Review Summary: On living up to a title
I could wax lyrical about how this is a tepid, derivative, empty catalogue of cliché after tired cliché. I could pull up some choice lyrical snapshots to demonstrate this. I could describe the tired, flabby beats, the glitzy, vacuous production, the dullness, the compounded derivation from other derivative works. I could hem and haw and make hay of the fact that I’m definitely not this thing’s intended audience, and the fact that all-too-often a fair-to-middling pop album is an excuse for a certain type to offload all the latent hatred they’ve been harboring for women under the guise of music criticism. I could damn with faint praise, talking about how it’s certainly got no end of hooks, and that Psycho is a pretty catchy bop in its adolescent way. I could rag on this thing with my best stab at the kind of spicy put-downs and verbal eviscerations that make reading negative reviews at the very least a kind of cruel entertainment, spiritually akin to watching Commodus clubbing disabled peasants to death in the arena.
I’m going to talk about Kate Bush instead. Specifically Wuthering Heights. The fact that somebody could make Wuthering Heights their initial artistic statement, that freewheeling, warbling ode to one of the great literary classics, the establishment of a spiritual kinship between two women across centuries through their art, that Bush could not only make such an earth rattling first salvo but that she could then continue to top it for the next decade, it’s all such a startling bundle of evidence that
it doesn’t have to be this way that it should be a wonder that the entire corporate pop structure didn’t just collapse after ‘78. Alas, it isn’t. Bush, one of the great artists in modern music is so often reduced to a token appearance in all the big lists, and if not for a certain Netflix series would almost certainly be discussed primarily by internet music enthusiasts to this day. But she made an incredible impact, in her time and beyond, and it all started with that half-crazed creative outpouring, the result of a few hours frantic work and a lifetime of engagement with the great art of our time. So when I think of that, and I compare it to this, and I think about the work that we all could be capable of under the right circumstances, and what’s being sold and spoon-fed to kids and young adults who aren’t ever going to be given the exposure to anything that could be called “great”, or given the foundation to even appreciate it, who’s minds end up nourished on the cultural equivalent of Lunchables and Mountain Dew, on the likes of Anne-Marie’s Unhealthy, I have to ask, in the words of my fellow infantile idealists Chat Pile: “why?”
