<\/p>\n
When I was old enough to know better, I ate a bar of soap in the shape of the Muppets\u2019 Fozzie Bear, because I loved him so much I wanted to consume him, even if doing so made me ill. I didn\u2019t yet know the word foreshadowing<\/em>. Fozzie was the only first of many pop-culture icons I feel shaped by. I\u2019ve held longest to Kate Bush, the singer-songwriter who conjures Millais\u2019s 1852 painting of Ophelia come to life, a beautiful young girl, singing to herself as she drowns, her pure, high upper register both childlike and demented. I was nine, in 1985, when Bush\u2019s Hounds of Love<\/em> unseated Madonna\u2019s Like a Virgin<\/em> from the top of the UK pop charts, presenting a different kind of sexuality. Hopping across New York in a Day-Glo tank top, Madonna was livin\u2019 for the city, fueled by wolf whistles. Bush was fueled by dreamscapes, by her inner emotional life. That\u2019s a good option, I thought. I could just live inside my head forever.<\/p>\n Bush emerged at the same time as Debbie Harry, but your punk-rock Grace Kelly was nothing like our prog-rock Ophelia. Never had one felt so worried<\/em> for a pop star.<\/p>\n \u201cHold me down! It\u2019s coming for me through the trees!\u201d she sang on Hounds of Love<\/em>\u2019s title track. In \u201cRunning Up That Hill\u201d she was ready to \u201cmake a deal with God.\u201d I memorized the accompanying dramatic dance moves (to the lay observer they look like Martha Graham, but they\u2019re actually Lindsay Kemp, whose interpretive dance classes Bush spent her original record advance on). My best friend Lizzie and I would send ourselves into raptures watching Kate Bush videos after school, loving her, loving each other, our emergent sexuality rotting our brains\u2014it looked like it was rotting Kate\u2019s\u2014dangerous to men and to ourselves. We were Briony in Atonement<\/em>, but with dance moves. We would write down SEX<\/em> in pages torn from our school notebooks, and then shriek, crumple the paper, and eat the words.<\/p>\n When she first made it, Bush was not all that much older than we were\u2014only sixteen when \u201cWuthering Heights\u201d went to number one\u2014but we could see the massive gap between us. We were obsessed with sex, but she\u2019d had it\u2014a kind of sex, it seemed, that had undone her.<\/p>\n Later, after a gap of twelve years, no longer an ing\u00e9nue, Bush reinterpreted Molly Bloom\u2019s soliloquy from James Joyce\u2019s Ulysses<\/em> as her song \u201cThe Sensual World.\u201d She did it because she couldn\u2019t get the rights to use the soliloquy itself.<\/p>\n … yes first I gave him the bit of seedcase out of my mouth …<\/p><\/blockquote>\n This became:<\/p>\n Mmmmm yessss. Then I\u2019d taken the kiss of seedcake back from his mouth \u2026<\/p><\/blockquote>\n \u201cThe Sensual World\u201d was a conversation through the ages, like Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea<\/em> to Charlotte Bronte\u2019s Jane Eyre<\/em>, a call-and-response between artists many generations apart.<\/p>\n I became a teenage music journalist. There was all this sensuality I carried in me, and it needed direction. But this was the height of Britpop. Guys wouldn\u2019t really talk to us because they were saving themselves for Paul Weller, and by the time he showed up at parties, if he ever did, they\u2019d be much too drunk to win his approval.<\/p>\n My first clear memory of sexual arousal comes from Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now<\/em>\u2014the opening sequence, where he\u2019s so drunk and unhappy that he\u2019s cutting himself with shards of his vodka bottle. Soon after discovering Martin Sheen, I became besotted with Cat Stevens on the inside cover of Teaser and the Firecat<\/em>. He\u2019d been Yusuf Islam for many years, but there he was, captured with his shiny black curls and bare chest. Looking back on a lifetime of impossible men, or \u201cright guy, wrong time,\u201d I note that my early focus was on a man who literally did not exist anymore.<\/p>\n I\u2019d need to move to America to have real boyfriends, to meet men who were on quests and had destinies. I\u2019d have to get older. But I was having a hard time with that, transitioning uneasily from child to adult. Bush\u2019s artistic celebration of fragility and madness had so influenced me that when it actually happened, pulling me under one night in my Manhattan studio apartment, I didn\u2019t see the problem. Madness had looked so good on her. No matter that I looked like hell and was desperately unhappy and also very dull and had no number-one hit singles and had not fallen in love with Peter Gabriel or had Prince write a song for me. I was just, you know, locked away at a psych hospital in the suburbs. Of course, if diabetes is a role model for mental illness, then one can be born with a genetic predisposition to manic depression, but your environment is also a factor.<\/p>\n I\u2019m not saying I watched the \u201cWuthering Heights\u201d video so many times that I\u2019d decided, When I grow up, I want to go mental. But it had always seemed a reasonable alternative.<\/p>\n
\nFrom her enormous popularity in Britain, I understood that men like mad women (see also Betty Blue<\/em> that same year). Or: men like beautiful women, and if you happen to be crazy, extreme beauty will allow them to forgive it. Bush was so<\/em> beautiful, with the slender body of the dancer she had been and the milky skin and dark hair of her Irish heritage. But mainly, she had the most amazing, staring eyes. Bush was probably the first sex symbol since Joan Crawford whose hallmark was staring.<\/p>\n