Thread by @GeePawHill

Kate Bush, "Houdini".

I think, sometimes, I have not properly honored this artist, Kate Bush.

This song is the song of Bess Houdini, the Bess of Erich Weiss. Wife to the highest paid entertainer in the world.

Houdinit spent his fame alternately stunning worldwide audiences with his gift for illusion and opposing, ruthlessly, relentlessly, the spiritualist movement that was the inevitable result of the devastation of the period from 1914-1922.

He died on a stunt.

People die. The stunts aren't easy, they're very fucking hard. We believe he died from a burst appendix. It is hard, now, to say.

But before he died, he hated hated hated the scammers who claimed mystical powers, he believed they *lessened* his art, long before his death, he told Bess that if there was a beyond, he would reach her, and if he reached her, it would be in code.

So there's Bess, bereft bereft bereft of the love of her life, this man we know as Houdini.

"... with your spit, still on my lip, I'd watch you hit the water ..."

I'mo leave you there, in the moment, in the envisioning. There is an actual history of Bess and her attempts to hear Harry, and her eventual result. Look it up.

But what I want you to know is this:

No one before Kate Bush ever even gave a fucking thought to Bess Houdini.

No one before Kate Bush ever even considered what it would be like to be Houdini's beloved widow.

No one.

But she did.

That is why she is in my pantheon of songwriters. It's not all of why, cuz it's not the only time she did it, but that is why I think she's one of the most brilliant artists of my era.

Rosabelle, believe.