Because it was used a couple of weeks ago in the brand new season of “Stranger Things,” Kate Bush’s 1985 hit “Running Up that Hill” has exploded across popular culture. It’s the highest seller on iTunes and her first-ever Top 10 hit in america. And maybe the best sign of its impact, it’s all over the place on TikTok. I’ve seen people dancing to it, posting it over footage of “Stranger Things” actress Sadie Sink deep in thought while stroking a puppy and, in fact, endlessly and irritatingly re-recording it. (I get it, singing is a type of participation, but truthfully it seems a bit desperate, you guys.)
An enormous a part of the recognition of “Running Up That Hill” at once comes from the way in which it’s utilized in “Stranger Things.” The breakout story of Season 4 has been Sadie Sink’s character Max Mayfield grieving the death of her step-brother. (Note: This text has some demogorgon-sized spoilers. Be warned.) In only a couple of lines, she gave one in all the nice speeches of the series, words that capture what it’s like being a personality on this world: “I don’t need you to reassure me at once and tell me that it’s all going to work out,” she tells her friends after she learns that the Season 4 Big Bad, Vecna, is coming for her. “People have been telling me that my whole life and it’s almost never true. It’s never true.” On “Stranger Things,” the characters know all too well that nobody is coming to save lots of them, either from monsters or the cruelty of life.
“Running Up that Hill” is greater than just the song in “Stranger Things”: it’s also deeply religious.
It’s Max’s sense of shame and guilt that permits Vecna to enter into her life. And ultimately, the one thing that saves her from a horrifying crucifixion-like death at Vecna’s hands is listening to “Running.” The song inspires Max to recollect the nice moments in her life, the buddies that love her, and with those memories, she begins to fight to return to them. The scene during which she runs away from Vecna across the Upside Down, striving to succeed in her friends while Kate Bush sings, is iconic, one in all the nice moments in television this yr.
Amid all the joy concerning the song’s renewed success, one thing that has been lost is that “Running Up that Hill” can be a non secular song. As Bush explained back in 1989, for her, the song is about two lovers, a person and a lady, who dream of swapping places in order that they may understand one another higher. “I assumed the one way it could possibly be done was, you already know, a take care of the devil,” Bush says. “After which I assumed: Well no, why not a take care of God? Because that’s so far more powerful.”
The truth is, she desired to name the song “A Take care of God,” but her label insisted if she did, the radio stations in at the least 10 different countries wouldn’t play it out of fear of offending religious listeners. Because her last album hadn’t done so well, Bush accepted the change, but not happily. “I assumed that was ridiculous,” she said of those concerns.
Bush herself was raised Catholic and attended St. Joseph Convent School in Kent, England, which Graeme Thompson in his biography of Bush Under the Ivy described as high on conformity, including having the names of women who broke any of the college’s rules announced in school assemblies. “I’d never say I used to be a strict follower of Roman Catholic belief,” Bush later said, “but loads of images are in there [in her work]; they must be; they’re so strong. Such powerful, beautiful, passionate images!”
She also noted that “there’s loads of suffering in Roman Catholicism.” You hear that in “Running,” the quiet desperation to its sound, a craving that looks like it has nearly given up hope, very similar to Max. Even the lyrics signal that; Bush never sings concerning the lovers as having been in a position to switch places. It’s all the time conditional; “if I only could, I’d make a take care of God,” she sings many times. They could possibly be running up that hill together; but they are usually not.
This intertwining of hope and futility could be present in other Bush songs, as well. “Suspended in Gaffa” from “The Dreaming” has a playful, antic quality. But it surely is about someone “wanting all of it” who can never quite get there. “Suddenly my feet are feet of mud,” she sings within the refrain. “All of it goes slow-mo/ I don’t know why I’m crying/ Am I suspended in Gaffa?/ Not until I’m ready for you/ Not until I’m ready for you.”
Here, too, Bush connected the song to her Catholic upbringing. “I used to be brought up as a Roman Catholic and had the imagery of purgatory and of the concept once you were taken there that you just can be given a glimpse of God and you then wouldn’t see him again until you were let into heaven,” she told MTV in an interview in 1985. “We were told that in Hell it was even worse since you got to see God but you then knew that you just would never see him again.”
Kate Bush noted that “there’s loads of suffering in Roman Catholicism.” You hear that in “Running.”
The song, she said, reflects that have of “seeing something incredibly beautiful, having a non secular experience as such, but not with the ability to get back there.”
In “Cloudbusting,” Bush likewise sings of waking up crying, pondering of somebody who was “just in reach.” Within the music video, which stars her and Donald Sutherland, the opening image has the 2 like Sisyphus, struggling to push an enormous object up a hill.
But despite the seeming futility of those situations, what’s notable concerning the characters in Bush’s songs is that they never stop. “Not until I’m ready for you,” Bush howls in “Gaffa,” lacking, wanting and trying all woven together. Within the “Cloudbusting” video, Sutherland’s character, who plays a rainmaker, is arrested before he can finally prove his machine works. The song ends with Bush racing back up that hill—there may be all the time one other hill with Bush—and turning the machine on in order that Sutherland can see it rain. “The sun’s coming out,” she sings, paradoxically. “The sun’s coming out.”
This sense that nothing more is feasible, and yet still she won’t stop dreaming, won’t stop singing, won’t stop running up that hill, is at the center of Bush’s power. It is ideal for the plight of Max and all of the characters of “Stranger Things.”
“I’d never say I used to be a strict follower of Roman Catholic belief,” Kate Bush said, “but loads of images are in there; they must be; they’re so strong.”
It’s also a robust expression of Christian hope. For Catholics, hope just isn’t similar to a Hail Mary pass. It’s not an act that we perform because we expect if we do things will recuperate but since it is who we’re. It doesn’t matter if all is lost; this continues to be what we do. It’s Jesus on the cross, his death the ultimate expression of his love for humanity, at the same time as it also represents the utter failure of that relationship. “My God, my God, why have you ever abandoned me?” he asks, grief-stricken and yet also still reaching. And miraculously, against all odds, it seems death just isn’t the tip.
So in fact “Stranger Things” should feature a Kate Bush song saving a baby’s life. She has long been the poet who calls us to maintain going. I’m thrilled that young people have rediscovered her. After I was a child, Peter Gabriel turned to Bush to be the voice of encouragement in his song “Don’t Give Up.” Within the music video, the 2 hold one another for the complete six and a half minutes. It’s very weird at first (like many Bush music videos, actually), however the longer it goes on, the more affecting it becomes. She is the physical embodiment of the care she expresses, a love that just isn’t going anywhere.
Sir Elton John would later attribute his sobriety to Bush’s vocals on that song, particularly these lyrics: “Rest your head/ You are concerned an excessive amount of/ It’s going to be all right/ When times get rough/ You’ll be able to fall back on us/ Don’t surrender.” The Telegraph reported in 2020 that over 11,000 people have made comments on YouTube attributing the song to saving their lives as well.
In her 1989 interview, Bush said that she saw her vocation as a musician as an expression of a seek for God. “Individuals who create feel an excellent empty sense of hunger, a sense of emptiness in life,” she said. “So many artists are on the lookout for God, and that is where we discover the voice to attempt to speak.” The truth is, it’s not only artists which are looking for God. In her songs, Kate Bush brings us along with her on that journey to a spot she believes in without knowing it may well be reached, “a spot where we belong.”