It’s happened again. I’m not special in this, I realize—it’s the plight of all music obsessives, really—but it raises my self-righteous ire every time. Another artist I used to worship as a cult hero in my early adolescence, proud of how misunderstood and underappreciated she was, has been appropriated by the indie rock mainstream. Kate Bush, for perhaps the first time in her career, is cool.

Maybe what’s happened is a case of cultural nostalgia finally giving a piece of music history its due. There must have been more of us than I realized who, knowing we would’ve been ridiculed for liking Kate Bush by our peers, never let on—half not wanting to cast our proverbial pearls before middle school swine, half terrified of what the consequences of doing so would have been. Admitting your love for Kate Bush in the 90s, as a young teen, would’ve been to let on that you didn’t listen exclusively to Nirvana. With her glorious excesses, the affectation of her vocals, the literary pretensions, the costumed performativity of it all, Kate Bush was even considered a little too prog for most in the 80s.

Beyond the concerns of the middle school cafeteria, Kate Bush was unique among artists I listened to in the way she resisted acceptance by anything but a cult audience. The 90s being (grunge aside) the heyday of straightforward college rock like Pavement and the Pixies, even the more sophisticated indie set had little patience for Bush’s antics. At the same time, the Lilith Fair phenomenon was giving rise to a crop of artists so obviously influenced by Bush that it seemed sacrilegious in my young and earnest mind that she was not given much credit by the mainstream music press. When Maxwell covered “This Woman’s Work” in the late 90s, and I had to endure people raving about “that new Maxwell song,” I was certain that Bush would be all but forgotten by pop music history and she could be, well, mine. A secret I didn’t have to try to keep.

Of course, this is very the feeling that music obsessives thrive and build their sense of community on—being one of the few who know and really understand. It’s a feeling of ownership, a method of consuming art whereby it is subsumed; music becomes part of one’s identity in much the same way food enters the bloodstream and becomes part of the body.

You can imagine my mixture of excitement and indignation, then, when critics’ darlings The Futureheads covered one of my favorite Kate Bush songs, “The Hounds of Love” in 2005. Surely this will get no attention, I thought, and calmed a little. But it was a considerable hit on college radio and ranked high on critics’ year-end lists, including those here on Stylus. It’s not that I dislike the cover—it’s just that it’s my song. Then Kate Bush released her first album in 12 years, to a surprisingly warm critical reception. Maybe, I thought, it would flop and no one would pay attention. But it was no longer any use resisting—Kate Bush was a fully rediscovered pop phenomenon.

In the end, reason wins out. I’m happy. After so many years of operating on the margins of popular music, Bush is finally getting the attention she deserves. Here’s to all of us in the secret Kate Bush super-fanclub who can say “I listened to her when…”

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