Why Kate Bush’s artistic goal was impossible to achieve: “That’s something I will never reach”
Rick Rubin wrote a whole book on the art of creativity, and even then, it remains pretty aloof.
“Living life as an artist is a practice. You are either engaging in the practice, or you’re not,” said Rubin. “It makes no sense to say you’re not good at it. It’s like saying, ‘I’m not good at being a monk.’ You are either living as a monk, or you’re not. We tend to think of the artist’s work as the output. The real work of the artist is a way of being in the world.”
His mindset is hotly contested, and while a lot of people agree that you can’t overthink the end product, there are others who want their music to be consumed and enjoyed by the masses, and if that’s how you think, you need to focus on the output at some point. Different artists want to do different things, the only thing consistent within the world of music is that inconsistency.
A lot of people think that an artist will have reached the top once they have managed to nail down a number one song or album, but that’s not always the case. Look at a band like Yes, as they had a number one single with ‘Owner of a Lonely Heart’ and thought they were finally successful upon doing so. However, what actually happened was that in the face of such a high, the band lost sight of what kind of music they intended to make. It was a momentary financial success, but at the cost of creative success.
“By the time we got to Big Generator, I was ready to leave because nobody was happy,” said the band’s lead singer, Jon Anderson. “We were scrambling to make a hit record, and the record company and management were all they talked about. They’d play records and say, ‘This is a hit record, make something like this.’”
Kate Bush is also an artist who had commercial success, but she knew that this was never how she measured her success. No doubt champagne was popped when her album Never For Ever went to number one, and Kate Bush certainly felt a sense of validation, but she also knew that that wasn’t the end as far as ambition was concerned. Similar to Yes, commercial success doesn’t necessarily mean individual success, and that’s something she understood.
“When I’m in the studio, I’m not aware of my success. It’s only really when you do the rounds of promotion – things like this. But the real pressures of success, I think, come from the inside,” she said. “I don’t intend to let pressures of success make me go under and lose everything. Pressures of life, yes, I think that’s something that can happen to anyone. There’s nothing you can do about it except to try and be as strong as you can.”
Bush knew how creative she was, and she was never going to be happy letting that creativity be subdued. She believed in her ideas even when others didn’t, which meant she needed to produce her own records a lot when other people didn’t see the vision that she was seeing. Her level of success was measured by how well she fulfilled the vision within her own mind, how well something sold was just a bonus. As such, her level of success was somewhat impossible to achieve because she was never going to be fully happy with her output.
“Success is a label other people like to put on you so they can go, ‘Success!’ I don’t feel successful,” she said, concluding, “There’s so much I have to do to feel that I’ve really done what I want to. My success is in terms of fulfilment and perfection of my art. That’s something I never will reach. I have to accept that.”
