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Is Kate Bush "Prog"?

No way to me. Prog's about musical exuberance forcing the boundary between 'rock', jazz & classical with emphasis on technical skills, shifting time signatures & usually being elongated pieces, with solos being a result (unfortunately!).

Aerial ticks the elongated thing, & her piano nods twds classical, with occasional time signature & jazz inflections, but even this I wouldn't say is proggy though. I can tell she's been very very slightly influenced by prog (innevitably if it was all around her & at it's peak in her heyday after all?) but that's it, to me.

Capt
 
Maybe she's looking at my MBL pre in the Classifieds, as we speak
David Gilmour was very much behind funding her debut album ( rumours of more than just a musical connection) and there's were some very Floydian moments on S2 of Hounds, mostly Rick Wright synthesiser sounds, I think !
:)
 
Pure_Carbon said:
Maybe she's looking at my MBL pre in the Classifieds, as we speak
David Gilmour was very much behind funding her debut album ( rumours of more than just a musical connection) and there's were some very Floydian moments on S2 of Hounds, mostly Rick Wright synthesiser sounds, I think !
:)
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C'mon DG would defo have tried it on with her! And he was quite the hunk of sp*nk at the time too.. they defo got it on. That's the closest prog connection in the Captain's log.
 
If there was anything untoward I think it's highly unlikely that she'd have been singing together with him later on.
 
Pure_Carbon said:
Once she was 16....one hopes.
He first got hold of her.....demo tapes, when she was 15.
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Well yes at the time of recording her debut I meant, both same studio & DG's help towards her musically at this time- her being 18 iirc so he'd have been what early 20's? (I wasn't gunning for a sunday AM pfm peadophile-audiophile concoction).

Capt
 
For the first few albums her backing band was essentially the Alan Parsons Project sans Parsons himself and Eric Woolfson so definitely a prog connection there!
 
The Captain said:
No way to me. Prog's about musical exuberance forcing the boundary between 'rock', jazz & classical with emphasis on technical skills, shifting time signatures & usually being elongated pieces, with solos being a result (unfortunately!).
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That’s what it became. However if we take what is probably regarded as the first Prog album- Sgt Pepper- it has none of those tropes. In its original incarnation it was, literally, a progression from the commercial three minute pop song. If we use the definition that cites a development of what went before, then KB fits more comfortably with Prog.

Musically, (at least for the first couple of albums) she’s actually quite conventional. It was more the delivery, the bravery of the naked confessional nature of the songs, and the idiosyncratic subject matter that initially stood out. I mean there wasn’t that many artists writing songs about committing suicide after being made pregnant by her brother, or from the POV of a foetus in the womb, afraid to be born in the wake of a nuclear holocaust, or even becoming sexually aroused by a child (and crucially I don’t mean paedophilia. The Infant Kiss was based on Henry James The Turn Of The Screw, which used the metaphor of the spirit of the dead gardener inhabiting the body of the young boy, which stirred the prim governess’s hitherto repressed sexuality into life. Brave, but a bit dodgy and you certainly wouldn’t get away with it now).

So yes, for me, Bush is prog.
 
The Captain said:
No way to me. Prog's about musical exuberance forcing the boundary between 'rock', jazz & classical with emphasis on technical skills, shifting time signatures & usually being elongated pieces, with solos being a result (unfortunately!).

Aerial ticks the elongated thing, & her piano nods twds classical, with occasional time signature & jazz inflections, but even this I wouldn't say is proggy though. I can tell she's been very very slightly influenced by prog (innevitably if it was all around her & at it's peak in her heyday after all?) but that's it, to me.

Capt
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Too narrow. Most Pink Floyd, especially early, wouldn't fit in with that, for instance.
I think of it as a progression from the three and a half minute pop song, thematically and musically.
 
Pure_Carbon said:
Maybe she's looking at my MBL pre in the Classifieds, as we speak
David Gilmour was very much behind funding her debut album ( rumours of more than just a musical connection) and there's were some very Floydian moments on S2 of Hounds, mostly Rick Wright synthesiser sounds, I think !
:)
Click to expand...
Tell her cash on collection only and then get her to confirm the rumours or not ?
 
Ok OP, so the answer is 'it depends on how you define Prog' as I'd consider classifying Sgt Pepper as Prog, as ridiculous as classing Arvo Part as prog, after all his music is aimed at progessing classical music just as Sgt Pepper was aimed at progressing studio recording techniques within popular music.

Such wildly differing opinions on the word therefore, doesn't spawn interesting discussion as to whether you consider Kate Bush Prog IMO.

Capt
 
I’ve always thought she was close to Peter Gabriel in that sense. There’s not a lot of blues influence in either but maybe echoes of a broader pagan or folk tradition. It’s very white music in is influences.

For me they both have a prog leaning sound world, and serious in a very English way, but also with a pop sensibility.

Is Gabriel prog?
 
kjb said:
Is Gabriel prog?
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Well I always respected his forging his own path and updating his sound instead of endless legacy tours of The Lamb. Certainly his early solo output- Salisbury Hill, Games Without Frontiers- was kinda prog-pop.
 
Scandi Prog is a very different genre , excellent stuff.
Big fans of early Flower Kings, Beardfish, and personal favourite is Motorpsycho.
But still think our Kate has some Prog sensibilities :)
 
From the time when Kate was able to choose who worked with her we hear various new influences colouring her work. Gaelic, Bulgarian and on HoL the then new Fairlight (I think) technology. Thematically I'd argue that Side 2 of HoL fits in well with the then general idea of 'Prog'. Not convinced many of her other albums do. Even the second album of Aerial feels too musically narrow and focussed to be Prog.
 
Robn said:
From the time when Kate was able to choose who worked with her we hear various new influences colouring her work. Gaelic, Bulgarian and on HoL the then new Fairlight (I think) technology. Thematically I'd argue that Side 2 of HoL fits in well with the then general idea of 'Prog'. Not convinced many of her other albums do. Even the second album of Aerial feels too musically narrow and focussed to be Prog.
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Kate Bush first used the Fairlight on her 1980 album Never For Ever.
 
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