a lot of us on this forum are very wary of our middle classness. luke’s told me he can’t deal with middle class people at all, its very emotionally difficult for him to be around them. corpse is very self-concious about it. reynolds often goes to great lengths to insist he’s not a posho. third told us that he had a grand piano in the his finchley living room with the same tone as someone admitting they have child pornography on their harddrive. its not uncommon on this forum for “middle class” to be used as a pejorative.
my relationship with being middle class is similarly uneasy. for starters in the area i grew up in all my family's dirty laundry was out in the open in a way it wasn’t when i went on to have friends in bermondsey or peckham or elephant or wherever else. my mum isn’t middle class so that was always a stick to beat my dad with whenever she’d have these bitter rants about him and likewise any problem i’d ever had was met with stories about how tough her life was and how privileged i am. then when i got to secondary school i was really the only middle class kid in my year, so it soon got wrapped up in all the qualities of myself that initially alienated me from my peers.
so on a surface level (given all the shame and embarrassment about being middle class) it is refreshing- liberating even- to see people like kate bush or brian eno or peter gabriel being so unabashedly middle class in the public sphere. its a huge contrast to the pete doherties and blurs and kieth richards of the word affecting this faux-working classness.
but there’s something more than that. even aside from personal experiences there is something deeply toxic about the middle classes. as cliched as it is to say they really do “keep up appearances” in a way that everybody else doesn’t. they’re at every moment being disingenuous. they’re forever (often subconsciously) embroiled in this networking and ladder climbing. i remember being horrified at quite a young age when i realised the kids around me had already taken on their parents strategies of social interaction; that even at the age of 10 or 11 social dynamics were already undulating relative to these strange forms of status and social currency. where working class people are very honest and open about things (their impulses, their traumas, their ignorance, etc.), the middle classes keep their cards close to their chests. there’s a coldness to them. they obscure their humanity.
so its easy to have a disdain for the middle classes. easy to caricature them and be repulsed by them (as i have done since my early teens). but what’s nice about kate bush is that she encapsulates another, far more benign side of the middle classes. there are loads of these middle aged, middle class women involved in the disabled charity i work with. they’re all soft spoken like kate bush. they all do contemporary dance like kate bush and love kitsch theatrics like she does. they’re all just as pretentious and laughable and ridiculous as kate bush. but at the end of the day they’re there (often unpaid) looking after these disabled people and these elderly people. they’re doing something good for the world. they have a naivity about them (they genuinely think doing some contemporary dance with a person in a vegetative state is constructive) but however silly it is it’s coming from a very kind hearted place. and that’s the side that kate bush captures. there’s a real wholesomeness about her music. a warmth to it. a genuine moral and psychological goodness. it’s music that would never want to hurt anybody. that's romanticised and wants to see the world be more like a fairy tale. its truly sweet and kind. however ridiculous it is or off it is, it’s heart is in the right place.
its caroline lucas music.
