TRUST YOUR VISION & ITS TIME WILL COME
Written By IJR (@only.ijr)
If you’re like me you love a good tune regardless of the era it came from. The further back in time you look, the more great music that you’ll discover from the honest folk music of the 50s to the glamorous and over-the-top synth music of the ’80s. Speaking of the 80s, they just so happen to be my favorite era to look back on, and over the past two years, I’ve made it a habit of checking out everything I can in an effort to really take it all in. So you can imagine the delightful surprise I had when while watching the latest season of Stranger Things, Kate Bush’s hit song “Running up that hill (a deal with God)” came on during one of the tensest moments on the show. The song about making a deal with God, and switching places with a lover had suddenly become recontextualized to fill an empowering moment between the characters we already love deeply.
These days thanks to its appearance on the hit show Stranger Things, Running up that hill finds itself back on the charts in a major way for the first time in 37 years peaking at number 8 on the US charts, number 1 on the iTunes charts, and number 6 on the UK charts, but it wasn’t always this good for Kate and her discography. Kate Bush was known to be a bit of a wild card, going on to create tons of experimental art in her early days in the industry, most of it being hit or miss, leading to some of her biggest moments, as well as some of her biggest flops. Kate was was truly ahead of her time, taking charge of her music, adding her touch to everything from production, to engineering, and especially her writing, but none of that mattered to her label EMI, who was on the verge of letting her go if she didn’t turn things around quickly. Kate Bush was set to release her fifth studio album “Hounds of love,” a project that she intended to create all on her own from a studio she had built herself, and given the fact that Kate was at a rough point in her career, label EMI had no problem skipping out on investing in writers and producers. Kate’s starting point was the very song that saved her career “Running up that hill,” completely set on focusing less on what I can only refer to as the “vibe” of the song and opting for more of a rhythmic approach, that gave the track its dance-like quality. When the song was finally released, it peaked at number 30 on the Billboard Hot 100, an impressive achievement for the artist who had previously dropped a single and failed to land a single spot on any of the charts.
Running up that hill (a deal with God) ultimately renewed the faith that the public had nearly lost in Kate Bush and her music, it showed that the experimentation could pay off and that compromising one’s vision in exchange for a hit record was no longer the only option. Not only did the song breathe new life into Kate’s career, but it proved that a female artist could take matters into their own hands, experiment, and create a record that is clearly, timeless.
