‘Army Dreamers’: The political song that “worried” Kate Bush
While Kate Bush is often described as theatrical or storytelling, that doesn’t mean that her songs lacked depth. Weaved in between the fictional tales on her albums and the various characters she embodied, she never shied away from getting political, even if it scared her.
There are several examples. ‘Breathing’ stares unfalteringly at the threat of nuclear war, embedding a haunting speech about the lingering possibilities of an earth-destroying explosion into the song’s dramatic climax. ‘The Dreaming’ deals with the destruction of Aboriginal land and the violence faced by Aboriginal Australians in the bid to mine uranium.
Sometimes, however, her commentary comes in more subtle ways as she embeds it into a fictional tale, stepping into the mind of a character like on ‘James And The Cold Gun’. But it’s ‘Army Dreamers’, her devastating take on war through the eyes of a grieving mother, that touched her fans hearts while worrying her own.
“All we’ve got is our lives, and I was worried that when people heard it, they were going to think, ‘She’s exploiting commercially this terribly real thing’”, she said, not just of that track but of every song she’s written about warfare and violence especially. “I was very worried that people weren’t going to take me from my emotional standpoint rather than the commercial one,” she added.
But even when it is a political matter at hand that hasn’t directly affected Bush personally, the song is still personal and deeply emotional to her. “No. I’ve thought a lot about the political aspect – this is when people label them as ‘Political Songs’. But it’s only because the political motivations move me emotionally. If they hadn’t, it wouldn’t have gotten to me. It went through the emotional centre – when I thought: ‘Ah…OW!’ And that made me write,” she said, so eloquently explaining not just her own motivations but why any artist or musician is moved to tackle a political topic.
Those two things beautifully converge when it comes to ‘Army Dreamers’. The song deals head-on with war but looks at it from a deep human. She thinks as a mother, grieving her son not as a soldier but as a person who died. Moving through the different paths, he could have taken, and how one different turn into a career as a politician or even a musician might have saved him, Bush joins the grand tradition of artists who have expertly articulated the topic as not just a political matter but a personal one.
“I’m not slagging off the Army; it’s just so sad that there are kids who have no O-levels and nothing to do but become soldiers, and it’s not really what they want,” she said, defending her pacifist stance on the song as she added, “That’s what frightens me.”
It’s that fear that leads the song; the helpless loss of a life that could have been saved if only they’d had the opportunity to pick a different path, or the privilege to live a life free from violence as she subtly but powerfully points out that war is still a class issue.
