It took all of an hour for someone to tell me that the Kate Bush cover of “Running of That Hill” was Placebo from Daybreakers. Thanks dude!
But then I started searching around a bit more, lost in the softness of the memories of one of my favorite artists from my early teen years, and I came upon this Charlotte Martin cover of Kate Bush’s “Cloud Busters.” (Fun fact: It’s based on Wilhelm Reich’s arrest, told from the perspective of his young son.) And I’m watching this Charlotte Martin clip and it’s, like, Jesus Christ, listening to this woman sing and play piano produces a physical response in me, something near-Pavlovian. It just extracts emotion, like the notes cut right through to your tear ducts and pry them open. And I’ve always thought Tori Amos’s “Here in My Head” was based at least loosely on this Kate Bush track, and so I looked it up, and found this clip of her doing it live:
And it makes Charlotte Martin look like a fucking amateur. She is channeling something so pure and so strong and she channels it with such purity and strength.
And I have long felt that that old-school YouTube clip of Terra Naomi singing “The Vicodin Song” was the most soul-scraping collection of kilobytes to ever hit the Internet, like once I hear it it’s a force field, and I can’t stop hitting replay and I can’t stop crying and I am right fucking there with her and I can’t leave and I can’t quit just like she can’t leave and she can’t quit.
And I guess it’s, like, I love Britney Spears with my whole heart, I do, really, and a post-9/11 America needed all the Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohans and *NSYNCs and Backstreet Boys it could get its hands on, but when is it going to be okay again to adore and nurture powerful female vocalists like this? These women are certainly getting no deeper or more true than most of what’s hit big in the hip-hop/rap world the past couple years.
And you know who can do this shit every bit as well as any of them but really, most of the time, isn’t?
This chick named Stefani Germanotta, but you might know her as Lady Gaga.
