Water, Music, and Transformation in The Ninth Wave by Kate Bush | Dorota Osińska

Water, Music, and Transformation in The Ninth Wave by Kate Bush

Dorota Osińska

As a lost teenager, I was constantly looking for cultural manifestations of water. My old but long-lasting fascination made me explore this trope for months. Finally, I encountered Kate Bush – a British singer and songwriter – and her 1985 album, Hounds of Love, with its second part called The Ninth Wave. Now, Hounds of Love is experiencing its renaissance. A song from that album, “Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God)” was used in season four of Stranger Things’ soundtrack – I couldn’t have known it was going to happen because I wrote this text a month before the season’s release. But I’m really glad that Kate Bush’s songs have become incredibly popular, widely beloved, and generally appreciated by younger generations of viewers and listeners. Indeed, “we’re letting the weirdness in” (as she put it in “Leave it Open” from The Dreaming) into the mainstream. And it’s wonderful!

Although Stranger Things used Bush’s music to capitalise on nostalgia for the eighties, her music still continues to communicate something intimate and deeply empathetic. Not only do the protagonists of her songs look at political issues (“Army Dreamers,” “Breathing”) but they also deal with existential crises (“Suspended in Gaffa”, “Sat in Your Lap”), love (“The Wedding List”, “All the Love”, “Houdini”), and womanhood (“This Woman’s Work”, “The Sensual World”). Yet, the most captivating element in her works remains the theme of water. Despite its coldness and rawness, it offers comfort and an uncanny sense of overwhelming embrace.

Hounds of Love conveys the complexities of transformation weaved into watery imagery. After the commercial failure of its predecessor, The Dreaming (1982), Bush retreated to her studio in the countryside and investigated what would happen if a woman got lost in the water. Hounds of Love consists of two parts: the first half deals with different facets of love – fear of love, miscommunication in relationships, parental love, and affirmation of nature. Although the whole album represents a masterclass in storytelling, the water imagery reverberates only in the second part of the record, demonstrating a harrowing vision of being in the water.

The other half of the album, The Ninth Wave, tells a strange, nearly cinematic story of an individual transformation through, in, and because of water. It opens with the imagery of a girl floating alone at night in the ocean. The first song, “And Dream of Sheep”, shows her fear of the ocean depths and of not being found. She is fighting the urge to fall asleep (“I’d tune into some friendly voices/Talking ‘bout stupid things/I can’t be left to my imagination”), and lingering in the intermediate state between life and death (“Like poppies, heavy with seed/They take me deeper and deeper”). However, the exhaustion overtakes her and water lulls her into slumber. Death seems better than the constant struggle for survival in the cold harsh sea.

Water slowly reveals its destructive tendencies in “Under Ice,” where it traps the protagonist and discloses the oppressive realisation of her drowning. In the Classic Albums Interview aired in 1992, Bush mentioned that “it’s the idea of seeing themselves under the ice in the river, [...] [realising that] “my god, it’s me,” [...] “it’s me under the ice!”. This terrifying awareness shifts in “Waking the Witch” into the fantasy of a witch trial. It begins with a series of callings trying to save the girl from succumbing to deadly waters. “Waking the Witch” makes a reference to historical hunts during which an accused woman underwent ‘swimming’, a test that would determine if she was a witch. Yet, the nightmarish vision of the soul’s judgement is interrupted by a helicopter that rescues the girl from the ocean.

Being in the water for too long, sensory deprivation starts to kick in and the girl loses all sense of where, when, and who. Appearing as a ghost in the next song, “Watching You Without Me”, the girl tries to communicate with her family again and again. The blipping Morse code for SOS and the distorted voice on the record – “Listen to me!/Talk to me!/Help me! – convey a desperate need for connection and its ultimate breach. They cannot hear her entering the house, nor can they hear her leaving it. Identifying herself as a ghost and watching her beloved anxiously waiting for her, the character floats between this world and the other. She laments that “[she] should have been home hours ago/But [she’s] not here” and she cannot let them know what has happened to her. Here, water is a dividing element in both the physical and psychological sense as it triggers the descent into one’s head, heart, and imagination.

Despite its bleak beginning, The Ninth Wave also offers glimmers of hope. As “Jig of Life” illustrates, with the recognition of darkness, uncertainty, and terror comes a reassuring push-and-pull fight for life that explodes into a dancey jig. The singing persona is an older heroine who scolds the protagonist in the water for giving up and convinces her younger self that it is not her destiny to drown (“C’mon and let me live, girl!”). In the context of the previous songs, the protagonist survived the trials of death and is ready to look out for what the future holds for her. A similar life-affirmation that water provides is also present in “Hello Earth”, the penultimate song of the album, where the ocean’s magnitude overwhelms the girl. As Bush admitted in an interview with Richard Skinner: “and the idea of [the character] looking down at the Earth and seeing these storms forming over America and moving around the globe, and they have this like huge fantastically overseeing view of everything, everything is in total perspective. And way, way down there somewhere there’s this little dot in the ocean that is them.” In that sense, the vastness of water makes her notice the vulnerability of her life.

Although water is absolutely terrifying, the horrors of death, life, and rebirth she experienced are universal and even essential to see beyond one’s narcissism. An individual, in the face of the water, is just a little speck of dust. Nevertheless, the realisation is not infinitely depressing but rather a comforting one. The final track, “The Morning Fog”, is a paean of how water – the transformative force that is neither inherently good nor intrinsically bad – made her appreciate her loved ones. Ultimately, without descending into the depths of the water, she would not have experienced the light of love and relief, changing the tragic into the beautiful. While in “Hello Earth,” the woman is drifting into space being overwhelmed by the enormity of the experience, “The Morning Fog” shows her being grounded by the situation she faced, learning the lesson of love, not bitterness: “I’m falling/And I’d love to hold you now/I’ll kiss the ground/I’ll tell my mother/I’ll tell my father/ I’ll tell my loved ones/I’ll tell my brothers/How much I love them.”

Bush’s album skilfully frames water symbolically, historically and pop-culturally: the art of musical storytelling is accompanied by the symbolic dissection of the trope of water. With a peculiar blend of empathy, darkness, and gratitude, The Ninth Wave serves as an intriguing example of how mutability should not be perceived as a dangerous force but as a positive, or even a necessary one. Water is dangerous; there is no doubt about that, but without its transformative qualities, there would be no maturation of the individual. Since antiquity, the abyss of water has been a symbol of wisdom – mysterious, unfathomable, yet regenerative in its nature. Paradoxically, the threat that water poses functions as a catalyst for maturation. As the beginning of The Ninth Wave depicts, the destructive potential of water reveals what is indeed important for the individual trapped in dire straits, which is the connection to other human beings. The nightmarish experience of being alone in the cold dark waters changes into the tale of appreciation of the people we love, communicating the life-affirming message: despite the tragedy, keep going.