Oddities – Page 17 – Distractions

Yep, I’m still revisiting teen enthusiasms.

We know we can find bizzare retro rock videos on YouTube; well, speaking of bizzare and retro, apparently it’s filled with Kate Bush videos, clips, rare-rare appearances, all sorts of strange obscure bits from TV specials that I got to see only once in the days that the Third Ear was a pub (and not just that, but a pub on Derech Petach Tikva, under Beit Maariv, of all places, which it was for just a brief while). And also those two videotapes I had and didn’t touched for maybe 15 years but which were part of my identity or something.

Anyway, the point is that now instead of seeing all this in crappy quality taped-from-TV and duplicated VHS, you can see it in crappy flash video, whenever you want.

Looking at the interviews and her choreography, most of it so painfuly bad that it speaks of a supreme, WTF??? level of daftness, Kate Bush seems heartbreakingly naive and innocent, even, well, stupid. Far more so than, say, Bjork in the video Tal linked to recently: Sometimes I suspect Bjork is just pretending to be the childlike pixie, that there’s a very self-aware, postmodern intellect there that’s posing. Maybe it’s because I suspect that, because she realizes her accent makes her sound strange, she delibrately over-plays the weird naif angle, just like some of my friends would talk English with a delibrately dumb Hebrew akzent.

But Kate Bush comes across as genuinely naive, or, not to be coy, stupid. I mean, this is a woman talking about the clip to The Sensual World and saying that the director worked with her to emphasize the sensuality of the world. She was in her thirties when she said that. In earlier interviews (there was one about Babooshka), she just comes across as the sweetest little girl.

But, you know, the mind boggles to think that a peculiar work like There Goes a Tenner has a clip, and was performed on TV.

Thinking about it, I think that there’s a similarity to Robert E Howard who I was just on about. like REH, Kate Bush is an amazingly naive artist, just doing what she loves; and her passion comes across.

Oh, that and her being bloody gorgeous.

If this interests you at all, you’ll want to crawl the search results. But I still can’t resist one more link: here’s an appearance on some odd TV show, with clips for Babooshka and Delius!:

Things you learn watching Cruel Intentions