In praise of … Kate Bush

Editorial in The Guardian 7th February 2012:

One of music’s most original talents is riding high again with the hauntingly beautiful and surreal 50 Words for Snow

Kate Bush‘s unique musical repertoire has been winning her fans since 1978 when, at age 19, she topped the UK singles chart with Wuthering Heights – the first woman to do so with her own material. And 34 years later she is again riding high after her recent nomination for a Brit award. But the album for which she is being rightly acclaimed, 50 Words for Snow, as well as cleverly weaving together some hauntingly beautiful melodies with a characteristically surrealist narrative, also perpetuates a widely held myth about the semantic capaciousness of the Inuit language. One author has called it the Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax. For contrary to popular belief, there are as many words for snow in English as there are in Inuit. Still, as the crisp white stuff beloved of children turns into freezing grey slush, it’s worth another laugh at the old British Rail “wrong type of snow” excuse. Noticeably, that old chestnut wasn’t rolled out at Heathrow this week.