![]() So in at least one read, “RUTH” functions as both a psalm of understanding and a warning about its limits. If you want power, if you want horror, you have to go to the biggest boss.” God is all powerful, all-knowing, puts Satan in his place, if we’re going by biblical mythology. “Satan is not in control Satan doesn’t have any power God is what’s scary. ”īush’s pivot from the devil to God reminded me of something I read recently in an interview with the musician Ethel Cain, whose music often invokes God: And I thought, ‘Well, no, why not a deal with God!’ You know, because in a way it’s so much more powerful, the whole idea of asking God to make a deal with you. you know, I thought a deal with the devil. And really the only way I could think it could be done was either. And if we could actually swap each roles, if we could actually be in each place for a while, I think we’d both be very surprised! And I think it would lead to a greater understanding. “I was trying to say that, really, a man and a woman, can’t understand each other because we are a man and a woman. Bush’s original choice for the title was “A Deal With God,” relegated as subtitle so as not to ruffle religious listeners’ feathers.ĭespite over a decade of listening to the song (first via a cover by the British band Placebo) and five or so years of serious Kate Bush fandom, I didn’t think deeply about “RUTH” until, bored one afternoon, I looked up the lyrics on Genius and clicked upon a curious annotation taken from a transcript from a 1992 radio interview with Bush (emphasis mine): “RUTH” spends the majority of its runtime pacing around a now-familiar stanza: “And if I only could / I’d make a deal with God / And I’d get him to swap our places / Be running up that road / Be running up that hill / Be running up that building.” Much fuss has been paid to the “ hill ,” but sometimes a metaphor is just a metaphor. As of this writing, it’s been on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart for thirty-six weeks. “RUTH” was also recently memorably synced in the television shows Pose and It’s a Sin, but this time around, it slipped into some larger collective lack. The “RUTH”/ Stranger Things sync achieved the rare feat of both being expected-the song was a hit back in its day and thus accessible within the world of the show, set in the ’80s-and sublimely weird to younger listeners who’d never encountered Bush’s idiosyncratic baroque pop before. Thanks to a memorable sync on the Netflix juggernaut Stranger Things, this year’s song of the summer was Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God).” Released in 1985, “RUTH” is yet another data point in favor of “bringback” culture, a kicky name for nostalgia ultra in media across mediums. Why the newfound fascination? I blame a recent milestone birthday, a long strange summer, and Dame Catherine Bush, also known as Kate. For the first time in my big adult life, I ponder: What is my body’s purpose within all this creation? What has my body become? What will my body become? And who am I within it, beyond it, yet surely buried or burned with it when it’s my turn to go? I’m now a living record of cognitive dissonance settling into harmony, but within this still-novel satisfaction I find myself unsettled in a not bad but new way. But you make do with what you have I can’t change the Saturdays I spent zoning out during Chinese school into attendance at a house of worship, for example.īut I’ve already changed something that shouldn’t be changeable: Over the past three years, I’ve been steadily recasting my physical body through a combination of working out, eating better, and weekly testosterone injections. Maybe “art” or “science” or “vibes.” As simple as swapping in brown sugar for white or egg yolks for whites, which is to say not at all. It’s not just nature that makes me lapse into rapture: I read a short story that happens to crescendo along a song I’ve heard a million times before but not like this, and the tears that swell in my eyes seem cartoonishly fake except they’re very real and so is the emotion that expands stellate somewhere between my throat and my chest, radiating out from a full-body psychic arrow piercing.įor people who didn’t grow up with God, we find other ways to access what “God” represents, usually as a resource, usually working off of the assumption that we aren’t missing anything, that what we’re looking for just goes by another name. When I run by the beach at dusk, I enter clouds of gnats and inevitably get some of them stuck like misplaced lashes in my eyes-that’s God too. But on a walk with my dog, I look up at the goldenrod crests of tipu trees and imagine an enormous paintbrush tapping each cluster of leaves and think, That’s God. Not with the intention of converting to any particular strain of religion. ![]()
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