Babooshka (WIP) (Patreon)

Sorry for the incomplete post. Mental health is a burden. With any luck I'll get you the rest of this thing soon.

Babooshka piano demo Babooshka beatbox demo Babooshka Dr. Hook performance Music video RockPop (Germany) Venice Veronica Totaal (Holland) Collaro (France)

It is, to be sure, Kate Bush’s biggest hit in the UK  since “Wuthering Heights.” It’ll be another five years until Bush defeats its peak at #5 in the UK charts. Afterwards, that never happens again. Its popularity across Europe and Australia is significant, reaching the Top 10 and Top 20 in a number of countries. The roster of TV performances I listed above is unmatched by nearly any other Kate Bush song. It proved to audiences that Kate Bush was not a one-hit wonder, but an artisan whose work would span the 1980s. Why did “Babooshka” garner so much attention? 

Its popularity is slightly indebted to “Wuthering Heights.” Like “Wuthering Heights,” “Babooshka” is indebted to the uncanny and mythic. Both songs have literary sources and explore dysfunctional relationships from the perspectives of women. Yet “Wuthering Heights” is more obviously poppy. It’s a deeply strange song, but it’s still a power ballad that ends with a guitar solo. The instrumentation of “Babooshka” is more aligned around the musical technology of 1980, centering around a piano and Yamaha CS-80 synthesizer. Bush then throws a wrench into the mix with a balalaika part by her brother Paddy. The basic grammar of popular music is there, even with the song’s jazzy melody, but “Babooshka” immediately telegraphs that it’s even more offbeat and baroque than Bush’s previous singles.

The newfound ambiguity in musical style is just as much explained by Bush’s evolution as a person and musician as by the turmoil that was 1980, the year the world seemed to totally lose its shit. That year, the eruption of Mount St. Helens caused greater destruction every other volcanic disaster in history, a senile and failed actor was elected President of the United States, John Lennon became one of American gun culture’s defining victims, and the United Kingdom’s unemployment rate reached its lowest point in decades while the country’s Prime Minister waged a war against striking workers. The annihilation of certainty that marked the Seventies became a defining fact of the Eighties: catastrophes transformed from slow, grueling processes into rapid flashes in the pan.

“Babooshka” is an ambiguous mindfuck of a song that encapsulates 1980. While “Wuthering Heights” was a lovers’ reunion, “Babooshka” relates the slow burn of a dysfunctional relationship, culminating in a psychotic break. The song’s title character acts as if Bush intended to finally write the Catherine of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights: a petty, jealous hooligan ruins her relationship with her partner in a frantically thoughtless attempt to secure her interests.  “She wanted to test her husband/she knew exactly what to do”: Babooshka tests her husband’s loyalty by catfishing him through “scented letters” (not a great plan — what happens if Babooshka’s husband finds these letters on a desk while the woman makes herself a pot of coffee? Surely he’d recognize the scent as, I don’t know, one of his wife’s perfumes, but we are working on Kate Bush logic here). Babooshka uses these letters to arrange a tête-à-tête between her husband and her assumed personality — “just like/his wife/but how she was before the years flew by.” Of course, upon their meeting, the gig is up and her husband recognizes her. The hubris and narcissism of Babooshka have broken her relationship. Her crippling need for her partner’s fawning admiration tears him away from her. 

To fully grasp this story, observe the extraordinary video Bush produced for “Babooshka.” As it’s drably staged, as Bush performs against a black background, the video performs its duty with stunning costuming and lighting. During the verses, Bush is clad in a black bodysuit and veil as she dances with a double bass. She meticulously poses alongside it, making short, clipped motions in place of sweeping bodily movements. Placing her hands up and down the bass and spinning it, one gets the impression that this bass is her partner, a sexualized personification of her music. The bass plays a significant part in the song — Peter Gabriel’s collaborator John Giblin provides the song’s marvelous bassline, a typically low-mixed yet important backbone for Bush’s baroque melody. It’s as much a part of the dance as her balalaika is — a sturdy and present but inexpressive partner. She frequently throttles it, ending some performances with a crazed gurn as she strangles the neck of the bass. The verse is the restrained part of the song, where Babooshka quietly schemes beneath her veil and lashes out at the bass with small gestures. It is the chorus of the video that makes it iconic, as Bush screams “ALL YOURS/ BABOOSHKA/ BABOOSHKA/ BABOOSHKA/ YA-YA” while swinging a sword and wearing the tight golden garb of a warrior princess from a fantasy novel (indeed, a number of Bush afficianados will know that’s the source of the costume — illustrator Chris Achilleos’ cover for a 1978 sword-and-sorcery novel called Raven: Swordmistress of Chaos). It’s a glorious spectacle of fantastical madness, engaging all of glam and punk’s raging excess while taking it in completely different directions. It’s almost like the person Babooshka pretends to be is who she really is: a raving madwoman better suited to a pulp cover-art than a real human relationship.

That Babooshka is utterly mad is view of the song. Certainly Kate Bush considers Babooshka a villain who screws over her innocent husband. Bush has described the character’s motivations as “paranoia [and] suspicions,” and ascribes the husband’s desire to meet his pen pal to her similarity to “his wife, the one that he loves.” Her perspective of the song is totally damning of Babooshka and absolves her husband. 

This blog doesn’t always align with Bush’s readings of her own songs. In less than a year’s time, I’m going to argue that “The Dreaming” is in no way the anti-imperialist parable Bush clearly intends it to be. The fact of the matter is that she did not write “Babooshka” as a song about that character’s vanity. Or she did, but not in the way she thinks. I believe Kate Bush writes husband and wife as equal offenders, and that “Babooshka” is two songs at once: it’s a mildly troubling and sexist song about how women’s vain jealousy hurts men, and it’s a raging feminist song about how gender norms are toxic and irreparably damaging to relationships. 

Let’s walk through the genealogy of “Babooshka,” starting with the traditional English folk song “Sovay, the Female Highwayman.” The song (which Bush may have first heard from A. L. Lloyd, a perennial favorite singer of hers) relates the story of Sovay, a maiden who “dressed herself in man’s array,” pretends to be a highwayman, and holds her lover at gunpoint, demanding treasures from him. The man gives Sovay his pocket watch but refuses to part with their precious engagement ring. Having seen her fiancé’s loyalty in practice, Sovay departs from him. The next day, Sovay’s fiancé sees her with his pocketwatch and learns the truth. Sovay explains that she only disguised herself “for to know/whether you were a man or no,” darkly adding “if you had given me that ring,’/ she said, ‘I’d have pulled the trigger/I’d pulled the trigger and shot you dead.’” It’s a darkly funny song, morally ambiguous woman protagonist. At the same time there’s a nihilistic appeal to Sovay’s actions. In a tradition of stories about women who break under the pressure of their partners, Sovay takes violent control of her own destiny, entering a man’s world by taking the guise and (subversive) societal role usually occupied by men. She undergoes a pleasant psychotic break — a rebellion against the norms of class society achieved by settling into one of its most despised professions.