Song of the Week - Cloudbusting Kate Bush

I have 5,187 songs in my iTunes library. This is one of them.

Kate Bush is an English singer/songwriter who is not well known in the US. She apparently does not perform in public which, I guess, doesn't help her popularity. She is very popular in England, however, and had several hit songs in the late 1970s to mid-1980s. She took a 12-year break from music, recently releasing a double CD called Aerial. The video is one of my favorite Kate Bush songs called "Cloudbusting" from her masterpiece 1985 album Hounds of Love. The song is about a child's love of her father who, for some reason, is arrested and taken away. When I looked up this video I learned that this is only partially correct. It is about a man named Wilhelm Reich a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who promoted many ideas not considered in the main stream of science. One of his ideas was that a machine could be used to harness the life energy within us for, among other things, making rain. This is the real meaning of this song. Reich called this energy "Orgonon" which is in the first line of the song. There is a pretty long article on Reich on Wikipedia. What's amazing to me is that I've been listening to this song for over 20 years and never heard of Reich or his connection to the song. In the video, Donald Sutherland plays Reich and Bush plays his 10-year-old son, Peter. The video is actually an extended version of the song on the album.



I still dream of Orgonon.
I wake up crying.
You're making rain,
And you're just in reach,
When you and sleep escape me.

You're like my yo-yo
That glowed in the dark.
What made it special
Made it dangerous,
So I bury it
And forget.

But every time it rains,
You're here in my head,
Like the sun coming out--
Ooh, I just know that something good is going to happen.
And I don't know when,
But just saying it could even make it happen.

On top of the world,
Looking over the edge,
You could see them coming.
You looked too small
In their big, black car,
To be a threat to the men in power.

I hid my yo-yo
In the garden.
I can't hide you
From the government.
Oh, God, Daddy--
I won't forget,

'Cause every time it rains,
You're here in my head,
Like the sun coming out--
Ooh, I just know that something good is going to happen.
And I don't know when,
But just saying it could even make it happen.

The sun's coming out.
Your son's coming out.