Kate Bush's Ten-Ton Flower Bomb

Turns out you CAN be feminine and strong!

The ferocious pressure and exuberant burst of Spring has always felt feminine. Every year I feel its quickening in my blood, in my womanhood, yet I still don’t know how to define these things. What the hell is femininity? What is womanhood, and, for that matter, who decides?

Even as a teen girl in the 80s, when rigid gender codes ruled everything, I had serious objections. It seemed that we were supposed to look feminine, and act feminine, and the specifics of those things were crystal-clear. But it was also very fucking clear that the concept of femininity was mostly defined by its opposite, masculinity. In the classic Patriarchal paradigm, masculine meant strong and feminine meant weak.

I called bullshit on that right away. Yet despite a firm conviction, a deep knowing, that this was inaccurate and just plain wrong, I was ultra-confused. I liked some of the things that women were stereotypically interested in, like clothes and makeup and men. I liked ballet class. I liked flirting with my eyelashes. I liked floral prints on my dresses (but I wore them with combat boots). I liked romantic movies, and especially romantic songs. But I did not want to be perceived as weak.

In fact I wasn’t weak. I was horribly shy but wildly horny, and these mighty forces inside me were like two thunderstorms battling for sky. Beyond that I could feel something else, a connection to Nature, and also, the force of my will and my heart, and it was so fucking strong. Was it feminine? I couldn’t be sure, and I didn’t want to risk it.

This is the precise moment when Kate Bush exploded through the airwaves and made ten thousand flowers bloom in my brain. She looked stereotypically feminine, with her long hair and leotards and lacy dresses. Her voice was undeniably that of a woman, with a swooping high range and gorgeous melodies that could haunt you for life.

But holy shit, she was fucking STRONG. She was clearly a woman who desired men, to love and be in love with them, but she would not defer to them. In fact, she wanted them to grow into better men.

It’s easy, now, to say that “Running Up That Hill” is a classic. Back then people didn’t quite know what to do with it, except send it to the top of the charts. In a pop landscape where women most often sang songs about feeling sad that men had left them, or anxious that men wouldn’t love them, it was a fucking stunner. Every time it came on the radio, I was transfixed by its beauty and intelligence. Grace, strength, lust, fragility and power are all present in the song. I had never seen a woman being that real, that honest, right there in plain sight.

The lyrics still cut me bone-deep. A question I would go on to ask every lover: Do you wanna feel how it feels? Are you at all curious about women’s experience in the world? Can you see beyond your limitations and discover new ways of being a man?

In my life, there was before and after Kate. Her songs recognize the power of Nature as it is experienced by a woman’s body, and her psyche. Her records don’t sound like anything else, and that’s because she built everything herself from the ground up, including her recording studio, her band, and her own musical talent, which extends far beyond singing and piano to programming complex synths and keyboards and mixing and producing most of her massive music catalogue. Lyrically and conceptually, she explored worlds far beyond her own, and didn’t shy away from existential themes, including the emotional cost of war and the nuclear anxiety of my generation.

That she did all of this during a robustly sexist era of the music business is even more astonishing, and further evidence of her personal strength and power.

There is so much more to discuss about Kate’s musicianship, her impact on the culture, and her legacy, which goes far beyond what she has, to date, been recognized for. For myself I will just say that she was the first example of powerful femininity that I ever saw. She gave me permission to be recognizably a woman, without apology. The world is not kind to us, and has never dispensed equity without a massive, living counterforce, a force of Nature. In ways big and small, personal and political, Kate gave me the courage to push like Spring.