widow’s solitude transforms laundry into a Svankmajer erotic dance, the boredom, loneliness and sadness of a confined mind transfiguring empty clothes into an animist memory-theatre. In these circumscribed horizons, washing the floor becomes a religious observance, an act of mourning and melancholy.
posted by One Second Before Awakening at 11:51 AM on December 18, 2019 [2 favorites]
What is fascinating about ‘Sea of Honey’ is its exploration of the Mother’s bliss, which has by definition been excised from a history of rock that has endlessly staged the cutting of the apron strings, the rejection of the maternal. There’s something oppressive and cloying about this domestic space, something suffocating and greedily insatiable about the protected interiority Bush creates. The ‘domestic idyll’ is literally agoraphobic, troubled by an Outside it seeks to keep at bay. ‘How to be Invisible’ is a spell in which ultra-ordinary objects are brandished as protective charms, preservatives of a domesticity that has withdrawn from the wider social world. Yet the heimlich, the homely, is always, also, the unheimlich, the unhomely, the uncanny. In ‘Mrs Bartolozzi’, a widow’s solitude transforms laundry into a Svankmajer erotic dance, the boredom, loneliness and sadness of a confined mind transfiguring empty clothes into an animist memory-theatre. In these circumscribed horizons, washing the floor becomes a religious observance, an act of mourning and melancholy.
posted by One Second Before Awakening at 11:51 AM on December 18, 2019 [2 favorites]
there is a strong sense of the uncanny in the work of Kate Bush
Immanence. And saying it could even make it happen
posted by glasseyes at 4:42 PM on December 18, 2019
Immanence. And saying it could even make it happen
posted by glasseyes at 4:42 PM on December 18, 2019
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posted by drivingmenuts at 3:36 PM on December 17, 2019 [5 favorites]