“Deeper Understanding” is the perfect single to release first. It was WAAAY ahead of it’s time. A slightly science-fictiony story, it’s from the point of view of someone who is obsessed with computers, and buys a creepy program that consumes them.
Keep in mind that it was released in 1989, BEFORE the World Wide Web even existed!
It starts out:
Later, as the program consumes them…
Here are the full lyrics, also included in that YouTube link above.
I can’t wait to hear the new version, but I do hope she keeps the Trio Bulgarka. They’re so perfect in the original version. It sounds like she will.
I’m so excited for this that I may vomit. A new album (kinda), plus remasters of The Sensual World and The Red Shoes, plus the promise of The Dreaming and Hounds Of Love also to be remastered and released later in the year… after six years of near-complete silence this is all too much. I need a lie down.
And the single she’s releasing from it is the one that I always thought deserved to be a single the first time around. Amazing.
The remaster of The Dreaming is the remaster that excites me most. It’s not only my favorite album by Kate, it’s my favorite album by anybody, ever. It’s my Desert Island Album. If I could only listen to one album for the rest of my life, it’s so layered and dense and full of so many ideas and colors and voices and original musical thoughts that it would keep me entertained. I’ve heard it hundreds of times and I can still hear new things when I listen to me. How much more will a remaster reveal? I may faint too.
I’m surprised she didn’t choose to revisit some of the songs on her first two albums. As that article says, she had no control over the producton and while I do love the albums, it would be fascinating to hear a more modern take on some of the songs.
Remaster? Oh, please, please, PLEASE make new mixes, ideally surround-sound ones!
“Remastering” is mostly bullshit - taking the stereo mix-down master and listening to it and producing a better digital master tape. That can produce five, maybe ten per cent improvement.
But remixing could be amazing. Most of the flaws of a recording are produced during the mix-down from the multi-track. If you have a chance to hear the isolated tracks, most sound great, or can be made to sound great with a subtle amount of noise reduction and other processing. For instance, the Fairlight was an astonishing breakthrough. But it was 8 bit digital recording. Seriously, it was in the same class as an Amiga or Atari computer, and every PC and Mac blows it away in sound quality. Some of Kate’s best work is marred by this “wash” of aliasing noise from the Fairlight sampling process.* If the original master tapes were captured into a DAW like Protools, the Fairlight samples could be replaced by better ones.
The Dreaming and Hounds of Love with the audio quality of Aerial? This could be an improvement in audio quality like The Beatles Love.
You can hear it most readily on the title song on The Dreaming on that Fairlight ORCH5 patch.
Replace The Dreaming with Hounds Of Love and I could have written that paragraph! The Dreaming is in my top five of all time too, add in The Sensual World and that’d probably be my favourite trio of consecutive albums by any artist, ever.
The vast mass of the public didn’t get obsessed with computers prior to the World Wide Web. In 1989 the vast majority of the American public didn’t even have e-mail.
For instance, I attended the 1991 World Science Fiction Convention in Chicago. There was a party exclusively for people who had e-mail addresses called the “@Party”.
It was held in a single hotel room. One might consider the World SF convention to exceed the default level of geekiness of the general public, and out of 5,661 people there, there were few enough to fit into a single hotel room. Two years after the release of Deeper Understanding.
I’m sure it was totally because there were that few people who had email addresses and totally not because it was a frickin’ lame idea for a party. I mean, email had been around for, what, 20 years by that time? And BBSes had been around for 15 or so?
The “antisocial nerd geeking out over <whatever technology is available at the time>” has been a theme for at least the past few hundred years.
I know. When I first got on the Net, it was via world.std.com, then later via CBBS, Randy Suess and Ward Christensen’s board, arguably the first BBS. I attended CBBS parties. I have some idea about nerd parties.
You are welcome to your opinion of whether the idea for the party was lame, but I believe it is biased because you have grown up in a world where having an e-mail address is the most mundane thing imaginable. At ChiCon V, it was a very cool thing indeed. I met ESR and Clifford Stoll there when I dropped in.
You’re moving the goalposts. The point is not if a particular behavior existed at all, but if it was well known enough for Kate Bush to have written a song about it. You are welcome to provide an example of another song about someone obsessing about a computer that was written before Deeper Understanding.
On a related note, is anyone else a fan of what I sort of consider to be a sequel/sister song to ‘Deeper Understanding’, ‘My Computer’ from Prince’s 1996 album Emancipation? It has similar themes to ‘Deeper Understanding’ and even features Kate on backing vocals.
Wow, you had to dig for that one, a musical that nobody has even bothered to write a Wikipedia page about, described as “a detective story about computer hackers.”, which doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the subject at hand. You may as well cite the Firesign Theater’s I Think We’re All Bozos on This Bus and the PDP-10 references.
The point is not if someone, somewhere had written something computer-related prior to Deeper Understanding, but a song about a person developing an obsessive relationship with their computer, a problem that has entered the cultural zeitgeist fairly recently.
Bwuh? Christ, Neuromancer was published in 1984. By 1989, cyberpunk was already on the downslope.