‘The Sensual World’: The album Kate Bush called her “most personal”
No matter what level a woman reaches in music, sexism still exists. The same is true of every industry, as the sad truth is that nowhere, in no country, has equality actually, fully, and thoroughly been achieved. It is too insidious for that, lingering in long-held subconscious attitudes that even women can weaponise against themselves without even realising. But Kate Bush did realise, and on one album, she rallied against it.
From the very start, Bush’s career epitomises power, specifically what it means to be a powerful woman in his world. When she was a mere teenager, she earned respect from some of the biggest players in music. Her debut album, released when she was barely an adult, is mature beyond its years in terms of subject matter as well as sound. When her second album, Lionheart, felt manipulated by outsider voices, she refused to let it happen again. She stood up for herself and seized control back, learning to produce and powerfully stepping into another male-dominated sphere.
Her music screams of this kind of empowered and determined spirit. Since the start, it has been bold and inventive in a way that honours Bush’s mind and ignores all else, especially the calls for her to be more classically appealing or even more classically alluring in her sound and visuals.
Still, Bush later admitted that she could still hear the masculine energy that rules creative worlds in her music. She could only notice it, however, after brushing it off. “This is definitely my most personal, honest album,” she said in a 1989 interview, discussing her record The Sensual World. “And I think it’s my most feminine album, in that I feel maybe I’m not trying to prove something in terms of a woman in a man’s world,” she said, jokingly adding, “God, here we go!”
But there was a difference between that album and her previous ones, and she could hear it. “On The Dreaming and Hounds Of Love, particularly from a production standpoint, I wanted to get a lot more weight and power, which I felt was a very male attitude,” she said, acknowledging how biases about gender and a desire to assimilate into that sphere of tough guys and respected men had impacted some of her decisions. She had mixed feelings on the output of that, adding, “In some cases it worked very well, but… perhaps this time I felt braver as a woman, not trying to do the things that men do in music.”
That attitude of leaning into her femininity as a power is poetically reflected in the album’s title track, a song that borrows from James Joyce’s Ulysses and its final chapter. After spending a whole complex novel from a man’s perspective, his final chapter gives voice to a woman, Molly Bloom. Since its publication, that final chapter has been at the centre of a debate as to whether it is a feminist piece of work, or if it’s the exact opposite, if Bloom is an empowered character or if she is merely a vision of a man’s fantasy.
Bush’s choice to write an anthem for that character and to let her lead this record where femininity ruled – a moving choice, as Bush refused to push that side of herself out of the studio.
