030 bush (37-50) 10/14/05 2:18 PM Page 37
Kate Bush’s Subversive Shoes
BONNIE GORDON
If I can’t dance I don’t want to be in your
revolution.
Emma Goldman, 1869–1940
I
f you know the lurid details of hans
Christian Andersen’s fairy tale “The Red
Shoes,” then Kate Bush’s song of the same
name presents a fascinating twist. A dance tune
with pulsating rhythms and haunting effects, it
encourages and celebrates dance. The song begins
with a girl who wants to dance. She gets to dance
and along the way takes her listeners for an expe-
rience that borders on ecstatic frenzy. Sending a
very different message, the 1848 didactic tale posi-
tions dance as both sin and punishment. In the
story a pretty but very poor orphan girl named
Karen falls in love with a pair of red shoes made
of shiny patent leather. After tricking her blind but
pious benefactor into buying them, she makes
the near-fatal mistake of wearing them to her
Confirmation and Communion. As punishment
for her vanity and excess she must endlessly dance;
even when she is lifted off the ground her little feet
keep on dancing through the air, totally escaping
her control. She wants to go left, they go right; she
wants to go home, they dance out into the street,
where all can see her terrible state. An angel makes
her fate painfully clear: “You shall dance in your
red shoes until you become pale and thin. Dance
till the skin on your face turns yellow and clings to
your bones as if you were a skeleton. Dance you
shall from door to door and when you pass a
house where proud and vain children live, there
you shall knock on the door so that they will see
you and fear your face. Dance, you shall Dance.”1
1. Hans Christian Andersen, The Complete Fairy Tales and
Stories, trans. Erik Christian Haugaard (New York:
Anchor Books, 1983).
Recto Running Foot 37
030 bush (37-50) 10/14/05 2:18 PM Page 38
Redemption ultimately arrives after Karen con-
fesses her sins and the executioner chops off her
feet, which then spend eternity dancing without a
body. The girl, sans feet, lives out her life in
domestic servitude to a local pastor. In this tale
dance is both a symbol of and a punishment for
female excess. Karen’s forced dance represents a
struggle to constrain female sexuality and raw
passion by violently punishing the female body.
In Bush’s sung version the projection of multi-
ple subjects and the creation of a soundscape that
celebrates and inspires dance transform the story
into precisely what it is meant to denigrate—the
dance of female excess. Karen was forced to
dance because she wore the sinful red shoes, and
her dancing isolated her from the villagers, who
look on in dismay at her unhappy fate. Bush’s
character puts on red shoes because she wants to
dance. To be sure, the celebration is not unprob-
lematic, because dance still pushes participants
out of control. But the crucial difference between
the fairy tale and the song is that, in the modern
sung version, the loss of control is ecstatic and
desired, representing the threat of excessive
pleasure. Moreover, in the fairy tale the protago-
nist dances alone, and in the song we all, listen-
ers and other interlocutors, dance with her.
We do this at least in part because in her ver-
sion of “The Red Shoes” Kate Bush takes on
multiple roles, including both Karen and the
original owner of the shoes. The most dramatic
difference between Bush’s song and the original
fairy tale is the music. In an effort to focus on the
power of sound to change meanings, this paper
deals exclusively with the song, purposefully
avoiding discussions of the film that Bush
directed in conjunction with the album. The film
presents an even more complicated story in
which visual images sometimes work against the
sound.2 In some ways the lyrics of Kate Bush’s
2. In conjunction with the album Bush released a fifty-
minute cinematic companion piece entitled The Line, the
Cross, and the Curve that links six of the album’s songs
together to create a narrative. Costarring Bush, her former
dancing instructor, Lindsay Kemp, and the actress
Miranda Richardson, best known for her leading role in
38 Women & Music Volume 9
song might seem to paraphrase and accentuate
the old fairy tale, as both versions share a plot
and suggest that the shoes, with their material
presence and magical disposition, sit on the cusp
of reality and imagination, thus warning against
the dangers of allowing those two worlds to
meet.
But I will argue that the sounds of the song
transform the tale into something new, especially
the technologically produced music and sounds
that highlight rhythmic repetition and the pecu-
liarities of her voice. Sound works on the story
just as the shoes work on the girl and in so doing
reconstitutes the dancing girl and her demonic
shoes. By adding music to a preexisting tale the
song both repeats and transgresses its original
version, thus acting as what Jacques Derrida has
called a supplement—something that adds to
and replaces the original term.
Let me make it clear from the beginning that
the song does not offer one easy-to-read message,
and I do not offer one implicit reading. Dance for
Bush is still a bit scary, it is still very close to
frightening ecstasy, but here it is also a coveted
dance of female creativity. The potential for loss
of self in ecstasy, even in a song that seems to cel-
ebrate dance, symbolizes what I would read as a
postmodern feminist ambivalence, one charac-
terized by multiple meanings and multiple
voices. Bush’s plurality of voices, the endless rep-
etition of the song that defies closure, and the
sometimes dissonant meanings resist a fixed
interpretation even as they invite all into their
alterior and sometimes contested space.
The Enigmatic Kate
Kate Bush’s rewriting of “The Red Shoes” exem-
plifies some of the ways in which recent trends in
The Crying Game, the video features a dancer, played by
Bush, whose yearning for greatness tempts her into putting
on a pair of demonic shoes that send her into an uncon-
trollable and endless dance and push her into a frightening
fantasy world of symbolic obstacles and quirky tests. The
very complex video makes a variety of connections and
points that are absent from the song alone and thus stands
outside the purview of this essay. For example, it conflates
the compulsion to dance with madness.
030 bush (37-50) 10/14/05 2:18 PM Page 39
popular music have opened up a space for female
performers to challenge traditional power struc-
tures and gender dynamics and some of the ways
in which Kate Bush is unique.3 To put this
slightly differently, the song gives an opportunity
to think through some of the ways women can
use sound, consciously or not, to rewrite stories,
selves, and even larger constructs. Bush, like
many other female performers, uses the space of
popular music, one often used to denigrate
women or at the least to turn them into passive
objects of male desire, to celebrate the female
body and creativity.
Despite the inroads that female musicians of
the last twenty years have made, Kate Bush
stands as unique among female musicians. She
has infiltrated the British art rock tradition and
modeled herself on Pink Floyd and Peter
Gabriel.4 Bush sets out to make self-described
“serious music.” In a Time Out interview Nick
Coleman comments: “The talk is always of art,
creativity, and reaching inside; never of craft,
commerce, and giving people what they want.”5
At the age of sixteen, in 1975, Bush was discov-
ered by David Gilmore, the Pink Floyd guitarist,
and after quickly signing a developmental con-
tract with emi she came out with the hit song
“Wuthering Heights,” which reached number 1
on pop charts all over Europe. She was by 1982
one of the most popular singers in Europe.
Bush has always sung against the grain of
female singer-songwriters who tend to write
explicitly about their own experience. She does
3. I have discussed this issue in more detail in my essay
“Tori Amos’s Inner Voices,” in Jane A. Bernstein, ed.,
Women’s Voices across Musical Worlds (Boston:
Northwestern University Press, 2003), 187–209. Also see
Sheila Whiteley, Women and Popular Music: Sexuality,
Identity and Subjectivity (New York: Routledge, 2000)
and Sexing the Groove, Popular Music and Gender (New
York: Routledge, 1997); Lori Burns and Melisse Lafrance,
Disruptive Divas: Feminism, Identity and Popular Music
(New York: Routledge, 2002).
4. Simon Reynolds and Joy Press, The Sex Revolts: Gender,
Rebellion, and Rock’n’Roll (Cambridge MA: Harvard
University Press, 1996), 263.
5. Nick Coleman, “Daft as a Bush,” Time Out, 10–17
November 1993.
not fall into the tradition of Joni Mitchell,
Suzanne Vega, or Tori Amos, whose music works
by creating the illusion of the performer sharing
her personal experience with an empathetic lis-
tener. This is not to say that Bush’s music does
not draw on personal experience at all. But
instead of telling a story about herself, Bush takes
inspiration from feelings, gestures, and preexis-
tent stories that provide molds for articulating
her experience.6 Describing the making of her
album The Red Shoes, she says, “I think that’s
probably true of every album I make, really. At
some point I feel like I’m just being dragged
behind it—though so far I haven’t actually had to
cut off my feet.”7
Bush avoids telling personal stories even in her
public persona. Purposefully distancing herself
from the public, she has toured only once, in
1978 at the age of eighteen, and the tour was a
massive costume-changing event that included
nineteen shows all over Europe. She habitually
refuses interviews, and when she does grant them
she is frustratingly evasive. She is a studio artist
enjoyed almost solely through recordings. In
keeping with her evasive persona she tends to use
her musical virtuosity and many-timbred singing
voice to create multiple subjects or personas. For
instance, in her hit song “Wuthering Heights”
she sings in the voice of Emily Brontë’s heroine,
Cathy, while in “The Dreaming” she takes on the
persona of a Viet Cong soldier stalking her
American prey.8 In “Waking the Witch” she
plays the part of a girl who is punished for flying
outside prescribed roles. Her passion for fiction
and drama camouflages any references to her
own life, a mask she works aggressively to main-
tain even in her infrequent interviews, during
6. This might relate to Freud’s idea that creators find myths
attractive because they provide preexistent molds for artic-
ulating individual experience. They express repressed
impulses commonly found in the unconscious.
7. Jon Sakamoto, “Kate Bush Weaves a Fairy Tale,”
Toronto Sun, 14 December 1993, http://gaffa.org/reaching/
i93_tsu.html, accessed 13 November 2004.
8. Nicky Losseff, “Cathy’s Homecoming and the Other
World: Kate Bush’s ‘Wuthering Heights,’” Popular Music
18, no. 2 (1999): 227–40.
Gordon, Kate Bush’s Subversive Shoes 39
030 bush (37-50) 10/14/05 2:18 PM Page 40
which she always consciously evades discussing
her own experiences. “When I perform I’m defi-
nitely someone else. She’s a lot stronger and I
wouldn’t be as daring as her.”9
A key part of Bush’s performance is her eerily
versatile voice, which has an almost superhuman
four-octave range spanning from a deep tenor to
an ultrahigh shriek. Craig Tomashoff of People
Magazine writes, “The one constant that will
both appease the Kate cult and entice new fans is
Bush’s voice. She coos. She sighs. She seduces.
Her soft and sensual vocals have always cast a
siren-like spell, and on this outing the magic feels
too good to resist.”10 Her recording engineer, Del
Palmer, describes her “unique vocal style with its
breathy delivery and haunting presence as being
in a constant state of flux, changing and devel-
oping with each album so that she is especially
hard to pin down.”11 She consistently uses voice
ranges that stand outside the norms of pop
music, embracing the discordant noise usually
reserved for punk sounds, and she uses technol-
ogy to accentuate the sounds of making that
voice—breathing, shifts in vocal range, and
grunting. Bush’s especially versatile voice, cou-
pled with her facility with technology, aligns her
at least loosely with avant-garde performers such
as Cathy Berberian and Diamanda Galás, who
do striking things both with their vocal cords and
with machines. Berberian’s stutters, grunts, cries,
and gasps were captured by Luciano Berio in his
electronic piece Visage, and more recently Galás
has worked extensively with real-time transfor-
mations of her own voice.
Bush is also different from most women in the
rock world in her total control of her product as
a songwriter, producer, and manager and in her
use of technology. As with all of her other
albums, Bush masterminded this one. This con-
9. Dave Laing, One Chord Wonders (Milton Keynes: Open
University Press, 1985), 89.
10. Craig Tomashoff, People Magazine, 24 January 1994.
11. Del Palmer, “The Red Shoes Sessions,” Sound on
Sound (1993): 52–57, http://www.livinginthepast.demon
.co.uk/red_shoesa.html, accessed 13 November 2004.
40 Women & Music Volume 9
trol, technological and otherwise, pushes against
gender stereotypes that have traditionally rele-
gated such expertise to the realm of men.12 She,
for example, uses musical technologies to com-
bine folk instruments with the latest synthesizer
technology, as in her use of the “fairlight synthe-
sizer” in novel ways that move beyond preset
artificial sounds to sample the natural resonances
of her voice and instruments. This kind of tech-
nological proficiency is part of what allows her
to rewrite “The Red Shoes.” With it, Bush
exhibits mastery and control, precisely what the
fairy tale takes away from its protagonist.
Discussing the subversive potential of technolog-
ical music, Kay Dickenson has argued that musi-
cal technologies act as instruments of control and
power and that the technologically mediated
voice allows for the refashioning of identities.13
Bush’s technological manipulation of her voice
and other sounds controls technology—an act
that embodies control of the ecstatic force of
dance.
Storytelling
“The Red Shoes” is the title track on Bush’s 1992
song cycle, inspired by Andersen’s fairy tale and
Michael Powell’s 1948 movie of the same name.
Andersen’s version emerges from the nineteenth-
century pedagogy of fear. Rather than “warm
and fuzzy” entertainment, fairy tales in Ander-
sen’s day were didactic stories that endeavored to
mold behavior by describing in gory details what
happened to children who deviated from social
norms. In these often gruesome stories virtue is
always rewarded and vice always punished.
Meanwhile, the narratives tend to hover some-
where between the real and the unreal by depict-
ing magical phenomena, such as the possessed
12. For other critical studies of Kate Bush see Holly Kruse,
“Kate Bush: Enigmatic Chanteuse as Pop Pioneer,”
Tracking Popular Music Studies 1, no. 1 (1988): 13–22,
and “In Praise of Kate Bush,” in Simon Frith, ed., On
Record, Rock, Pop and Written Word (New York:
Pantheon, 1990), 452–65.
13. Kay Dickinson, “Believe? Vocoders, Digitalized
Female Identity and Camp,” Popular Music 20, no. 3
(2001): 333–47.
030 bush (37-50) 10/14/05 2:18 PM Page 41
red shoes, as part of everyday human experience.
Fairy tales speak through an omniscient narrator
who tells the reader about the protagonists.14
The gender structures of traditional fairy tales
come complete with either punished girls or pas-
sive female victims waiting for their active and
always male rescuer.
In addition to the Hans Christian Andersen ver-
sion Bush also claims to have been inspired by
Powell’s movie. She met the director just before he
died, and her own lifelong involvement with dance
rendered the movie especially powerful to her. The
film rewrote the tale to feature a ballerina whose
life of tormented struggle between the demands of
her career and her lover ends tragically when a
train runs her down. Moira Shearer plays Vicky
Page, a young woman whose consuming passion
for dance leads her into the company of the pedan-
tic perfectionist Boris Lermontov and the conduc-
tor Julian Craster, whom she falls in love with and
marries. Andersen’s story here becomes a modern
romantic melodrama colored by almost expres-
sionist dance scenes. The unspecified social dance
of the fairy tale here becomes the refined high art
of ballet.
The movie was instrumental in Bush’s concep-
tion of the song, but the initial idea was taken
from the fairy tale. “You have these red shoes
that just want you to dance and don’t want to
stop.”15 The image that guided her was dance,
“because it [dance] is something I’ve really
enjoyed being involved in. But it’s an image you
can take to almost any form of art, the idea of
being possessed by one’s art. Sometimes it con-
trols you rather than you controlling it.”16 Bush
says that the song emerged from a feeling she had
14. Ellen Cronan Rose, Through the Looking Glass: When
Women Tell Fairy Tales (Hanover: University Press of New
England, 1983); Marina Warner, From the Beast to the
Blond (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996); Jack
Zipes, Don’t Bet on the Prince: Contemporary Feminist
Fairy Tales in North America and England (New York:
Routledge, 1986) and Fairy Tale as Myth, Myth as Fairy
Tale (Louisville: University of Kentucky Press, 1994).
15. Marianne Jensen, “Rubber Souls,” Vox Magazine
(November 1993): 32–34.
16. Sakamoto, “Kate Bush Weaves a Fairy Tale.”
one day at the piano of music running away from
itself, a feeling that came with mental images of
horses galloping until they turned into running
feet that just galloped away.17 She wanted to har-
ness that feeling, the raw creative passion per-
haps symbolized by the insatiable desire to dance
in the song.
But ultimately Bush does control that passion,
producing indeed a song and a whole album to
go with it. Recorded by her long-time musical
partner Del Palmer in her home studio, all of the
songs on the album suggest motion and kick in a
way that her usually lyrical art rock does not,
beginning with the pounding thump of the open-
ing funk-based “Rubberband Girl.” With the
rhythmic pulse of the title track and the Latin
rhythms of “Eat the Music,” the album stands as
her most dance-oriented one yet. At the same
time, Bush’s use of strange effects and diverse
sounds carries mystical undertones that appear
in the opening of “Why Should I Love You,” a
collaboration with Prince that begins with the
haunting sounds of the trio Bulgarka. Bush’s
work fits within a recent tradition of women who
rewrite fairy tales in ways that end better for
their female protagonists and that infuse patriar-
chal stories with feminist messages. Describing
the host of feminist revisions in circulation, Jack
Zipes describes two kinds of rewritings, those
that leave the story line essentially the same but
infuse a different set of values and those that
transform by melding traditional stories and
contemporary references.18 The poetry of Ann
Sexton, for example, creates satire out of tradi-
tional fairy tales. Her poem “Cinderella” fits into
the first of Zipes’s categories. It highlights the
original fairy tale’s self-mutilation: one sister cuts
off a toe and the other a heel in vain attempts to
force their feet into the precious slippers.19
Though Sexton leaves the story basically intact,
she sends a very different message, using it to
17. Coleman, “Daft as a Bush.”
18. Zipes, Fairy Tale as Myth, 159–61.
19. Ann Sexton, The Complete Poems (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1981), 53–57.
Gordon, Kate Bush’s Subversive Shoes 41
030 bush (37-50) 10/14/05 2:18 PM Page 42
bring to the fore the countless acts of self-
mutilation that many women go through each
day. Also reinventing Cinderella and adding
Rapunzel, Sandra Cisnero’s “The House on
Mango Street” fits into the second of Zipes’s cat-
egories, transforming the traditional story with
contemporary references. It features three little
girls who, upon putting on discarded women’s
pumps, realize that they would much rather be
scruffy little girls than the sexualized women the
shoes turn them into.20 In The Mer-Child: A
Legend for Children and Other Adults Robin
Morgan completely transforms Andersen’s story
of the Little Mermaid, exceeding both of Zipes’s
categories.21 In her version the daughter of a
black mother and white father is ostracized for
her race and paralyzed legs. Lonely, she spends
countless hours by the ocean, where she meets a
green merchild whose alien strangeness empow-
ers the girl to walk. This girl gains legs without
losing her voice. Dismemberment is replaced
with a story that puts a broken body back
together again.
Kate’s Shoes
Given that this song is disseminated only through
recording, a brief excursus on its packaging is
merited: the cd jacket features a particularly
ominous-looking pair of red shoes that perhaps
offers one of the conflicting meanings in the song.
Mapping Jacques Derrida’s interpretation of pic-
ture frames onto the cd suggests that the picture
is part of the album itself and must be consid-
ered.22 Urging the consideration of areas that
supposedly stand outside a picture’s material
limits (the frame), Derrida challenges assump-
tions about where works of creative production
begin and end. In this picture the toes are pointed
so that the arches stretch far beyond what most
20. Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street (New
York: Vintage, 1991).
21. Robin Morgan, The Mer-Child: A Legend for Children
and Other Adults (New York: Feminist Press, 1991).
22. Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff
Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1987), 63–79.
42 Women & Music Volume 9
of ours can do. Their fiery red color might repre-
sent the blood that often comes from dancing on
pointe and the bloody stumps that Karen, the
original fairy tale’s protagonist, was left with
after the executioner exorcized her dancing feet.
The complicated crossed ribbon lies loosely
undone. These are shoes that do not work pre-
cisely because they are in a work; sitting in a pic-
ture, they do not dance. But the shoes do
eventually get filled, first by the album cover,
with feet and legs cut off just below the knees,
then by Bush’s rewriting of the story.
The fairy tale and the song are based on two
very different pairs of shoes. Both tales center
around a pair of red shoes that alter their
wearer’s body, enticing a physical frenzy that
highlights associations between dance, sexuality,
and the excessive female body.23 It should be
noted here that sexuality in both versions ought
not be assumed to be heterosexual but rather
stands in for female desire and excess all told. In
the fairy tale the shoes symbolize sin and punish
desire from the get-go. Karen comes by them dis-
honestly, tricking her kind benefactor into buy-
ing them. She spends her whole Confirmation
thinking of her shoes rather than her covenant
with God, forgetting to sing and pray in church.
She starts to dance involuntarily as the shoes lit-
erally punish her body. “Once she had begun
[dancing] her feet would not stop. It was as if the
shoes had taken command of them. She danced
around the corner of the church; her will was not
her own.”24 The shoes take her body apart, alien-
ating her from her own corporeality. “Cut off my
feet,” she says to the executioner; it’s the only
way she can possibly stop her endless dance.
In contrast, Bush’s protagonist puts the shoes
on purposefully because she wants to dance like
23. For the relationship between the social constructions
of body and dance music see Barbara Brody, “Sampling
Sexuality: Gender Ideology and the Body in Dance Music,”
Popular Music 12, no. 2 (1993): 155–57; Susan McClary,
“Music, the Pythagoreans, and the Body,” in Chor-
eographing History, ed. Susan Leigh Foster (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1995), 82–105.
24. Andersen, The Complete Fairy Tales, 291.
030 bush (37-50) 10/14/05 2:18 PM Page 43
their original owner. Her shoes emerge from the
sonic world of dance, so that they are always
already a symbol of dance. A site of massive
energy, the shoes are magic objects that alter the
body of the girl who inhabits them, but here the
dancer chooses that alteration. Bush’s words show
the deep connection between the shoes and the
body: “You can dance the dream with your body
on.” They also suggest magic: “These shoes do a
kind of voodoo / They’re gonna make her dance
till her legs fall off.” This magic does not involve
magicians and alchemy but rather the signification
of an alterior space that is other and fantastic.
Feel your hair come tumbling down
Feel your feet start kissing the ground
Feel your arms are opening out
And see your eyes are lifted to God
With no words, with no song
I’m gonna dance the dream
And make the dream come true
The words here suggest freedom from constraint
and a power that comes from within. In the fairy
tale dancing is a punishment, a tool for reining in
female excess—a process taken to violent
extremes when the girl’s feet are cut off. Bush’s
song turns that physicality into a positive state—
the girl wants to dance. Writing about electronic
dance music, Susana Loza says that “popular
culture and modern science inject the flesh with
fantasies of immortality, limitless pleasures, and
unadulterated agency.”25
Bush’s musical setting enhances just such a feel-
ing of limitless pleasure in ways that, for the most
part, follow the narrative of the text. The use of
electronic effects, combined with instruments,
rhythms, and vocal effects derived from a variety
of non-Western musical forms, including the
Mixolydian mode so common in Irish folk
dances, allows her to point musically to a magi-
25. Susana Loza, “Sampling (Hetero)Sexuality: Diva-ness
and Discipline in Electronic Dance Music,” Popular Music
20, no. 3 (2001): 349–57.
cal realm of such intense pleasure.26 Throughout
the song she continuously thickens the sound-
scape, and each new sound pushes the song far-
ther into the magical and demonic world of the
shoes. She juxtaposes whistles, the valiha (a harp-
like instrument from Madagascar), and the mbela
(a musical bow from central Africa) with more
traditional keyboards, guitars, and mandolins.
Meanwhile, she adds percussion riffs and new
voices to the texture. All of these sounds are
enhanced and manipulated by digital effects so
that her process of composition takes place as
much in the recording studio as anywhere else.27
In a rare interview Bush defines herself as an artist
taking inspiration from piano riffs, images, and
the recording studio itself. “The Red Shoes was
not such a quick song to put together, I wanted
this to feel Madagascan. With Stuart on percus-
sion and Paddy on mandolin, we laid down a cir-
cular based pattern with strong influences from
Madagascan rhythms.”28 Tim Taylor has
described this Peter Gabriel–like style of a thick
texture comprised of layering of sounds from dif-
ferent cultures on top of one another to create a
hybrid sound as “polystylistic polyphony.”29
Multiple Subjects
Kate Bush is known for her ability to envoice
multiple subjects, and her doing so in this song
26. Bush began exploring an approach to song writing that
involved the synthesizer and the use of non-Western
sounds after her collaboration with Peter Gabriel in 1980.
Her brother Paddy’s continued interest in exploring non-
Western music also influenced her style.
27. I am not trying in this paper to take on the many com-
plicated issues of exploitation and appropriation that have
been discussed in relation to world beat. For discussions of
these issues see Steven Feld, “Notes on World Beat,” in
Steven Feld and Charles Keil, eds., Music Grooves: Essays
and Dialogues (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1994), 238; and Tim Taylor, Global Pop: World Music,
World Markets (New York: Routledge, 1997). It is impor-
tant to remember that even a Western feminist revision of
a Western fairy tale is not immune from the problems of
appropriating Madagascan elements. This is a much larger
problem that relates to global capitalism and First World
access to Third World musical materials.
28. Palmer, “The Red Shoes Sessions.”
29. Taylor, Global Pop.
Gordon, Kate Bush’s Subversive Shoes 43
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strengthens the song’s rewriting of the fairy tale’s
message. In contrast to the original version the
story cannot be heard as a monologic narrative
that talks about and does something violent to a
physically absent female body. The monologic
narrator of the original follows the conventions
of nineteenth-century fairy tales, a convention
that gives the narrator all of the agency, so that,
for example, in the case of “The Red Shoes” we
never hear Karen’s side of the story. The song
remakes the invisible and silent body spoken
about in the fairy tale into a corporeal and vocal
presence. She is one of many voices listeners hear,
and the sounds Bush gives her imply a female
body even if we don’t actually see it while listen-
ing to the cd. In other words, because the pro-
tagonist literally has a singing voice she acquires
an important presence. We can hear her, and the
physicality of her sounds authenticates her voice.
The voice of the dancing girl is joined in the
song by voices of the shoes’ original owner, the
shoes themselves, and a commenting narrator,
and the effect of such multiplicity is a much more
confusing story than the original. Textually, the
words constantly shift between the pronouns I,
you, and she, as if the dancing girl is both speak-
ing and being spoken about. Complex musical
textures produced by Bush’s wide range, a vari-
ety of timbres from a whisper to guttural conso-
nants, and technologically enhanced effects such
as overdubbing and voice loops create the per-
ception of many speakers as well as different
moods and musical spaces.
Moreover, Bush’s envoicing of multiple speak-
ing subjects makes it difficult to imagine the iden-
tity of any one speaker, which in turn makes it
hard to tell where the agency at any given
moment lies. In the world of the song multiple
voices represent simultaneous subjectivities that
inhabit Bush’s body and challenge any assumed
identification between individual bodies and
subjectivities. If the fairy tale and Powell’s movie
make clear that the shoes control the feet that
inhabit them, the song’s confusion of identity
complicates the issue of control. Put differently,
a song such as Bush’s that insists on multiple
speaking voices reminds us that, as Judith Butler
44 Women & Music Volume 9
has famously argued, identities are always con-
structed and are always merely temporary.
Identities constructed as fantasy by patriarchal
structures can be radically deconstructed, as is
the dancing girl of Hans Christian Andersen.30
Bush uses an eclectic mix of sounds that desta-
bilize her own “voice” and continuously shift the
speaking voice and musical space of the song.
Bush uses variations in her voice and its accom-
paniment to shift the speaking voice. While the
melodies are very simple and repetitive, Bush
plays with timbre in her voice and the instru-
ments that accompany her. The song begins with
Bush playing the protagonist, using first-person
singular pronouns. She expresses the desire for
the shoes in a high soprano vocal range accom-
panied by the pulsing guitar and mandolin rhyth-
mic pattern that run through the entire song.
Here she uses a classical “head voice” with
vibrato for accent on the word “shoes.” The
voice might have the saccharin sound of a cheesy
pop ballad were it not for the pulsating rhythmic
edge. This is the sparsest segment of the song,
featuring just Kate Bush and the string instru-
ments without even the bass drum that will even-
tually enhance the percussive effects. In this
opening verse the intoxicating shoes make the
girl want to dance. “Oh, she move like the diva
do.” At the third line of text the shoes’ original
owner enters, but Bush keeps her voice in the
high range to indicate the morphing of the two
dancers into one another. “She said, ‘Just take off
my red shoes / Put them on and your dream’ll
come true.’” The pulsing guitar continues. At the
fifth line of text the narrative voice moves to a
commentary on what those shoes can do to the
wearer, as if the shoes themselves are doing the
talking. “With no words, with no song, you can
dance the dream with your body on.” Marking
this change in narrative voice, Bush shifts to a
lower vocal register and changes the sound of her
voice, accenting consonants and controlling her
30. For Butler’s arguments on identity performance see
Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
(New York: Routledge, 1990), 25.
030 bush (37-50) 10/14/05 2:18 PM Page 45
vibrato. Next, with the lines “And this curve is
your smile / And this cross is your heart / And this
line is your path,” Bush takes on yet another
voice, a commentator, this time indicated by a
textual shift. The song seems to enter the magi-
cal realm of the shoes. We hear new sounds:
vocal whooshes and the twang of the mbela. The
guitar and mandolin background is now accom-
panied by a percussive bass drum loop that will
continue in the background. Bush changes the
timbre of her voice yet again, using glottal artic-
ulations to accent the consonants of curve, smile,
and cross. The voice next shifts back to that of
the shoes’ original owner as Bush’s voice rises
back to the higher register and the special effects
sneak into the background. The distinguishing
factors of Bush and the shoes dissipate so that the
two characters seem to become one voice,
bonded by the possessing shoes and dragged
together into an ecstatic space. This is different
from the fairy tale, in which the girl is a victim of
her fate, spoken about by an omniscient male
narrator. Here we are all in it together.
Oh it’s gonna be the way you always thought
it would be
But it’s gonna be no illusion
Oh it’s gonna be the way you always dreamt
about it
But it’s gonna be really happenin to ya
really happenin to ya
really happenin to ya
Ex. 1. “The Red Shoes,” Kate Bush.
As the speaker takes the listener into a magical
world the special effects fade; the sound of the
mbela is absorbed into the rhythmic back-
ground. Whistles sneak in by the line “But it’s
gonna be really happenin to ya.” The whistle
then takes over the music of the guitar, which,
accompanied by the drum, breaks up the verse.
Bush shifts to a scream on the word “really”
(example 1).
When she senses danger immediately after
placing the shoes on her feet, the music takes
a dramatic turn toward a thicker texture that
includes a variety of effects that I will discuss
later. The text returns to the first-person singular,
and the voice shifts back to the high register.
Oh the minute I put them on
I knew I had done something wrong
All her gifts for the dance had gone
It’s the red shoes, they can’t stop dancing,
dancing
Finally, at the end of the song the dancing girl
appropriates the words of the shoes’ original
owner.
With no words, with no song
I’m gonna dance the dream
And make the dream come true
Note here the shift from the second-person
“you” to the first-person “I.” To emphasize this
Gordon, Kate Bush’s Subversive Shoes 45
030 bush (37-50) 10/14/05 2:18 PM Page 46
narrative merge Bush moves back to her lower
chest voice, but here she almost speaks the word
“dance” in a recitative-like sound. Her voice is
again underplayed with a very short whistle
motive. Throughout the song it is Kate Bush’s
facility with voice and sound effects that allows
her to tell a story with a moral very different
from the original fairy tale.
The Supplement
The most powerful instrument in Kate Bush’s
reversal of the fairy tale is the music itself. By
using music to tell the story she transforms and
challenges the original story so that her version
of the fairy tale acts as a musical version of
Derrida’s supplement, in which she deconstructs
and reverses the meaning of the original text. As
mentioned before, Derrida defines the supple-
ment as something that adds to and replaces the
original text. “The supplement supplements. It
adds to only to replace. It intervenes or insinuates
itself in the place of; it fills, it is as if one fills a
void.” Derrida took the term supplement from
Rousseau and imagined it as both an extra added
to something complete in itself and an enhance-
ment of something that is already complete. To
put it a bit differently, something can seem
wholly complete from one perspective, with a
supplement seeming like an extra appendage, but
from another perspective it might seem like an
utterly necessary addition. Both Derrida and
Rousseau use this concept to differentiate writ-
ing from speech and, by extension, song, sug-
gesting that song supplements speech.31 In this
song dance music reformulates the original story.
The addition of dance rhythms designed to entice
the body to movement necessarily changes the
fairy tale’s condemnation of the female body and
positioning of dance as punishment. By refash-
ioning the story as a dance tune, the very act that
the fairy tale casts as a punishment, Bush simul-
taneously creates a repetition by retelling the tale
31. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1976).
46 Women & Music Volume 9
and a transgression by transforming the meaning
and the shoes. Sound becomes a transgressive
vehicle for the shoes.
The song is both additive and substitutive, a
material addition to the narrative and an
enhancement of the shoes by sonic force.
Rearticulating the shoes with the sound of dance
produces a force grounded in the song, but this
rearticulation is simultaneously excessive over
the language of the text and the narrative of the
fairy tale because sound allows for added and
more complex meaning. The displacement per-
formed by the song rewrites the tale’s moral and
undercuts the condemnation of dancing. Rather
than fixing them only as a punishment for desire,
the sound of the music invites listeners to move
their bodies. Even if dance is dangerous, here it is
the danger of pleasure.
In this song it is not only the shoes that entice
dance but the heavy bass line, an always audible
duple beat pounded out by the drums and nearly
strophic melody that invite and even entice lis-
teners to move their bodies. Since the song is
meant to make everyone who hears it dance, it is
no longer a compelled act of one punished
woman but rather a collective experience. Even
if dance is out of control, we are all in it together,
unlike Karen, who must dance alone in punish-
ment as villagers watch her shame. The signature
of dance emerges in the relentless beat, even
before the words begin, as the pulsating repeated
guitar sequence introduces the song’s physical
energy and draws the listener into the song’s
strange world. But the techno-twang here creates
a more demonic feel than the usual dance tune.
The supplemental qualities of the song, the
excess of song over speech, allow it to create a
magical alterior space that immerses the listener
in “unreal sounds” that sonically mirror the
magic of the shoes.
Throughout the song the soundscape moves
toward the magical and marks the speaker’s jour-
ney into the world of the shoes. From the first
statement of “and this curve is your smile” sounds
begin to collapse into noise, electronic slides, and
muffled low voices. The pulsating guitar riff is
punctuated in the first-line twang of the mbela.
030 bush (37-50) 10/14/05 2:18 PM Page 47
Ex. 2. “The Red Shoes,” Kate Bush.
The descent continues as Bush puts the shoes on.
The last word, “dancing,” is overdubbed with
low-voiced vocals and runs immediately into a
new whistle motive. The whistle signifies the jour-
ney into the magic of dance. Listeners can hear
Bush breathe at the end of each line of text, and
the whistle motive is even shorter and more frag-
mented than the earlier one. The song sounds so
uncanny here because of the juxtaposition of
musical fragments whose continuous repetition
threatens always to collapse into degeneration
and unstructured monotony; the guitar riff, drum
loop, and whistle tune fade in and out. The aural
immersion in a world of unreal sounds mirrors the
frightening magic of the shoes. The monotony of
the repetition seems to heighten the magical
effects, continuously reinterpreting the story.
Increasing layers of sound take the girl farther
and farther into an alterior realm constructed
largely through technology. The repeat of the
words “and this curve is your smile” sounds even
more eerie the second time, with the whistle tune
taking new primacy and an overdubbed, high
voice singing “whoosh” with an accent on the
sounds of “shhhhhhh” (example 2). Meanwhile,
low voices accent the word “yea,” which almost
meshes completely into the twang of the mbela,
giving it the sound of a voice that is not quite
human. The compulsion to dance becomes clear
in the next verse with both the words and their
musical realization.
She gotta dance, she gotta dance
And she can’t stop till them shoes come off
These shoes do a kind of voodoo
They’re gonna make her dance till her legs fall
off
Digital delay creates a polyphonic effect as Bush,
the shoes, and the shoes’ original owner all
embody the compulsion to dance. The first whis-
tle motive comes back at this point to remind the
listener of magic’s omnipresent role.
The technological enhancement of Bush’s voice
adds to the magical effects. Describing the record-
ing process, Del Palmer says that Bush’s sound
“owes a lot not only to the pulsating highly atmos-
pheric slightly discordant noise that seems to
emanate from every direction.”32 The technologi-
cal altering of her body creates a kind of cyborg
effect in which the purposeful confusion of
organic and electronic elements decentralizes and
denaturalizes the human body, situating it in an
altered space.33 Technology transforms Bush’s
voice and thus her body, sonically embodying the
shoes’ transformative effect. The special effects
call into question the boundaries between Bush’s
natural voice and its mechanical enhancements.
Technology mirrors the magic of the shoes, but
instead of losing her feet Bush’s body extends and
takes on the power of dance. Technology here fur-
ther supplements Bush’s voice, adding musical
effects and replacing her natural voice with a
larger and even more diverse sound palette. The
technological manipulation of vocal sounds actu-
ally extends the concept of the voice, suggesting
that to vocalize is to create. Bush turns the dancing
girl into one of Donna Harraway’s disruptive sub-
jects whose posthuman, artificially reconstructed
body dissolves boundaries between human and
32. Palmer, “The Red Shoes Sessions.”
33. Donna Harraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The
Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 149.
Gordon, Kate Bush’s Subversive Shoes 47
030 bush (37-50) 10/14/05 2:18 PM Page 48
machine and thus crashes gendered oppositions
and rearticulates received understandings of the
human body.34 The cyborg’s dangerous possibili-
ties are here audibly present in the music, which
capitalizes on the now destabilized borders
between authentic human presence and the tech-
nological.
Technology, especially as Bush uses it to create
her “polystylistic polyphony,” also allows for an
excessive repetition akin to that of an altered
musical state. The song can be broken up into a
series of repeated riffs, rhythmic and melodic
patterns. We grow used to the relentless guitar
progression, since it is always already there, but
as the song progresses we hear repeated whistle
motives whose superimposition on the continu-
ous guitar beat embodies the story’s magical
realm. In the verses just discussed the whistle
comes in on the words “really happenin to ya.”
It enters again in the third stanza on the words
“And this curve is your smile / And this cross is
your heart.” In writing about the use of repeti-
tion in popular music Richard Middleton has
called this kind of repetition of short riffs “muse-
matic.”35 He suggests that this kind of music is
imagined in the popular imagination to incite a
collective hypnotic state, known in the world of
literary theory as jouissance and associated with
an all-encompassing and overwhelming pleasure
that borders on pain.
To bring this theoretical language back to the
specifics of this song, the effect of this demonic
tendency toward excessive repetition forces the
listener to sit with the dancing girl on the cusp of
magic and reality. It brings us all into a hypnotic,
trancelike state. Setting the story to music allows
for a discursive depth that is not accessible to
words alone. Fairy tales are a case in point,
meant to scare their audiences (remember the
Grimm brothers’ characterizations of Cin-
derella’s selfish stepsisters). Yet despite the blood
34. Harraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women.
35. Richard Middleton, “Play It Again Sam: Some Notes
on the Productivity of Repetition in Popular Music,”
Popular Music 3 (1988): 235–70.
48 Women & Music Volume 9
and gore of that image, the narrator mitigates its
effect. His or her presence outside of the story,
and the concluding statement of a moral, con-
firms that it actually ended. Unlike narrated sto-
ries, music has no “once upon a time.” It cannot
work like a novel or an epic by presenting a tale
told later but must instead, in Carolyn Abbate’s
words, “trap the listener in present experience
and the beat of passing time from which he or she
cannot escape.”36 Thus, in Kate Bush’s “The Red
Shoes” there is no assurance of pastness and no
narrative distance. Rather than reciting a story,
Bush’s song surrounds listeners, inviting them
into her bizarre world. The invitation to dance
suggests a more consensual experience than
Abbate’s language of force does, or at least one
that is beguiling for everyone involved and not
just one punished woman. The pulsating guitar
riff that signifies dance also serves to create a
temporary world that the listeners enter aurally.
Kate Bush seems to want this effect, saying, “I
wanted the track to be hypnotic, but also to build
and build.”37
This song’s sonic world seems particularly
borderless, since it lacks a definitive beginning or
ending. The song starts by setting up a sound-
scape that in its existence as background seems
immediately as though it was already there. The
rhythm continues almost uninterrupted through-
out the entire song, picking up new sounds and
melodic phrases along the way. Instead of punc-
tuating the song with a conventional concluding
gesture, Bush ends with the ubiquitous guitar
rhythm and words “you gotta dance, you gotta
dance, you gotta dance” emblazoned on our
minds; there is no “The End.” The song’s lack of
closure embodies never-ending dance. Thus,
sound corresponds directly to the lyrics by musi-
cally representing the meaning of the text.
There are, however, also instances when music
goes beyond text representation or, rather, when it
36. Carolyn Abbate, Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical
Narrative in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1991).
37. Palmer, “The Red Shoes Sessions.”
030 bush (37-50) 10/14/05 2:18 PM Page 49
escapes the text. Abbate has explored these
moments in the context of late-nineteenth-century
music, especially opera. She describes moments in
which the narrative voice distinguishes itself from
the surrounding music. Music’s materiality—that
is, its difference and excessiveness to speech—is
most clearly audible when sound overpowers
words, when it does something words cannot.
Julia Kristeva has described such moments in
terms of the semiotic, the sounds of the body that
resonate through rhythm, intonation, and move-
ments of the voice that displace language at least
for an instant.38 Bush often creates powerful
moments of sonorous excess through nonverbal
and what might be called nonmusical sounds. The
electronic sounds and vocal gestures such as the
quintessential Kate Bush scream stand out as dif-
ferent from the soundscape they inhabit. The last
verse begins with the words “she gotta dance, she
gotta dance.” This moment is overdubbed for a
polyphonic effect and includes a hissing that calls
attention to the musicality of what came before.
To put this in terms of recent work on electro-
acoustic music, technological manipulations of
the voice effectively defamiliarize the voice itself.39
In addition to musically signifying a magical
realm these sonic emanations momentarily extend
the song’s world. Even though we hear these
sounds throughout the song, they occupy a space
over and above the constant guitar beat, calling
attention to the constructedness of the sonic
world. Diverse sounds and expressive gestures,
including vocal, electronic, and exotic effects,
stand just outside of the song’s musically con-
structed universe. They exude materiality in their
ability to escape music. Such moments of excess
work something like instances of estrangement,
in which the seeming normalcy of a process is
38. Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic
Approach to Literature and Art, ed. Léon Roudiez, trans.
Alice Jardine, Thomas Gora, and Léon Roudiez (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1980).
39. Joseph Auner has explored these issues more fully in
“‘Sing It for Me’: Posthuman Ventriloquism in Recent
Popular Music,” Journal of the Royal Music Association
128 (2003): 98–122.
revealed as anything but natural. In “The Red
Shoes” these alienating moments often involve
radical shifts in vocal style. When Bush sings in
the second stanza “with no words” her voice
drops over an octave in pitch, which, combined
with radical changes in timbre, tessitura, and
dynamics, makes her almost sound like a differ-
ent singer. Bush and Palmer both seem especially
conscious of these moments. Describing her stu-
dio, Palmer says, “So what’s happening is that
every time she breathes in you can hear it, so she
has to be very specific in the way she deals with
it.” Beyond the materiality of Bush’s voice, instru-
mental sounds work their own disruption. After
the words “really happenin to ya” are sung for
the first time, a whistle restates the melody, eerily
evolving into a radically different sound. At this
moment the noumenal music—the music that is
always already there—calls attention to its own
precarious status. The music here creates a dis-
tance between itself and the story it tells by fleet-
ingly seizing the role of discursive subject.
Kate Bush uses song to tell her story, and by
doing so she accesses a subversive space in which
female performers can claim power and thus
rearticulate situations that once violently con-
trolled them. The process works something like
Butler’s concept of gender performativity, in
which normative constructions of gender can
mobilize to challenge the very structures they
seem to reiterate.40 By rewriting a fairy tale that
uses dance to punish and isolate one girl because
of her feminine excess as a dance tune that
encourages a relinquishing of bodily control,
Bush overturns the original violence done to
Karen. This reading of Bush extends Butler’s dis-
cussions of subversive performativity, which
have tended to refer predominantly to drag and
other cross-gender behaviors. Here Bush’s sub-
version involves a woman rewriting herself as a
female dancer.
Kate Bush spins an old story into a powerful
performative gesture, one whose sonic force
gives it a more visceral and more complex effect
40. Butler, Gender Trouble.
Gordon, Kate Bush’s Subversive Shoes 49
030 bush (37-50) 10/14/05 2:18 PM Page 50
than the original story. She forces us to think
about the female voice and body—two cate-
gories overdetermined by normative construc-
tions—by singing and reclaiming a fairy tale
meant to constrain women’s bodies and their
erotic potential. She mobilizes her voice and
body to refigure social tendencies that ideologi-
cally mark the sensual sonorous effusions of
women as problematic gestures that are wor-
shiped, eroticized, denigrated, and suppressed.
Dancing and singing for women are activities
fundamentally rooted in their female bodies—
already sites of contention. These activities may
still be precarious in Bush’s song, but here dan-
ger lurks in the subliminal and subversive space
opened up by dancing. To dance or to sing might
be something akin to putting on red shoes, but
those red shoes might not be so bad. For if the
dance of female creativity and sexuality has the
50 Women & Music Volume 9
potential to exhaust, it can also exhilarate and
“make the dream come true.”
Note
Very early versions of this paper were given at
the International Association for the Study of
Popular Music in 1995 and the Society for
Ethnomusicology in 1996. The ideas are com-
pletely rewritten now but did have their origins in
those early efforts. I would like to thank for their
help with this latest version Mathew Butterfield,
Martha Mockus, Manuel Lerdau, Shirly Lim,
and the two readers for this journal. I am espe-
cially grateful to Cordelia Chenault for her care-
ful editing as well as invaluable help with research
and transcriptions. The epigraph quotation has
been attributed to Emma Goldman in numerous
sources. Though never verified, it has acquired
enormous value in various feminist movements.