The Archival Spell: Kate Bush and the Politics of Cultural Memory
I still dream of Orgonon.
The line floats through Terry Gilliam's miniature movie, Kate Bush transformed into Peter Reich, Donald Sutherland towering as the persecuted scientist Wilhelm Reich. The cloudbusting machine—part Tesla coil, part Victorian fever dream—stretches toward the sky in a gesture of pure theatrical faith. We're watching this at a local art museum theater, part of a "Kate Bush night" that feels like both retrospective and séance. Nancy and I have stumbled into something that's part film screening, part archival rescue mission.
The program consists of The Whole Story anthology (sourced, we suspect, from LaserDisc—the image quality too crisp for VHS under projection), followed by The Line, the Cross and the Curve, Bush's ambitious failure of a short film that she later dismissed as "a load of bollocks." But sitting in museum darkness, watching these artifacts flicker back to life, I'm struck not by their supposed failures but by their sheer existence—and by how precarious that existence has become.
The Spell of the Road
Years earlier, Nancy and I had splurged on a convertible for a New England vacation. Aside from the amusement of discovering The Grateful Dead had their own satellite radio channel, the memorable driving experience was listening to Hounds of Love from start to finish with the top down while cruising through Maine. That album—structured like a two-act play, with the hits giving way to The Ninth Wave's oceanic dream-logic—transformed the landscape. After that trip, Maine wasn't just Maine anymore. It was Kate Bush's Maine, sequenced on a Fairlight sampler and punctuated by whispered spells.
This is how art colonizes memory, how certain combinations of sound and space become inseparable. But it's also how art survives—not just in official channels, but in the mobile archives of personal experience. We become archivists not through ownership of artifacts but through acts of attunement—how we listen, remember, reenact. The convertible becomes a capsule of shared reverie, the CD acting as spell and score simultaneously, creating a distributed archive that exists in motion, in memory, in the space between two people sharing the same transformative moment.
The Worlds of Kate Bush
The museum program's subtitle was something like "the worlds of Kate Bush," and that phrase cuts to something essential. Her music videos aren't just promotional artifacts—they're self-contained mythologies, dream-logic dioramas with recurring symbols and obsessions. Take "Experiment IV," that proto-X Files government horror story about a sound weapon so terrifying it can kill. Released in 1986, it imagines secretive military R&D, sterile labs, and scientific idealists twisted by institutional agendas. It's got the bureaucratic horror of Monty Python's weaponized joke, but rendered to be genuinely lethal.
What strikes me about these videos, watched together, is Bush's obsession with uniforms—symbols of authority and power that appear throughout her work, always compromised, always masking panic or absurdity. In "Army Dreamers," uniforms are maternal grief in camouflage. In "Cloudbusting," they're the forces of state violence. In "Experiment IV," they're the clean-cut façade for a program that births a Lovecraftian sonic entity.
These aren't just aesthetic choices. They're strategic hexes, critiques of power embedded in four-minute pop songs and broadcast into living rooms worldwide.
The Sell-By Date
I think about Kate Bush at around the time The Red Shoes emerged in 1993. She was in her mid-30s—already "aging out" of pop stardom in a culture that puts a sell-by date on women and starts actively erasing them after their twenties. But the timing makes it even more brutal: 1993 is peak alternative rock hegemony, grunge sanitized and MTV-ized, the industry having figured out how to package rebellion—but only a very specific kind, flannel-clad and crucially male-dominated.
Bush is caught in an impossible position: too weird for mainstream radio, too theatrical for the newly dominant alternative aesthetic, too established to be "discovered," and too uncompromising to reinvent herself for the zeitgeist. The very qualities that made her revolutionary in the late '70s now make her seem like a relic. Within a year, Kurt Cobain would champion The Raincoats and The Vaselines out of obscurity, showing there was appetite for recognizing overlooked artists—but that cultural capital dies with him in April '94. By then, the Britpop machine is gearing up with its own nostalgic masculinity.
The album itself is steeped in loss: her mother's death, fractured relationships, disillusionment with fame's machinery. When Bush later dismissed the accompanying film as a failure, it felt preemptive—an artist trying to beat the world to the punchline. But here's what gets erased: Bush made a feature-length, dance-driven, woman-centered mythic narrative about the costs of artistic ambition, released into a musical landscape that had no room for her particular brand of emotional complexity.
The Red Shoes contains some of her most musically adventurous work—the Prince collaboration, polyrhythmic complexity, world music integration without appropriation. But none of that registers in a moment when musical complexity reads as pretension, when the dominant female archetypes are riot grrrl rage or ethereal waif vulnerability.
Bush didn't try to fit. She retreated. Went quiet. Didn't release another album for twelve years.
The contrast with contemporaries like Liz Phair is instructive. Phair's Exile in Guyville also arrives in 1993, but represents the opposite strategy—brutal directness instead of mythic complexity, lo-fi earthiness instead of cinematic dreams. Yet both women get punished for their approaches: Bush dismissed as pretentious, Phair facing plagiarism accusations that betray the persistent suspicion that women's work, especially when it's good, must somehow be inauthentic.
Phair couldn't afford to disappear. She had to keep making albums, keep touring, keep engaging with an industry that increasingly seemed confused by her work. Bush gets to be an enigma; Phair has to keep explaining herself. Different economic positions, radically different possibilities for resistance.
What gets lost in that gap isn't just her public presence—it's the acknowledgment that she never stopped being an artist. She just stopped being visible on the culture's terms. But this disappearance, however principled, was also a privilege. Bush had the economic capital—from The Whole Story's multi-platinum success, from owning her masters and publishing, from decades of catalog income—to vanish for twelve years without financial consequence.
Most artists, especially women who hadn't achieved her level of commercial success, couldn't afford such resistance. They had to keep touring, keep releasing, keep chasing relevance because they needed the income. Bush's ability to retreat wasn't just artistic defiance; it was enabled by extraordinary financial security.
When she returned with Aerial in 2005, she gave us a sprawling double album about domestic life, birdsong, washing machines, and the divine—arriving in a musical landscape where Björk, Radiohead, and other iconoclasts had carved out space for complexity. But Bush gets to make that reentry as a legend returning rather than a newcomer scrambling for visibility. The kind of album you only make when you know your worth doesn't reside in youth or attention anymore—and when you can afford to prove it.
The Unstable Archive
Which brings us to the quietly devastating reality: Kate Bush's complete videography isn't available on Blu-ray or major streaming platforms. This isn't just a licensing issue—it reflects a broader archival failure that disproportionately affects women artists, especially those whose work resists easy categorization. This disparity compounds exponentially for women of color, queer women, or artists working outside the Anglo-American cultural core, creating hierarchies of forgetting that mirror broader structures of power.
Bush is canonical, yet her visual corpus exists in limbo. Some videos persist in decent resolution on YouTube, but the original masters, professional restorations, curated releases? Where are they? This is striking when you consider how lovingly restored the catalogs of male contemporaries have been. Meanwhile, The Line, the Cross and the Curve remains largely unavailable in any legitimate digital form.
The systems that decide what gets preserved often reinforce the very power dynamics Bush's work critiques. It's almost too perfect—and too bitter—that "Experiment IV" and "Cloudbusting" exist in digital half-life while corporate rock catalogs are endlessly reissued in high definition.
The Ritual and the Meme
Then there's the mass dancing event for "Wuthering Heights"—a devotional ritual that's now also a meme. The "Most Wuthering Heights Day Ever" sees crowds gather in red dresses to recreate Bush's choreography. It's joyful, campy, communal—and a case study in how rituals of reverence can become flattened into viral spectacle.
When it works, it's beautiful: bodies reclaiming public space, channeling a woman who at nineteen redefined what pop could be. The original video is strange magic—Bush spinning through a windless void, singing as the ghost of Cathy. When the annual reenactments happen, they're not mocking her; they're inhabiting her, reenacting a performance that was itself a possession.
But when the ritual crosses into meme—shared out of context, played for laughs—it risks becoming another case of "look at the silly women twirling." The nuance, the intentionality, the artistry can be drowned out by algorithmic churn.
Yet here's what Bush herself anticipated: "Wuthering Heights" is already a story of repetition and haunting, of a woman's voice refusing to be silenced. The mass dance becomes an act of embodied preservation, bodies keeping memory alive through motion. In a world that erases women past a certain age, the ritual resists commodification. It doesn't belong to Spotify or Netflix. It belongs to whoever's willing to put on a red dress and howl in public.
It's a meme, yes. But it's also a spell.
Against Simple Stories
Unlike Bush's fairytales, with their clear archetypal figures—Heathcliff and Cathy, witch and persecutor, father and son—the real cultural politics have no clean protagonists and antagonists. The music industry executives aren't cartoon villains, but neither are they neutral actors—they're responding to market pressures shaped by cultural bias and institutional inertia. Radio programmers who stopped playing her music weren't necessarily misogynist conspirators; they were reading cultural temperature and making safe bets. Critics who dismissed The Red Shoes operated within frameworks shaped by forces larger than individual bias.
And Bush herself resists easy categorization as victim or hero. She's someone with extraordinary privilege who made choices that were simultaneously artistically principled and economically feasible. Her disappearance was both resistance and retreat, both feminist statement and luxury few could afford.
But the privilege extends even further back—to the almost fairy-tale circumstances of her discovery and development. Bush was essentially found at 16, signed at 19, and had the luxury of honing her craft in professional studios with serious resources and mentorship. The David Gilmour connection—his houseboat studio, his industry clout, his willingness to champion a teenage unknown—represents artistic fortune that's almost impossible to replicate.
Most artists spend their twenties scraping together studio time, learning their craft in dive bars and bedroom recordings. Bush got to skip that developmental phase entirely, arriving essentially fully-formed because she'd had years to experiment with professional equipment while still a teenager. The mentorship mattered—but so did her uncanny readiness to make use of it, and the internal world she was already shaping long before she entered a studio. The houseboat studio becomes almost symbolic—a floating, isolated creative space where extraordinary talent could develop insulated from both financial pressure and industry interference.
This moral ambiguity makes the cultural story messier than her songs, but also more honest. The forces that marginalize women artists aren't evil wizards you can defeat with magic spells—they're systemic, structural, often invisible even to those perpetuating them. Bush's songs resolve through transformation and reversal; her actual career required mundane strategies: financial planning, strategic withdrawal, waiting for cultural shifts.
Around the time of 50 Words for Snow, someone on social media dismissed Bush as a Tory—one of those glib comments that stick harder than decades of nuanced work. It stemmed from a 2016 interview where Bush was quoted calling Theresa May "wonderful," a comment later clarified as being about the abstract idea of female leadership, not party politics.
But the accusation reveals something deeper: our culture demands legibility from women artists, especially as they age. We want them to plant flags, show loyalty, take clear sides. Bush's refusal to be politically legible—her preference for symbolism, dream logic, and allegory over ideology—becomes its own subversive act.
Consider the actual record: "Army Dreamers" as anti-militarist critique, "Breathing" as nuclear anxiety, "Experiment IV" as anti-industrial satire, The Ninth Wave as meditation on gendered persecution. She has consistently elevated female perspective and non-linear narrative without pandering to market tastes or fashionable causes.
Bush operates outside standard political maps, which makes her both maddening and liberating. She's not apolitical—her politics are expressed through affect, aesthetic friction, and cultural resistance rather than party lines. That ambiguity, while easily misconstrued, is what makes her enduring.
She's a witch, an archivist of dream-states, a mythographer of feminine interiority—her own category. And like the best witches, she understands that the most subversive power often lies not in direct confrontation but in maintaining mystery, in refusing to be fully known or controlled.
The Counter-Archive
Which makes screenings like the one Nancy and I attended vital. They act as unofficial counter-archives—glimpses of what cultural memory could look like if it weren't filtered through commerce and platform consolidation. We're not just spectators; we're stewards, witnesses to work that exists increasingly in the margins.
The museum theater, the LaserDisc source, the communal experience of watching these videos as intended—as complete works rather than YouTube fragments—all become acts of resistance against cultural forgetting. When the official channels fail, when the proper archives don't materialize, these improvised preservation efforts become essential.
Nancy and I drove home talking about Hawkwind's "Orgone Accumulator"—another Wilhelm Reich tribute, but one that turns the orgone box into cosmic garage-rock fuel. Where Bush's "Cloudbusting" channels grief and wonder, Hawkwind delivers sleaze and swagger. Both artists mythologized the same figure, creating a chain of transmission that now includes us, driving through the night, connecting dots across decades.
The Spell Continues
I still dream of Orgonon. The line stays with me not just as lyric but as method—the way art creates its own weather systems, its own gravitational pull. Bush understood something that many of her contemporaries didn't: that pop music could be a delivery system for dreams, for myths, for ways of seeing that couldn't be contained by three-minute radio slots or MTV rotation.
Her work persists not despite its strangeness but because of it. In a culture that tries to smooth out the rough edges, to make everything legible and marketable, Bush remains proudly illegible. She remains a witch, an archivist of dream-states, a mythographer of feminine interiority. Her own category.
The flickering availability of her videos, that her films remain hard to find, that her political positions resist easy categorization—all of this is part of the archival spell. In a world of infinite scroll and algorithmic recommendation, she remains genuinely mysterious. And mystery, it turns out, might be the most subversive force of all.
Sitting in that museum theater, watching those archived images flicker back to life, I understood something about cultural memory and its discontents. The official channels will continue to fail women artists, will continue to prioritize the easily packaged over the genuinely transformative. But the work persists anyway—in museums and convertibles, in mass dances and sold out screenings, in the spaces where true believers gather to keep the spells alive.
I still dream of Orgonon. And the dream continues to make its own weather, to find its own ways of surviving, to cast its own counter-spells against forgetting.
The author wishes to thank Nancy for her superior Hawkwind knowledge and the folks who put on that wonderful night at the museum. May all archives be so lovingly tended.