Kate Bush redux

So a fair amount of fuss is being made of the sudden chart ranking, for the first time in the US Top Ten in her 44-year career, of a song by the British indie songwriter-performer Kate Bush. The song is "Running Up That Hill" (original music video) and it was released way back in 1985.

The prompt for the sudden interest in the song is its appearance, in an episode released about three weeks ago, in the Netflix series Stranger Things. But that doesn't really explain the reason for its hotness.

One point I've seen made is that the catalog of pop songs is now so extensive and deep that younger people, who are the main audience for Stranger Things, may simply never have stumbled across work that might impress or move them, and when they do, it comes as a memorable surprise.

Even I can testify to that. Despite the fact that it's evidently been a big hit for several years now, I'd never heard of Stranger Things before now. On the other hand, I'm certainly old enough to know Kate Bush from her 1980s heyday. Many of my friends were great admirers of her work. I was never a big fan, and never bought any of her albums, but I certainly knew some of her songs, "Running Up That Hill" among them.

I was hit, though, by an example of the gaps in my knowledge from reading John Scalzi, who's been running in his blog entries about songs that have been personally meaningful to him. Most of the songs I find perfectly pleasant to listen to, but only two have really hit me as appealing to me. One was by Kate Bush, whom I evidently like more than I thought, but the other, which it me as strongly as it had Scalzi, was a song I had never heard or even heard of before, despite the fact that it was released in 1982, which was right in the midst of the only time in my life that I was regularly listening to pop radio. Scalzi counts it as surprising that he came across this song, because its sound wasn't typical of what the station he heard it on normally played, and maybe that's why I never came across it at all. But there's a song I had heard that it reminds me of, and that's "Sweet Dreams" by the Eurythmics. On the other hand I didn't hear that one on the radio either: I came across it on some of my rare exposures to MTV, and it was the really weird video, not the song itself, that first caught my attention.

Back, though, to Kate Bush. Someone has put online the scene from Stranger Things featuring the song, and seeing this I think I see further explanation for the song's popularity. The scene features a teenaged girl named Max who's in some sort of trance in our world while, in some alternate fetid reality, she's awake and being menaced by a hideous monster. Her friends, back in our world, have learned that she can escape the alternate reality if she hears music, so they clamp earphones on her comatose head and fumblingly grab a cassette of her favorite song - "Running Up That Hill." (Why is it the favorite song of a teenage girl? Because this is taking place in the mid 1980s, a setting which the showrunners chose so that they could make reference to Eighties pop cult, Kate Bush among it I guess.)

The emotional intensity of the scene - as testified to by numerous YouTube commenters; it really doesn't have much impact on someone who doesn't know the characters and has never seen the show - is one additional reason I can think of for the dramatic interest in "Running Up That Hill."

And there's another. In the video you don't get to hear much of the song. Just a few clips, some of them beneath background noise. If the sound of the song catches your ear - and why shouldn't it; Kate Bush doesn't really sound like anybody else - you'd have to go seek out a full recording of the song in order to give it a good listen. And that perhaps accounts for sales figures, even today.

I think that's the last of the necessary qualities that explain it.