Aww, thanks. I'm glad it was useful in some way. :) As someone who is familiar with (and who loves!) both Kate's work and Tori's work, I can promise you and your friend that Tori can't be dismissed "because Kate already exists." At best, that's like dismissing Toni Morrison because Faulkner existed. Their work may have some stylistic and thematic similarities, but both won Nobel Prizes for literature, and Morrison did not win because of Faulkner's writing. She won because of her writing in her own voice that told her own stories, regardless of any similarities anyone may notice. Some people insisted that Morrison's writing was primarily influenced by Faulkner's writing, and Morrison insisted that while she was familiar with and had great appreciation for Faulkner's writing, his writing was not her primary influence. It's the same situation with Tori Amos and Kate Bush. The greatness of neither one diminishes the greatness of the other.

There's a short video here on RU-vid that pops up for me often in which Tori says she is always asked about being compared with Kate and she says she is flattered by it because she admires Kate. I'm sure it's very annoying, as well, but Kate is among the great artists of our day, and what artist wouldn't want to be compared with Van Gogh or Picasso or Cézanne or Chagall? (In my mind, Tori and Chagall are of a kind.) Metal, Water, Wood and Flowers Burn to Gold are my favorite songs from Ocean to Ocean. I think I get what you mean with MWW; I can imagine Kate singing the song. Something about the sonic quality and the cadence do seem like a good fit for her. However, the lyrics are Tori's sensibility and style and not Kate's. Tori is a confessional poet and essayist in most cases and Kate is more of a short-story/fiction writer. Metal, Water, Wood's lyrics follow in the tradition of all of Tori's writing from Little Earthquakes on. "Take these broken dreams/wash them away/out with the tide" is another version of "these precious things/let them break/their hold on me" and "give me love/give me pain/give me myself again," and so on. The verse is cathartic and the chorus is both a wish/plea/prayer and a didactic lesson, explaining how to become a resilient psychological shapeshifter and adapt to the forces and obstacles presented by life. Tori's music most often explains and teaches, and it mostly comes from Tori's own first-person perspective, whereas most of Kate's music more objectively presents scenes and scenarios or discusses ideas. Kate sings "Some say that knowledge is something sat in your lap," offering a vignette that allows us to consider people, including ourselves, who passively want to have accomplished something without doing any work, and I think Tori is more likely either to sing about a time in which she did that herself or else to sing judgmentally and in mockery of some foolish politician or religious leader who caused harm by doing that. Tori's music is personal and subjective, even judgmental, and Kate's is a bit more distant from its subjects unless she is singing from the perspective of someone who is not Kate, as in This Woman's Work and Cloudbusting and Wuthering Heights, in which case her thoughts are super-specific to the (usually imagined) individuals she embodies.

One might suspect she could have been speaking on her own behalf and from her own experiences. She was 'sporty,' she most often wore pants when it was considered unusual for women, and she's always been rumored to have been at least bisexual if not gay despite her decades-long purported love affair with her frequent costar Spencer Tracy. She lived to age 96 and never married. There were always many LGBT people in Hollywood, in front of and behind cameras and in offices, but those who were celebrities may have occasionally discussed issues of sexual identity publicly because those issues were important to them, even as they never explicitly identified as being LGBT because of concerns for privacy and their careers. Also, I don't know if she said 'too masculine.' She explained homosexuality as being a natural evolution of humanity to reduce a population that is too large. That doesn't sound judgmental to me; it sounds like a rational, nonjudgmental hypothesis that was probably seen as very accepting and progressive for the time.

She's right 😂 There are a bunch of tomboys and studs 😅 right now plus factories 🏭 still, I mean still making dildos and other sex toys for women and of course men as well plus other genders like trans and non binary

I think I only broke out on the fronts of my thighs...it may have also been the sides. It hasn't happened in years thanks to medications I take, so I can't say with 100% assurance. Hives are an allergic reaction to something. It is possible that you're breaking out because of a contact allergy--the fabric of your clothing, lotion, or something else that touches your skin. It's also possible that you have a food/supplement/medication allergy that you haven't realized yet, and it's worth doing some kind of scratch testing if you only break out occasionally on your legs. However, as my allergist-immunologist has explained it to me, breaking out in hives is a health concern even if it only seems superficial and temporary, and particularly if by any chance after you break out into hives on your legs, you also get hives on another part of your body or if you also have asthma or wheezing. If any of this applies, then you probably should get food allergy testing and potentially also consider asking your doctor to test your serum tryptase level. That is a simple blood test and it's most likely normal, but if it's elevated, then you definitely have a histamine problem that needs medical treatment.

Yes, Kate is the originator-of Kate's own work. Not of everyone else's. I love her work. Absolutely love it and I'm astounded by her creative visions and how she expressed them. None of that is any reason to discredit other people's visions or works.

@@DavidMichaelCommer I'm sure Tori Amos wouldn't have achieved as much without the pioneering efforts of Kate. There is no doubt she was influenced by Katie. Tori is without doubt talented and has achieved a lot.

That's a curious comment. I think Kate Bush has produced all her albums since "The Dreaming"-so, seven studio albums, two live ones and three compilations. Tori has produced all her albums since "Boys for Pele," which consists of 14 studio albums so far, four EPs, three compilations, and two live albums.

Though I think it's unfair to say that Tori is not a producer (of COURSE she is), I think the point being made is that Kate experiments with a lot more arrangements and sound effects and is a pioneer in sampling and atmospheric creation. Tori is more likely to keep it simple: piano, vocal, maybe strings, maybe guitar, drums. While Kate occasionally does that as well, she is more likely to include world instruments and vocalists you might never had heard of prior and push the straightforward accompaniments out or to the background

Thanks for the kind words and the thoughtful reply, and for the stats! I hate being a communicator of misinformation-sorry about that! I "learned" somewhere along the line that Tori performed 250+ dates a year but that's obviously wrong info. (I wonder if it might include radio performances, etc., in small studios that weren't formally part of a tour?) Always appreciate thoughtful responses and fact checking!

Yeah, the director of my MFA program always classified great writers as either innovators or masters. Joyce and Woolf were among those who innovated stream-of-consciousness, and Faulkner and Morrison mastered the technique. Innovators are highly experimental, confounding, often both critically acclaimed and critically panned, often regarded as offensive or even obscene. Masters come along after the innovators have broken through and have reset people's paradigms and they are more accepting of and even hungry for refined approaches to those experimental works. I don't think that divide is entirely a foolproof dichotomy, but it can be a useful way of thinking about things. Of those I mentioned in the video, Laura Nyro was musically and vocally innovative and she never broke through to a very broad popular audience, but her songs became hits through other artists who were more mainstream, and that laid the foundation for artists like Joni Mitchell to come along, who laid groundwork for Kate and Tori, and Kate laid groundwork for many artists including Björk and Tori laid groundwork for many artists including Regina Spektor and Taylor Swift. It doesn't mean their music necessarily directly resulted in others intentionally writing and performing like they do, but it means their styles diffused into popular music culture and was adopted by others. And as I said, I think "big hair band" rock vocals influenced Tori's singing even more than, say, Joni's and jazz singers' did. Almost anytime she plays solo, I hear vocal affectations that are very '70s and '80s-rock influenced, even when she's singing softly.

I feel similarly. I don't really view Kate as 'gimmicky,' but I did interpret her that way before I was very familiar with her work. I think her expressiveness is sincere and thoughtful, but the abundance of whimsy and general kookiness/campiness in some of her performances definitely makes her confounding, I think probably especially to American people. Brits seem to have a much greater appreciation for camp and whimsy and fantasy than we do. Kate is adept with all of that, and at least for me, even when she makes silly, exaggerated faces and gestures and wears wild costumes, it somehow doesn't undermine the seriousness of what she is doing; it just adds a layer of knowing humor, even at times when people from the U.S. would think "this is no laughing matter!"

@@DavidMichaelCommer you make a good point about the Brits. I lived in London for a few years, and although I didn’t meet many Tori or Kate fans then (mid-00s), Tori has made the UK her home for decades now and they don’t bat an eye at her quirks. That said, most of my friends over the years that have loved Tori are gay men ❤️, and she herself has said ‘straight men can’t handle my music’. Regardless if it’s a particular nationality or another unifying factor, TA fans are usually pretty great people. Never been to a KB concert, but I’m sure I’d find great people there too.

Gimmicky! Yeah, sure

Cloudbusting and (shocker!) Running Up That Hill are the ones that drew me in. I thought Cloudbusting sounded like Enya or something but I found the peculiar lyrics "you're like my yoyo/that glowed in the dark/what made it special/made it dangerous/so I bury it and forget" really interesting. When I went down the rabbit hole of what the song was about my heart raced and I realized she really is another artist who may have the lyrical intrigue that Tori does. I just thought Running Up That Hill was a gorgeous sentiment and production but the more I listened, the stranger and more layered it became. Then Breathing and This Woman's Work and I was hooked. She's a stunning talent.

@@DavidMichaelCommer Oh yeah Breathing is one of my all time favorites! For me I'm mostly drawn into the soundscape. The clever and/or deep lyrics are just a plus. Some of her songs that speak to me lyrically as well is Deeper Understanding, This Woman's Work and Moments of Pleasure. 🥰

Thanks, and cheers to you. Happy holidays!

Thank you, Heathcliff. That's very kind of you to write.

Thank you. I just watched an old interview with Kate from the 1980s during which she was asked about how she presents herself sexually. Her answer was (paraphrasing as closely as I can recall) along the lines of, "That's an interesting question, and a difficult one for me to answer. I think sensuality is the basis of all art. It comes from the senses. I think sensuality is projected outward and sexuality is, you know, projected onto you by others." She said she doesn't mind at all if other people find her attractive, that it flatters her, but she finds it can distract from her intention of making sensual art, which is an expression of who she is, rather than something sexual, which she feels is put upon her. I think this vantage point meshes well with Molly Bloom's passage. Joyce did the best he could to get inside and to present the inside of a woman's mind, all her streaming thoughts, including sensual and sexual thoughts, mixed in with mundane thoughts--just as we all have all the time, without being mediated in any way by any kind of judgment. Kate's self-presentation when she was young was a unique combination of a highly sensual woman and an avant-garde expressionist performance artist. Come to think of it, the character of Maria from the German Expressionist movie Metropolis could have been a prototype for how Kate moved and the expressions she made, at once sensual and absurd, and also serious. Check out the video here: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-pJWhaRz7_VA.html I wonder if Kate emulated Maria's dance and appearance in the Babooshka, Sat in Your Lap and Wuthering Heights videos.

It's hard to overstate how startling Kate Bush was when she first wassailed her way to the top of the charts with Wuthering Heights, displacing ABBA's Take a Chance On Me. Before that, Wings's execrable Mull of Kintyre had tyrranised us for so long that only the very old could remember a time when it wasn't number one. Ugh! Otherwise you could take your pick of John Travolta & Olivia Newton John, The Bee Gees, and The Sex Pistols. So hearing on the radio, for the first time, Kate's extravagant masterpiece of gothic pop was a collective 'WTF is that?' moment, the likes of which are rare nowadays, as we all wander our separate ways with our ear-pods and iClouds. Funnily enough, in a week dominated by rail strikes, economic uncertainty and the latest clutch of political catastrophes, Bush's ascent to number one with RUTH, 44 years after Wuthering Heights, was the lead story across all the news media, and gave all of us, young and old, a warm fuzzy glow of nostalgia and well-being that felt a bit like hope. The power of art, eh? Anyway, back in 78, Kate Bush was just 19, and if anyone thought that WH was one-off novelty, The Kick Inside soon put them right. It was an astonishing debut, so vivid and imaginative, and utterly feminine. She sang of longing and lovers and one-night stands; mentors, menstruation and a man with a child in his eyes; kites and saxophones soared; Cathy's ghost howled from eternity, and a pregnant teenager ended her own life to spare her brother from shame. Some of the songs she had written when she was just 13, but this was no mere juvenilia. She would develop, of course, but as an artist she arrived full formed. She was also very beautiful, gamine and expressively physical. She had spent two years prior to her launch learning movement and mime with the dancer, Lyndsay Kemp, who had stripped away her natural shyness to reveal the performer within, allowing her to physically embody the characters that populated her songs. His work was strongly influenced by expressionism, and I'm sure that if Kate did not know of Metropolis before she met Kemp, he would soon have made her aware of it. Of course, for a record label looking to make the most of a young female artist, Kate Bush exuded what used to be called 'sex appeal'. One famous photograph had her smouldering into the camera wearing a pink leotard that barely disguised her breasts and nipples; and she was frequently to be seen in figure-hugging dance outfits. She was probably a little bit naive about the commercial exploitation of her body in these early years, but must have for the message by the time she was satirised on a now classic BBC sketch show, singing a bowdlerised version of 'Them Heavy People':- "People buy my latest hits 'Cos they like my latex tits And want to get inside My leoootard!" She was much more careful about how she was presented by 1980, and successfully avoided the objectification of her body from then on. But of course she continued to express and find inspiration in sexuality and sensuality, whether it be her own or the characters she imagined. She was particularly bold in her examination of sexual taboos such as paedophilia, adolescent sexuality, incest and (back then) homosexuality. She observed these behaviours as manifestations of the human condition, rather than leaping to judge them as deviant, and she treated the protagonists of her dramas with compassion and respect. We don't really like to talk about these things, but Kate Bush allowed her audience a space in which to consider them humanely. It is a very notable achievement of her art, even if it often goes unremarked. Throughout her career she has explored the world through her senses, and in a very holistic way. In The Sensual World, she makes a powerful statement about embracing the world of our senses, enjoying and appreciating the experiences and pleasures they can bring. I love the imagery of her dancing through the trees, the way she wears that dress, the richness of the purple velvet, and the liberation of removing her bonnet, and letting her hair fall freely. The little figure in the pipes when his spark takes life in her hand, and the gratification deferred. It's very erotic, which is not a word we use very much these days; but it's what Kate Bush does incredibly well. I have the same feeling with the second disc of Aeriel, and there's a B-side out there called Under the Ivy, which captures a feeling without having any obvious subject. It's barely 2 minutes long, but it's amazing.

Hi, Cate. Thanks for your comment. I'm doing pretty well, thank you. I think from time to time about posting updates, but I'm really never sure if they are of any benefit to anyone. A lot of people have found my original 'mystery diagnosis' video through RU-vid's algorithm, but very few watch any of the follow ups. I'm not exactly sure what updates I gave in this video, but as of now, I began Xolair treatment for my mast cell activation syndrome (MCAS) about five months ago, and it has made a tremendous improvement in my well being. Xolair is a biologic medication that is injected monthly. As I understand it, it effectively plugs up *almost all* allergic receptors in the body, ending most allergic reactions. As a result, I've been able to exercise rigorously without anaphylaxis for several months, and that's an absolute godsend and a life changer. I am also much less reactive to heat that I have been for at least a decade, and so, so far, I have been able to spend more time outside than I have in many years. (Washington, D.C. is a hot city, and even though it's only June 10, we've already had 20 or so days above 90 degrees, with over 75% humidity.) The Xolair has had the added benefit of making my spring allergies less severe than...well, as far back as I can remember. I usually feel sick, like I have a very bad cold, from April through about July, and I also lose my hearing completely in my left ear during this period every year. This year, I've had no sinus congestion at all, and I can even smell flowers blooming all over the place, which is a crazy revelation to me because I never knew flowers are so fragrant. Honestly. I've always had to stick my nose in flower blossoms to smell them, but now I just get blasted with fragrances every time I turn a new corner. It's really crazy so me. I still have weird health issues, though. Things are not perfect. I've had migraine-like headaches and waves of nauseousness over the past two weeks, and my left leg has been behaving strangely and hurting. But these are odd quirks of a sort I've had all my adult life, and the most life-affecting of my health problems have either left the building or else are on a nice long vacation, and I'm really happy about it! I hope you are well! Thank you for checking in.

Thanks for the response, and the new treatment sounds amazing. Your not being around suggested a bad spell or an improvement, and I'm glad it's the latter. Wow, great that you can smell flowers now! I planted three rose bushes in my garden just for their scent. Sinus problems are awful and I'm glad they're alleviated. How do you cope with that heat? Well, we grow where we're planted, I guess: it's what we're used to. But a blessing that you can adapt to it better now. I'm in South East England and anything over 20 degrees makes me grumpy, haha. I went to Virginia, USA, once and the humidity just about killed me. Hmm, I know the feeling of always some symptom or another. My leg's been hurting too, and I'm thinking it's restless leg syndrome. I'm someone with undiagnosed illness, but because I have trauma issues everything is put down to my anxiety and unhappy living situation. I had the big bullseye tick mark about 15 years ago, but didn't even know about Lyme then. As I'm off work with mental health, I just try to live with the body collapsing on me: nausea, vertigo, breathlessness, fatigue, gut issues. Anyway, enough of that. I'm just glad after reading about your health problems that a lot of your suffering has been alleviated. May it continue! Take care.

@@catem3102 Haha...I grew up in Virginia, a half hour northwest of Washington, D.C. D.C. is hotter than the part of Virginia I'm from because the city architecture holds and radiates heat, and because it's naturally a swamp, and so it just holds humidity like a terrarium. Magnolias and other hot-weather plants grow here, but in recent years, people have also begun growing banana trees, palm trees and cactus in their yards year-round. It's classified as a "humid subtropical" climate, but I think we're on our way to becoming tropical. It's significantly hotter in the summers, and the summers are longer, than it was when I was growing up here in the 1980s. If my family weren't here, I would have moved by now. If you had a bullseye-shaped rash, then you were infected with Lyme disease without any question. Not all Lyme rashes are shaped like that, but those that are can't be caused by anything else, and Lyme is a bacterial infection that has to be treated. It is very much like syphilis in nature. It's the same class of bacteria (spirochete), and its pathology is a distinct three-phase process. First, you get infected and usually but not always will see a rash. Then the rash will go away and you may or may not have a flulike illness. After that, most infections become latent and asymptomatic--they "dive" deep into your tissue and reproduce there, feeding on your body's resources for 5-15 years before causing gradual central nervous system and joint deterioration. In some cases, they also can cause fatal heart conditions. This is what happened to me. As complicated as my Lyme diagnosis and treatment processes were, I was diagnosed with late-stage disseminated neurological Lyme--which is not controversial--and not the more ambiguous and very controversial "chronic Lyme" diagnosis. Both cause profound chronic illness, but the first is well documented scientifically and understood, and the second is a minefield of disagreements and controversies and prejudices and shaming patients. It's also REALLY important to understand that, just like syphilis that goes on for years untreated, Lyme disease and some other infectious diseases can be the direct cause of anxiety, depression, mood disorders, cognitive decline and even psychotic episodes in some people. Yes, a lot of doctors will dismiss physically ill patients assuming that a mental illness or emotional disturbance is causing them to experience phantom physical symptoms. Doctors *must* understand but rarely consider that physical health problems, including some infectious diseases and including inflammatory diseases, can be the *causes* of some profound mental health problems. They come as a package deal. And in these cases, if a patient has an infectious disease and the illness is assumed to be a psychological manifestation, medicating with psychotropic drugs may (or may not) improve the mental symptoms but it also is a Band-Aid that covers up and hides a serious infectious disease that must be treated with antimicrobials. I'm not a person who thinks every complicated health condition is actually Lyme disease, and I get pretty frustrated with people who do always jump to that conclusion. I've learned, though, that in the case of infectious diseases, it's really, really, really imperative not to ignore them. In 2017, my mother died from opportunistic infections that never, ever should kill people in this day and age. She had diarrhea for a long time that just would not relent. She went to several doctors and to the emergency room several times. She kept losing weight. Every doctor told her the same thing: You have irritable bowel syndrome; go home and take Immodium AD. She was 5'4" and her weight dropped to 95 and then to 85 and then to 76 by the time doctors would finally admit her to the hospital. When they did, the intensive-care unit charge doctor yelled at my father for letting my mother become so underweight. It was infuriating. She started bleeding internally from a large ulcer that had formed. What happened was that she became so malnourished, bacteria that normally don't become infectious became infectious and ate a hole through her stomach lining. She lost a lot of blood. Then she got a blood clot in her leg and had to have a surgery to remove it. Then they told us that she had developed pneumonia that she contracted in the hospital days before. Then they told us that she needed to be intubated and put into an induced coma so that her body could recover. Then they couldn't take her off the breathing tube, and then eventually they had to and she died. This happened over Christmas and New Year's and she died on January 11. She was "actively dying" for two weeks, and it was all because 1) doctors ignored a serious illness that was diagnosed, just before she died, as either Crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis, and 2) as a result of ignoring that disease process, she became malnourished and vulnerable to opportunistic infections, and those killed her. She was 66 years old and my best friend. I didn't lose my mom to Lyme disease, but I did lose my mom to medical neglect, and I myself suffered throughout my 30s because of medical ignorance. We can all do better. If you had a bullseye rash years ago and were never treated adequately with antibiotics for Lyme disease, please do yourself a favor and find a competent doctor who understands Lyme disease and can potentially treat you, at the very least to find out if you can improve. <3

Kate Bush was influenced by Irish Music

Thanks for the response, Stacy. I recorded this video about seven years ago and life and health are *much* better, at least for now. It's been quite the ordeal with lots of ups and downs, but I've gotten several diagnoses and related treatments and I'm feeling a lot better. In case it's helpful to you or anyone else: 1. In 2015, I was diagnosed with late disseminated neurological Lyme disease and also Bartonella henselae infections. I was in really, really bad shape then. Treatment took a long time and involved several antimicrobial medications and also a lot of supplements for various reasons. I began to write about tickborne diseases, primarily via a Huffington Post blog, and through this, I met a lot of people who deal with and who treat these illnesses. 2016: A foundation sponsored me to attend a tickborne diseases medical conference, and there I learned about mastocytosis and mast cell activation syndrome (MCAS), which sounded so much like a lot of my symptoms. I asked my doctor to test my tryptase level (an indicator of mast cell activation disorders), she did, and I ultimately was diagnosed with MCAS. I was treated with several antihistamines, and my health continued to improve. By 2017, I had stopped taking antimicrobials and I slowly weaned myself off of most supplements I had been taking. I kept taking lion's mane mushroom supplements because I couldn't think clearly without them and could think clearly with them. I continued taking the antihistamines. I remained 'allergic' to heat and exercise, having anaphylactic symptoms and sometimes convulsions when exposed to either of them. (This is a symptom of MCAS.) I tried repeatedly to simply use an elliptical machine, but two days in a row, my arms turned scarlet and the left one swelled up like a water balloon after about 20 minutes of cardiovascular exercise and so I had to abandon my hopes of being physically active. In 2020, I found an allergist-immunologist who is familiar with mast cell activation disorders. He changed my medications and since 2020, I have been taking four antihistamines and one leukotriene inhibitor, along with an inhaler prior to exercise, and these changes improved my wellness even more; however, I've remained unable to engage in vigorous exercise. Four months ago, I began treatment with an injectable biologic medication called Xolair, and last month I suddenly noticed a major difference. Most of my allergic symptoms have improved significantly or have gone away entirely, and I discovered two weeks ago that I am able to exercise vigorously again...so I have kind of overdone it and I'm sore, but it's "good pain," the effect of working out, and not of my body backfiring when I exert myself. So right now, I am in a really, really good place, but I've been in very good places before and have had major setbacks, and so I am cautiously optimistic.

So glad u are doing better. Keep it up. When we as patients tell our story, our emotions, feelings, pain, experiences it really gives us a will to try different things and help medical society figure things out to help us. Keep telling your story!