FEATURE:
Just Like His Wife When She Was Beautiful
PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush
Why Kate Bush’s Babooshka Reveals New Layers with Every Listen
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EVEN though I have recently…
written about Babooshka, I am coming back to it again, as it is a song that continues to draw me in and reveal new layers. On 27th June, the song is forty-two. I am going to repeat some of what I wrote last time in terms of the song’s origins and Kate Bush’s interpretations. I am going to finish by discussing why the song is so alluring, nuanced and special. Before that, and returning to the Kate Bush Encyclopaedia:
“It was really a theme that has fascinated me for some time. It's based on a theme that is often used in folk songs, which is where the wife of the husband begins to feel that perhaps he's not faithful. And there's no real strength in her feelings, it's just more or less paranoia suspicions, and so she starts thinking that she's going to test him, just to see if he's faithful. So what she does is she gets herself a pseudonym, which happens to be Babooshka, and she sends him a letter. And he responds very well to the letter, because as he reads it, he recognises the wife that he had a couple of years ago, who was happy, in the letter. And so he likes it, and she decides to take it even further and get a meeting together to see how he reacts to this Babooshka lady instead of her. When he meets her, again because she is so similar to his wife, the one that he loves, he's very attracted to her. Of course she is very annoyed and the break in the song is just throwing the restaurant at him... (...) The whole idea of the song is really the futility and the stupidness of humans and how by our own thinking, spinning around in our own ideas we come up with completely paranoid facts. So in her situation she was in fact suspicious of a man who was doing nothing wrong, he loved her very much indeed. Through her own suspicions and evil thoughts she's really ruining the relationship. (Countdown Australia, 1980)”.
There are three different reasons and ways in which Babooshka entrances me. The song, its video and the production combine beautifully. The ambiguity and sense of mystery in the song is something everyone pictures. I listen to the song and have my own visions about what Bush is singing. The video has this incredible power and allure that blows the mind! It is much more than the sexiness of the video. It is a remarkable piece of film (directed by Keef) that stands as one of Bush’s finest videos. Dreams of Orgonon discusses the amazing video, in addition to the depth and layers of the song:
“Observe the extraordinary video Bush produced for “Babooshka.” Simply staged, with Bush performing against a black background, the video relies on its costuming and lighting to provide spectacle. As Bush sings the verses, she is clad in a black bodysuit and veil as she dances with a double bass. She meticulously poses with it, making short, clipped motions, like a prim aristocrat at a royal ball. Placing her hands up and down the bass and spinning it, one gets the impression that this bass is her partner, a sexualized personification of her music. The bass guitar also plays a significant part in the song — Peter Gabriel’s collaborator John Giblin provides the song’s marvelous bassline, the song’s low-mixed backbone. The double bass is as much a part of the dance as her balalaika is — a sturdy, inexpressive partner. She frequently throttles it, ending some performances with a crazed gurn as she strangles its neck. The verse is the restrained part of the song, where Babooshka quietly schemes beneath her veil and lashes out at the bass with small cruel gestures. As Bush screams “ALL YOURS/ BABOOSHKA/ BABOOSHKA/ BABOOSHKA/ YA-YA” while swinging a sword and wearing the tight golden garb of a warrior princess from a fantasy novel (a few Bush aficionados will know that the source of the costume is illustrator Chris Achilleos’ cover for a 1978 sword-and-sorcery novel called Raven: Swordmistress of Chaos, and yes, we’re going down the rabbit hole of kinks for this song), she’s moved into an entirely new dimension from “Wuthering Heights” and The Kick Inside, one where the depravity and glory of the human imagination can do its best and worst. It’s a spectacle of fantastical madness, engaging glam and punk’s raging excess while taking it in oddly classicist directions. It’s almost like Babooshka’s costume is an expression of her true self: a raving madwoman better suited to pulp cover-art than a human relationship.
That Babooshka is something of a madwoman is expressed by the song, and particularly its video. Certainly Kate Bush considers Babooshka a pathetic (if pitiful and tragic) villain who hurts her husband. In an interview, she described Babooshka’s motivations as “paranoia [and] suspicions,” and ascribes the husband’s desire to meet his pen pal to her similarity to “his wife, the one that he loves.” Her perspective of the song is damning of Babooshka and de facto absolves her husband. The story is ultimately one of Babooshka’s downfall, where her preoccupation with retaining control of her life costs her the marriage.
Of course, the song’s moral ambiguity is its most interesting aspect. While there’s an almost reactionary slant to the way “Babooshka” perceives relationships, particularly in the way it treats gender along binary and determinist lines, Bush does push against the grain. She often demonstrates a willingness to interrogate the internal experiences of her characters, particularly women characters. Exploring the ramifications of jealousy is crucial to imbuing her characters with interiority. Bush has Babooshka’s husband failing similarly, even if she doesn’t realize it. Most texts are buzzing with suggestions their authors haven’t considered. In the case of “Babooshka,” Bush enacts a complex meditation on how gendered expectations can poison relationships. Babooshka lets her suspicions and preoccupation with re-becoming young and glamorous overcome her life, and her husband lets his treacherous predilections towards young beauty lead him astray. No party comes out morally in the clear, and yet neither is entirely unsympathetic. They’re trapped in an ugly binary where people are programmed to perform in ways incompatible with human psychology. If there’s a way to use the framework of folklore in a thoughtful and modern way, this is it.
As such, “Babooshka” makes the case that Kate Bush’s songwriting can be multiple things at once and create a conflicting hive of meaning, and that Bush’s love for the archaic is hardly blinded by a nostalgic haze. She demonstrates a consistent willingness to interrogate how stories like these work, how human beings act when plugged into myth and folklore, and the ways in which these situations are incompatible with humanity. Some of the most complex women in fiction are characters in Kate Bush songs. Never for Ever’s status as the first studio album by a female artist to reach #1 in the UK remains significant for a number of reasons. If Dreams of Orgonon has a thesis, it’s that Kate Bush is a traditionally-minded person who can’t stop herself from writing feminist songs. Break the glass. Howl “Babooshka, ya-ya!” The 1980s are here, and there’s a new swordmistress of chaos to herald them”.
PHOTO CREDIT: Adrian Boot
I love the production by Kate Bush and Jon Kelly. Both light and dense with sound, the instrumental of Babooshka alone is bewitching! Bush’s vocal has this two-prong quality. In the choruses, it seems almost seductive and ripe with intrigue. The rawness and explosion she unleashes on the chorus is so incredibly stunning. I often wonder where Bush was when she wrote particular songs. It would have been amazing watching her think about Babooshka and put it together. The song itself (on Never for Ever, 1980) gives you one view. The video provides another. I find myself listening again and again to Babooshka as, despite articles being written about it, its real truth and power alludes me. Maybe it is a song that has a sense of mystery and something held back. One of Bush’s greatest vocal performances, there is so much to unpick and unpack when it comes to the song. Ahead of its forty-second anniversary next month, I wanted to revisit it once more. On an album as fascinating and strong as Never for Ever, Babooshka stands out. It is one of Bush’s more commercial songs, though it is still so much more original and individual than anything people would have been listening to in 1980! A beguiling and dazzling jewel from Kate Bush, Babooshka is absolutely…
ONE of most spectacular tracks.