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It is Kate Bush’s salient hit in the UK since “Wuthering Heights.” It’ll be another five years until Bush supersedes its peak at #5 in the UK charts. Afterwards, this never happens again. Its popularity across Europe and Australia is significant, as it reaches the Top 10 and Top 20 in a number of countries. Its roster of TV performances is unmatched by nearly any other Kate Bush song. Bush wasn’t exactly a one-hit wonder — she’d maintained a presence in the higher echelons of the charts after “Wuthering Heights.” But this song demonstrated to the public that she could work in molds other than the precocious exuberance of “Wuthering Heights.” Why was “Babooshka” so successful? 

In part, the success of “Babooshka” can be explained by its conceptual kinship with “Wuthering Heights”. Like Bush’s first single, “Babooshka” is a song of reverie, relating the dysfunction of a relationship through images derived from a preexisting work. Both songs boast jealous women protagonists whose pathologies lead to a dramatic break in their romantic relationships. Yet while the two songs share DNA, they differ significantly in their songwriting and realization. “Wuthering Heights” is much poppier than “Babooshka.” It’s a deeply strange song, but it’s still a quintessential power ballad ending on a guitar solo. The instrumentation of “Babooshka” mixes a piano, a Yamaha CS-80 synth, and Paddy Bush’s balalaika. There are elements of pop in the song, such as its jazzy melody, but “Babooshka” telegraphs its weirdness from the get-go.

“Babooshka” is a lugubrious mindfuck. While “Wuthering Heights” was a reunion of lovers, “Babooshka” relates the slow burn of a dysfunctional relationship, culminating in a glam psychotic break. The song’s title character acts as if Bush intended to finally write the Catherine of Brontë’s Wuthering Heights: a petty, jealous hooligan ruins her relationship with her partner in a frantic bout of possessiveness.  Her plan, of course, is barmy — 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 lady of the house makes herself some Earl Grey? Somebody make a short film about this). 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.” The song is unclear on whether Babooshka is recognized by her husband, merely suggesting he gives into her whims (he’s absolutely a sub). The hubris and narcissism of Babooshka break their relationship. Her crippling need for her partner’s fawning admiration tears them apart, creating a process of martial recursion in which the fear of a relationship’s ending itself ends that relationship. Think Anakin Skywalker and Padmé Amidala, but even more tinged with the ugliness of faint. 

Observe the extraordinary video Bush produced for “Babooshka.” As it’s simply staged, as Bush performs against a black background, the video excels 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 guitar also plays a significant part in the song — Peter Gabriel’s collaborator John Giblin provides the song’s marvelous bassline, the song’s low-mixed backbone. The double bass is as much a part of the dance as her balalaika is — a sturdy, inexpressive partner. She frequently throttles it, ending some performances with a crazed gurn as she strangles its neck. The verse is the restrained part of the song, where Babooshka quietly schemes beneath her veil and lashes out at the bass with small cruel gestures. 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 (a few Bush aficionados will know that the source of the costume is illustrator Chris Achilleos’ cover for a 1978 sword-and-sorcery novel called Raven: Swordmistress of Chaos), she’s moved into an entirely new dimension from “Wuthering Heights” and The Kick Inside, one where the depravity and glory of the human imagination can do its best and worst. It’s a spectacle of fantastical madness, engaging glam and punk’s raging excess while taking it in oddly classicist directions. It’s almost like Babooshka’s costume is an expression of her true self: a raving madwoman better suited to a pulp cover-art than a real human relationship.

That Babooshka is utterly mad is certainly the 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 damning of Babooshka and absolves her husband. To Bush, the husband’s perspective is sacrosanct — he’s a martyr of his wife’s worst instincts, who really loves her despite her worst assumptions. The story is ultimately one of Babooshka’s downfall, where her preoccupation with retaining control of her life costs her the marriage.

But Dreams of Orgonon doesn’t always align itself with Bush’s readings of her own songs. In less than a year’s time, I’m going to argue that “The Dreaming” is a hundred miles from the anti-imperialist parable Bush 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’s articulated in interviews. I think Kate Bush writes the husband and wife as equal offenders, and that “Babooshka” is two songs at once: it’s a distressingly traditionalist song about how women’s vanity and jealousy hurts their male partners, and it’s a subversive feminist tract about how gender norms are toxic to relationships. 

Let’s walk back to the beginning of Babooshka’s narrative genealogy, the traditional English folk song “Sovay, the Female Highwayman.” The song (which Bush could have heard from A. L. Lloyd, one of her perennial favorite singers) relates the story of a maiden who “dressed herself in man’s array,” pretends to be a highwayman, and holds her lover at gunpoint, demanding his treasures. 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 morbidly funny song that creates a female protagonist quite unlike anything else in fiction (Doctor Who arguably pays homage to “Sovay” in its 2015 episode “The Woman Who Lived,” where Maisie Williams plays a character who masquerades as a highwayman with a man’s voice). 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 a socially unacceptable mode of agency, testing her partner’s dedication to her by literally threatening to rob him. She undergoes a pleasant psychotic break, staging a rebellion against the norms of class society achieved by settling into one of its most despised professions.

Kate Bush is relatively at home in class society. While she’s written songs about working class people, she does so from a skewed theatrical perspective rather than a kitchen-sink realist one. Class dynamics in her stories are largely made up of characters and tropes, and swapping out classical ideas in antiquated contexts for modern ones. In “Babooshka,” she switches out the Sovay’s bandit for its middle class equivalent — an adulteress. In this version of the narrative, the man is complicit in the hoodwinking to an extent, as he chooses to go along with this strange woman writing him letters (itself a bourgeois medium of communication). Rather than simply being outmaneuvered by his lady, he betrays her by doing exactly what she wanted him to do. There’s a fundamental power imbalance here that simultaneously relies on unethical predilections from both parties, rather than a fairly simple narrative of a gentleman being manipulated by his girlfriend. Neither “Sovay” nor “Babooshka” reveal the aftermath of their seminal betrayals, but in both songs there’s a clear case of social boundaries being crossed. 

Now let’s turn to Babooshka’s husband. Kate Bush is largely right when she says Babooshka is responsible for ruining their relationship. The situation that thwarts their marriage is one she contrives herself. As the song’s protagonist, she’s the center of the story, which is focused around her failure to treasured the love and support she has. Indeed there are little hints that she turned on her husband long before he showed interest in her catfish, particularly in her husband’s observation that the catfish resembles “his wife before she freezed on him/just life his wife when she was beau-ti-ful.” There’s a distressing suggestion that Babooshka is simply no longer attractive to her husband and stopped being beautiful when she stopped paying attention to him. Bush’s view that Babooshka’s husband is the betrayed party is largely supported by the song, as she stops being a good wife for this guy. However, Bush fails to account for the fact that Babooshka’s husband cheats on his wife. It can hardly be said this isn’t an emotional affair — he has a correspondence with a woman who reminds him of his wife when she was young (which. Ew) and goes to meet her behind Babooshka’s bad. There are few ways in which this doesn’t match the definition of adultery. That the song doesn’t take him to task for this is odd, and suggests Bush’s tendency to forgive men for their wrongdoings is a tad blinkered. However severe Babooshka’s crimes against love are (and they are major), there’s no innocent party in this arrangement.

This is beginning to sound like a moralistic screed where I condemn the song’s characters for being unethical. It isn’t. I think the song’s moral ambiguity is its most interesting aspect. Again, there’s disturbingly reactionary slant to the way “Babooshka” perceives relationships. It perceives gender in binary, determinist ways, pinning women’s jealousy as the rot at the heart of bad marriages. This is somewhat endemic to the source material — “Sovay” is quite obviously about a sociopathic anti-heroine — and yet it’s also a reoccurring part of Bush’s work. Her songs often center a heteronormative model of romantic relationships and certain modes of behavior for men and women at the core of their dramas. It’s an ongoing flaw in Bush’s work that simplifies the psychological realities of love and gender into a set of conservative tropes. For all that she pushes against said tropes and often puts a modern glean on them, particularly in her willingness to face complex emotions, she tends to settle for a fairly traditional way of looking at couples.

But Kate Bush does push against the grain. Her songs show a significant willingness to interrogate the internal experience of women. Indeed, exploring the ramifications of an ugly motive like jealousy is crucial to acknowledging that women can be toxic, rather than fawning objects of desire. And in her willingness to ascribe greater motivation and interiority to her whole cast, Bush imbues Babooshka’s husband with a similar moral failure mode, even if she doesn’t realize it. It’s important to grasp authorial intent, but readings of texts shouldn’t stop there. The nature of texts is such that they’re buzzing with suggestions their authors haven’t considered. In the case of “Babooshka,” we have a complex meditation on how gendered expectations can poison relationships. Babooshka lets her suspicions and preoccupation with being young and glamorous against overcome her life, and her husband lets his treacherous predilection towards young beauty lead him astray. No party comes out on top. They’re trapped in an ugly binary where men and women must perform certain walks of life that are incompatible with real human desires. If there’s a way to use the framework of folklore in a thoughtful and modern way, this is it.

As such, “Babooshka” makes an important case for Kate Bush’s songwriting: that it can be multiple things at once, a conflicting hive of meaning, and that Bush’s love for the archaic is far from a nostalgic haze. There’s a constant willingness to interrogate how stories like these work, and how real human beings would act when plugged into them. Some of the most complex women in fiction are characters in Kate Bush songs. If Dreams of Orgonon has a thesis, it’s that Kate Bush is a traditional-minded person who can’t stop herself from writing feminist songs. Break the glass. Howl “Babooshka.” The 1980s are here, and we have a whole new swordmistress of chaos for them.