Ran Tan Waltz
Unfinished again. Sorry. This will be my last blog post to be crossposted to Eruditorum Press, as El’s song-by-song project about Tori Amos, “Boys In Their Dresses,” will begin its run on the site next week. In the meantime you can still follow me at katebushsongs.wordpress.com, or financially support me in exchange for exclusive writing and personal editing here. I am literal days from moving out of my current apartment and haven’t found an affordable replacement, so my partner and I could really use your help. As always, thanks for reading.
Numerous times on this blog we’ve talked about Kate, Bush’s classic 1979 Christmas special. As one of the only extended performances of her music Bush has done, and the only one made for television, it documents some of her less performed songs. While the bulk of Kate’s setlist was played on the Tour of Life, with the exceptions of Peter Gabriel’s contributions and a couple Never for Ever songs, BBC’s style of “televised theatre” differs from the musical theater Bush spent the tour performing. 20th century BBC shows were often boxed into a single room of a studio, and wholeheartedly embraced their limits by embracing their producedness, letting themselves become a theater with film editing. Bush capitalized on the theater aspect of TV particularly in her early career, relying less on special effects than on costuming and mime. Most of the songs performed in the Christmas special have visual counterparts from Bush or Gabriel elsewhere, barring “Another Day,” but we’ll leave that post to itself. The other exception, which we’ll look at today, is a B-side, the only one not to appear on a Bush album that’s played in the special.
“Ran Tan Waltz” has maybe one of the strangest video of Bush’s career. It’s a three-dancers-on-one-stage setup that’s not atypical of Bush in this era, but the costuming makes it into a truly bizarre episode of the period. Bush is decked out in Tevye-like garb, boasting a neckbeard, waistcoat, and bare feet, an exemplary sample of how middle-class English girls think the working class looks (a la some cabaret). To her left and right are dancers Stewart Avon Arnold and Gary Hurst dressed respectively as an upper class woman in purple and, I swear to God I am not making this up, a fucking baby in a diaper. Kate Bush has made a music video that’s a weird mix of cabaret, Victoriana, early 20th-century Russo-Jewish musical theater, and ADBL. In a BBC Christmas special. Having written these last two sentences, I should now retire Dreams of Orgonon and languish in obscurity.
Alas, to stop here would be lazy. So umm… yeah, “Ran Tan Waltz” has a lot going on. Normally we could contextualize the substance of a video with its song, but really, how do you get Tevye and diaper fetishes out of a song like this? Well, musically, “Ran Tan Waltz” is the third part of a loose trio following “Coffee Homeground” and “Magician,” all gloomy Kurt Weillesque waltzes. The Weill influence is useful for figuring out the class aspects of the video: while Brecht and Weill’s plays weren’t always about the working class — not by a long shot — they did often feature a dramatized ideal of working class decadence. Bush’s interest in such aesthetics is more dynamic than based in Marxist class consciousness, but there’s still a largely political base to it, largely one made of gender politics and domestic life. In “Ran Tan Waltz,” the nuclear family is rapidly collapsing. Bush’s character is a cuckolded husband who’s left to take care of his baby while his wife shags his friends. Really. It’s a surprisingly crass adultery song that’s laden with entendres which intentionally flunk their doubleness and flaunt their flunking spectacularly. The very first verse has some rare lyrical profanity from Bush when she sings that some nights, the adultress will run home terrified because she’s “[picked] on a dick that’s too big for her pride.” The chorus constantly push the phrases “she saw me coming for miles” and “she saw me open wide,” the last two words of which Bush repeats twice to usher out the song. Even the title “Ran Tan Waltz,” applies a rhythm to “ran tan,” a synonym for a banging noise. Bush is treating sex more coarsely than she does in her usual output of songs about sex as a sensuous union between a man and a woman. This Bush song doesn’t just have sex: it fucks.
There’s a lot to this. This is a blatantly negative song about relationship dysfunction, which is in part the bread and butter of Never for Ever with such tracks as the upcoming “All We Ever Look For” and “The Infant Kiss.” It deals with a marriage break in a material way: sex is referred to entirely as a rough act, one that’s driving a family apart than keeping a relationship healthy. The poor singer is getting nothing at home: he is, in Internet fuckboy lingo, getting cucked.
The cuckoldry bit is perfectly in keeping with the sort of thing Bush does. Often she writes about issues concerning women from the man’s point of view, a subgenre of Bush songs which is going to culminate in Never for Ever’s most famous single. It’s a strange pathology of hers, one that sets her as a rare woman in a tradition of masculine songwriting, but it often allows for interestingly fractured views of gender. In the case of “Mr. Mom: Kurt Weill Edition,” Bush gives us the destruction of the nuclear family. The mother is out being the playboy while the father stays home and takes care of the baby. [Attack on the nuclear family? Class stuff? Will sort this out tomorrow night]