BLAZE

The Dreaming Curriculum

As promised. Wish me luck presenting it on Tuesday! — L

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Although some of it is thoughtless and even puerile, popular music has proven that a unique combination of words and sounds can offer a potent form by which to influence the masses. As pop moves closer to artistry, it may capture distinct moments in its creator's life or reflect significant passages in its culture's development. At its best, popular music is art, both a document of personal transformation and an invitation for listeners to identify, to empathize, and to learn.

Long before Tori Amos and Sarah McLachlan there was Kate Bush, one of the first girl-and-piano singer/songwriters. Bush arrived on the music scene in 1978 with the single "Wuthering Heights" from her album The Kick Inside, a series of largely personal, introspective songs. The record launched her into the experience popularly referred to as "overnight success." Critics appreciated her intelligent writing, while her ethereal beauty appealed to the masses, creating an intense, sometimes fanatic following. Bush released a second album, Lionheart, similar to the first, and then a third album, Never Forever, a little more instrumental and experimental, in the span of just over eighteen months. Then there was the blank period, between 1980 and 1982, when Bush released nothing of her own and worked very little with other musicians. When her fourth album, The Dreaming, was released, fans and critics alike were taken aback: The Dreaming documents a personal crisis — a literal record of disintegration. Read through this album, the curriculum of our culture is a curriculum of alienation from the Self: the experience of education as existential angst. Bush uses her medium to articulate the lessons fame has taught her, offering up a catechism of madness.

Bush intended The Dreaming to be heard as a comprehensive whole, not a series of singles. Each song presents a Self adapting to and functioning in a political, social world. Track 1, "Sat in Your Lap," deals with learning and epistemology. Track 2, "There Goes a Tenner," recounts a bank robbery gone wrong. On Track 3, "Pull Out the Pin" — a protest song — a North Vietnamese peasant confronts an American soldier. Track 4, "Suspended in Gaffa," discusses the fear of dying without finding a sense of self, while Track 5, "Leave It Open," describes psychic collapse as side one ends. Opening side two is another protest song — Track 6, "The Dreaming" — which explores the plight of Australia's Aborigines. Track 7, "Night of the Swallow," is about needing risk to feel alive, while Track 8, "All the Love," discusses changing relationships after a death. Track 9, "Houdini," is a love song to the escape-artist; the track also helps listeners interpret the record as a whole: its central image is the mouth — and by extension, language: "With a kiss I'd pass the key..." (also the visual for the album cover). Track 10, "Get Out of My House," concludes the record with an angry, oppositional theme. Bush's instruction in the liner notes is informative — "This album was made to be played loud" — suggesting that the lyrics were intended to be shouted, not whispered, and that the music was meant to disturb, not soothe. The album is a carefully engineered syllabus, mediated by the technologies and influences that surrounded Bush as a subject in the late twentieth century.

From this provocative lesson plan I have chosen three songs to explore Bush's curriculum of angst. The first, "Sat in Your Lap," is about the elusive project of learning. Is knowledge received or earned? The speaker cannot decide. Perhaps knowledge is one of many heritable talents, as Howard Gardner might suggest — "something sat in your lap." Perhaps it is a construct of the powerful, created to control the distribution of scarce resources, as IQ test scores might suggest — "something that you never have." The speaker's quest for wisdom is interrupted by mundane concerns: work, status, material being. She believes she should learn, but is frustrated when her goal proves more elusive than she expects ("just when I think I'm king, I just begin"). Here Bush articulates a familiar model of curriculum as product, rather than process; her speaker is alienated from learning when her journeys go unacknowledged, unrewarded.

Wrapping up side one is "Leave It Open," a song about the psychic space of the mind and the struggle to remain receptive to difference. Ideological state apparatuses — the school, for example — seek to colonize the mind. Resistance is exhausting and possibly futile; at the song's conclusion, the speaker succumbs. The final, double-backward-masked chant "We let the weirdness in" may be a promise or a threat: we cannot know whether the speaker has accepted an alternative path of socialization ("weirdness" by a social standard) or opened her mind to conformity to the point of breakdown, letting go of her sanity. In the meantime, she has swallowed her ego and must shut her mouth to stop it from emerging — she is silenced. This song is a bitter indictment of the hidden curriculum of socialization: we cannot be our true selves if we are to survive in a world that demands conformity and obedience. Success in this world divides the lived Self from the perceived Self, leading to fragmentation and, as the highly processed, mechanical vocals suggest, a loss of humanity.

"Get Out of My House," the final song on the album, is about reclaiming the Self from forces that would dominate and destroy the speaker. It is sung from the perspective of an embattled individual confronting fear, anger, and violence. The house represents the embodied Self resisting psychic and physical violation. If we read in this text the aim of schooling as socialization, we discover an individual who can resist only by barring and bolting her Self, protecting it from invasion. Two statements of resistance — "can't knock my door down" and "this house is full of fight" — are clear. When reason and physical evasion are not sufficient to evade her pursuer, the speaker draws on animal energy for resistance ("I change into the Mule"); the song ends with a noisy, meaningless chorus in which the human rationality of language is rejected in favour of a rhythmic, wordless state. This text might then be read as a response to the scientific efficiency method of curriculum development; it is a curriculum of refutation, a reclamation of the embodied Self, but ultimately it must resort to wordlessness to escape rational thought. Like the other songs on the album, it ends with unresolved feelings and situations — the whole text reveals a striking absence of closure.

The curriculum of The Dreaming is both a curriculum of oppression and a curriculum of evasion. In this text, Bush adopts the roles of both student and teacher. As the student, she reveals the experience of depression and alienation in the classroom of popular culture. The songs offer strategies of resistance and survival within the psychic onslaught of life as a popular female musician in the late capitalist system. Bush sees herself objectified and responds with anomie: "I want the answers quickly / But I don't have the energy." As the teacher, Bush presents a structural-functionalist view of society: each element of her worldview exists in dynamic relation to the others and attempts to correct the system when another element breaks down. Notice the recurring imagery of fixing and cleaning: "Wide eyes would clean and dust / Things that decay, things that rust" and "I wash the panes, I clean the stains away"; equally, note the response that follows: "But now I've started learning how / I keep them shut."

The content of this curriculum is largely hidden: the intrapsychic shocks of living in an alienated, consumerist society (remember, 1982 was the height of Margaret Thatcher's Conservative England). Education, as we know, may be formal or informal; Bush's experience of sudden, worldwide fame affected her deeply (she was allegedly the most-photographed woman in Britain in 1979). This curriculum of notoriety, of exposure, teaches by turns the helplessness, depression, and rage we discover in this album.

However, a curriculum of resistance that turns to insanity, criminality, and wordlessness as its ultimate strategies cannot be a pedagogy of hope. Any sense of praxis — reflective action — is unclear. The Self presented here is battered by psychic storms. The gesture of expression — coming to speech (or in this case, song) — is important, and the text attempts to grapple with the silence and isolation of modern life, with more or less success; but ultimately this Self is defeated by the many forces attempting to confine her to a predetermined role: a vulnerable, sexualized, female object. On her next album (Hounds of Love, 1985), Bush turned to love as the answer to this crisis, but she needed to name the crisis, as she did on The Dreaming, before she was ready to take that step.