FEATURE:
I’m on Now
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1993 during the filming of the short film, The Line, the Cross and the Curve/PHOTO CREDIT: Guido Harari
The Ups, Downs and Side to Side of Kate Bush’s Rubberband Girl
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EVERY year or so…
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1993 during the filming of The Line, the Cross and the Curve/PHOTO CREDIT: Guido Harari
I do return to particular Kate Bush songs for reinspection. It is a nice way of introducing them to people who may not be aware. Today, I wanted to come back to Rubberband Girl. It has its anniversary in September so, ahead of that, I thought it might be worth digging into the sign and getting to know it better. There are a few reasons why the track is significant. For one, it was Bush’s first release in thirty-nine months. On 6th September, 1993, Bush returned with a song that took her to twelve on the U.K. Her pervious single, Love and Anger, was the last from The Sensual World (1989). Bush did record an Elton John and Bernie Taupin cover, Rocket Man (I Think It's Going to Be a Long, Long Time) in 1991. In any case, there was this speculation what had happened to Kate Bush. That was the story after any gap between albums. There was this four-year period between The Sensual World and The Red Shoes. Taking more time to record albums, I think there was this growing reluctance to embrace promotion or go through that cycle too regularly. Even if Rubberband Girl did do well, it is a track with a bit of a complicated history. Bush wrote the song quite quickly in the studio one day. She wasn’t someone who did that often but, maybe with a particular stress or feeling weighing heavy on her mind, she was compelled to ger this song out. Bush has dismissed it sort of a silly Pop song. Something almost throwaway. It is, in my view, one of her best tracks. I don’t think it is one that people should dismiss.
I am going to come to more thoughts about the song. First, this fascinating article looks at one of the gems from The Red Shoes. Bush has said that she quite liked the original – I will talk about updating the track for 2011’s Director’s Cut -, but there is always this impression from her that it is silly and quite lightweight. There are people that dislike the bouncy and brilliant Rubberband Girl:
“Rubberband Girl” was the first single released from The Red Shoes. Most people don’t think much of it, for a couple reasons:
It’s the most dated-sounding track on the album. The Red Shoes doesn’t age as badly as people say – parts of it could even pass for retro cool. (I harp on this a lot, but if “Constellation of the Heart” was released by Annie or Jessie Ware tomorrow there’d be confetti.) But “Rubberband Girl”’s production betrays its release date everywhere, canned drums on down. (If anyone else’s a Throwing Muses fan, it’s the same reason I can’t listen to Hunkpapa: the drums.)
The concept is easy to dismiss or mock if you go in trying to do either – the chorus goes “I want to be a rubberband girl!” Nor does the metaphor give you many easy emotional ins, either. It’s possible to relate – we’ll be doing this shortly – but it’s subject to what I guess I’ll call the OAT-FREAKING-MEAL Principle: it requires you to suspend the fact that you’re trying to pluck meaning out of a fucking rubber band.
The entire outro is an extended Kate Bush vocal-acrobatics gig akin to “Violin” that, again, is easy to dismiss or mock if you want to do that or if you’re not used to it.
It was the pop single, and it sorta-kinda-almost sounds like a pop song. See entry: “rockism.”
Fair points all, but “Rubberband Girl” is more interesting than people give it credit for. A few ways:
See, I Try To Resist
Pop song it may be; but “Rubberband Girl” breaks all the rules of how pop songs work. Even the most ardent poptimists would admit they have a formula: the verse should sound like this, the chorus should pummel you like that, the middle eight should be, well, a middle eight. There are standards.
This is how Kate Bush approaches the verse of her big pop crossover: “SEE THOSE TREES! BEND IN THE WIND! I FEEL THEY’VE GOT A LOT MORE SENSE THAN ME. See, I try to resist!” Voice at full throttle (sing it like she does; receive nodes probably), pacing basically nonexistent. VERSE: OVER.
The choruses arrive mostly like choruses should – though the backing vocals are a little more leering than most – but then they disappear so Bush can imitate a bungee cord for several minutes over electric guitar and sax solos. Again, nothing unheard of, for rock or jazz or “Mirrors”; but it’s more like a jam session where all the players are on laughing gas than something consciously calculated – if not by Bush, certainly the label – to get airplay. Every part of it is distorted, stretched past its breaking point; but nothing breaks.
It’s also a lot of fun.
If I Could Learn To Give
But what about the premise? It’s certainly a little silly. Kate Bush is one of the few artists who can put out a song like “Rubberband Girl” and literally be singing about wanting to be a rubberband, with no metaphor whatsoever; and she’s certainly drawn to arch whimsy. But I think there’s more.
This is where The Line, the Cross and the Curve is helpful. In the plot, “Rubberband Girl” is the I Want song: the first track, the precursor to the Red Shoes story and a microcosm of it. It works on a literal and figurative level. The literal is simple enough – Bush’s character, a dancer, wants to be a natural: sprightly and supple, but it’s not quite working. Note the choreography: Some is the kind sort of pas de deux you saw from Shearer, but more often Bush plays clumsy, exaggerated, large steps as if she’s got clown shoes. The lighting is dim, the conditions dingy, probably true to real-life rehearsals but not the stuff of magic. By the end Bush is dancing in a straitjacket or bouncing off padded walls (filmed from her perspective, one of many nods to Powell and Pressburger) as the musicians gawk. It’s a cautionary tale within a cautionary tale. What she wanted was abandon; what she got was driven mad. (And yes, if “Rubberband Girl” were released today people would – rightly – find it a little insensitive or ableist. I bring this up because when we get to “Eat the Music” we’re going to need stronger adjectives.)
The figurative stuff is a little trickier. What the hell is a “rubberband girl”? It’s never quite clear. (It’s a wonder more people didn’t drag “Cornflake Girl” in their Tori-comparison frenzy; both songs sling hyperpersonal metaphors you’ve got to think for.)
The closest explanation I’ve got is that a “rubberband girl” is resilient: she gives, she bends, she’s breezy and stoic in the face of crisis, if she ever faces crisis at all. She A+ student, the yoga-goer: the girl who has it all. It’s a rather Buddhist notion, as some have identified, this idea of bending with the wind; but for a certain sort of personality, bending is basically antithetical to their entire way of being. They do not let go or go with the flow or be one with the platitude; they plant their feet and try to resist. Meditation is basically impossible. Zen does not exist. Crises are forever. She sets out of their catapult, and her feet splay and her body splats. And she’s downed, there’s no bouncing back to life; no amount of straining or trying seems to get her back on her feet. She might try to imitate the well-adjusted girls, but it’s a groaning, heaving parody. That’s the point, after all; she's trying, when from all she can tell she shouldn’t even have to. (The Dreaming again: can she have it all yet? It’s working for them, but when she tries to join in….)
Note, too, that Bush is talking about girls. It’s in the title, it’s in the way the backing vocals go “A rubberband girl, she?” The sort of role model she’s made for herself is gendered: for lack of a better phrase, the good girl. She’s put-together in a certain wholesome way, not given to despair or – again, for lack of a better word – hysterics. She doesn’t wear the dull drab of Bush in rehearsal nor the red-and-black carnival regalia we’ll see later on; she’d probably go for cardigans and Lilly Pulitzer, say.
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1993/PHOTO CREDIT: John Stoddart
And Bush goes for every connotation of “hysteria,” including the sexual ones. The tendency with writers on Bush is to creepily sexualize everything that doesn’t need to be – leer over “The Sensual World” and that leotard photo, that sort of thing – while ignoring what she’s actually got to say on the matter. But The Red Shoes comes inherent with those undertones – thanks, Andersen’s diaries! – I don’t know how else you can hear the two juxtaposed lines “A rubber band, hold me trousers up; a rubber band, ponytails” – i.e. not letting her hair down – except to bring her love life into the lament. Of all the possible images she could put front and center, over and over, she chose these two. Depending on how you hear the outro, arguably she keeps choosing them.
(Curiously, Director’s Cut changes the former line to something more innocuous. It’s not the first time Director’s Cut completely changes the meaning of songs – more on that shortly – but it’s one of the instances where I have no idea why it happened here.)
Twang Like A Rubberband
But speaking of gender, check out that instrumental mix! Withers: “The combination of these [electric guitar and tenor sax] sounds communicates culturally naturalised ideas of male-defined genius." There’s one aspect of "Rubberband Girl” I’ve never seen mentioned anywhere, despite it being rather blatant: "Rubberband Girl,“ for all its Stock-Aiken-Waterman production, is Bush’s attempt to make a Led Zeppelin song. It’s not out of character at all: for all writers make of Bush being essentially feminine, the guys she hung out with and her musical idols were mostly male. (How Not To Write About Kate Bush?) Right before The Red Shoes, she’d just exhausted a long Peter Gabriel phase, for instance. And once you get this notion in mind, you can’t stop hearing it. The outro might signify madness, but it signifies classic rock just as much. When Bush sings "if I could learn to twang…” it’s with a twang.
This all becomes clear when listening to the Director’s Cut version. Bush dispenses with the ‘80s entirely, gets a full band – you know, what the dudes in the video were supposed to be playing, directs them to go the Full Authenticity, and spends the whole song, well, twanging. It’s a little awkward to hear, in the way that any dour 50-something white woman imitating the blues is going to be. It’s not the better version by a long stretch. But given the entire point of Director’s Cut –do-overs, basically – this is what Bush heard in her head. Huh”.
I like Rubberband Girl for a number of reasons. I feel it has gained more love and appreciation since its release. As it is thirty in September, people need to pick it up. The opening track and lead single for The Red Shoes, it was a confident and compelling first taste of that new album. The Sensual World’s Love and Anger – where she left us in 1990 – was quite energetic and spirited, but it is not the same as Rubberband Girl. Even if Bush’s Elton John cover was Reggae-like and has plenty of energy, I feel Rubberband Girl was Bush doing something funkier and Prince-nodding. I could have seen the two working brilliantly together on the track. As it was, Prince appeared on the penultimate song from The Red Shoes, Why Should I Love You?. I am going to wrap things in a minute. Even if Bush was not a fan of the song when she revisited it in 2011, I do feel that the original got some proper respect. Two music videos were released. The one for the U.S. market meant that it charted with the Billboard Hot 100. With some incredible performance from the likes of Danny McIntosh on guitar and John Giblin on bass, Rubberband Girl is a triumph1 The U.S. video is Bush wearing a cool leather jacket and some shades. In 1993, Bush directed, wrote and starred in the short film, The Line, the Cross and the Curve. It got a little bit of praise, but many felt it could have been better – maybe Bush taking on a bit too much at a difficult time. Bush’s direction is great. I love the video for Rubberband Girl and how the U.K. version – the second video was for the U.S. release came in December 1993 – finds her in a straitjacket and bouncing on a trampoline. Maybe her feeling that she was spiralling a bit and needed to bounce back to life!
The lyrics talk of this desire to get back on her feet. maybe being affected by life and the demands of her career, it was strangely apt. In 1993, Bush was still death the death of her mother (who died in February 1992). Her relationship with Del Palmer was all but over, through she did find new love in the form of Danny McIntosh (who she is still with today and they have a son together, Bertie). There was burnout and this artist throwing everything into her work, perhaps to distract from other things. Direct and spirited, some preferred the dreamier side of Kate Bush, so they were not that taken with Rubberband Girl. Others were shocked Bush was doing something more Pop than we were used to. Funkier and different to anything before, the media were a bit mixed. When Bush came to re-examine it for Director’s Cut, she made it slower and more contemplative. This is what The Independent made of the new version in 2011:
“This is largely due to her re-doing all the lead vocals, which has imposed a warmer, more reflective tone on proceedings. The most striking change is on the closing "Rubberband Girl", where she sounds oddly muffled: the original stratospheric yelps are gone, along with Jeff Beck's flashy guitar, replaced by an understated harmonica groove that aims for more hypnotic impact – as too does "The Red Shoes" itself, whose mesmeric mandola groove is nudged along by softly pulsing drums. Ironically, though less flamboyantly abandoned, Kate's vocals here better evoke the sense of possession in the dance”.
I will leave it there. Because The Red Shoes’ lead single, Rubberband Girl, is thirty next month, I was eager to explore this song once more. I will do another feature closer to the anniversary. Whether the title and idea of the song comes from The Spinners’ The Rubberband Man of 1976, I am not sure. Clearly, Bush would know the song and would have been struck by the title – even if the two tracks are very different lyrically and have their own meaning. On this underrated and largely underplayed jewel from 1993, Kate Bush was…
A Rubberband girl, she.