Among angels
50 Words for Snow and other Kate Bush stories, Part 2
Oddfinds is a series about the records, bands, songs, or even shops, labels and other pieces of the musical ecology that are literally ‘odd finds’. Stories, pieces of vinyl, CDs, or online sounds found in digital corners. From my point of view, an oddfind is good – very good.
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Note: This is the second part of a post, about Kate Bush and her album, 50 Words For Snow. Part one started with Little Shrew, a short and moving film about the effects of war. You can find it HERE. This second part continues my reflections on this album and, as always, is less review than meditation on how music weaves in and out of life!
If you enjoy this article and others in Ziggy’s Lament please support War Child, Kate Bush’s selected charity for her Little Shrew film watchers.
Oddfinds #7.2
50 Words for Snow and other Kate Bush stories: part 2
Among Angels
“Stand up, look back and it is if an angel fell to Earth, making an impression in the snow before walking away”
Nancy Campbell, Snöängel, from 50 Words For Snow
Spending some time with a particular album is revealing. I often move from artist to artist, record to record. There are so many releases at any one time that it’s difficult to keep track of them all! So sitting with this album over the past few weeks, playing it and replaying it, has been an enlightening experience.
In my first piece on 50 Words For Snow (see the link below) I wrote about my sporadic relationship with Kate Bush’s music, then finding the album and loving it; then buying a vinyl copy from a friend and discovering it over again.
Kate Bush crashed onto the scene as a teenager with Wuthering Heights, a very peculiar and precociously ambitious song which appeared on her impressive debut album, The Kick Inside. Three decades later, 50 Words For Snow came out and though its a very different record, there’s a thread between the wonderful songwriting on, say, The Man With A Child In His Eyes and the beautiful Among Angels.
However there’s a concept at the heart of this album that I’m going to explore more in this second part, and connect it with another artist – the writer Nancy Campbell – whose 2020 book shares its title with Kate Bush’s record. To be clear, it’s a connection I’m making, rather than anything explicit acknowledged by either of the artists. Still, the themes and the words that both use resonate with and trail through each other.
Nancy Cambell’s 50 words… is a beautiful book of fifty short poetic essays, each a description and reflection on a snow-word, drawn from cultures around the world. She’s keen to point out that the myth of the ‘Eskimo’ peoples having 50 words for snow is just that, an anthropological myth, and that snow words hold a heap more human and other-than-human significance.
Snow is a political, ecological thing, she tells us. ‘Snow people’ have been as marginalised and exploited as ‘Sun people’ have; their languages and words set aside, decontextualised and hidden. And she also tells that, in any case, snow also appears in the highest places of the warmest places on earth, so is not just a geographical or cultural artefact of the North…
Kate Bush’s 50 words…, on the other hand is the playful piece – dark in places, it’s true, and more sentimentally drawn from Northern ‘Christmas’ worlds, perhaps – but the album has a humour and emotional intensity that is probably only available in songs and poetry. That said, Nancy Campbell is a poet too, though her piece seems altogether a more serious work.
I had thought, when Nancy Campbell’s book came out, that there must be some link between the two, or inspiration drawn at least. Maybe, I thought, she’d been listening to the record and came to explore her own 50 words…? That wouldn't have been outlandish; I know that she’s a music fan. In her essay, Hundslappadrifa (an Icelandic word for “snowflakes as big as dogs’ paws”), she writes about how the music of Bjork, Marvin Gaye, Sigur Ros and, specifically Sigur Ros’s lead singer Jónsi and Alex Somers on their album, Lost and Found, refer to snow and snow-related themes.1 Her 2021 Guardian travel playlist, published just after her book came out, reveals an astute and (to my mind, pretty cool) musical taste.
She doesn’t refer to or acknowledge Bush’s album however – either in the book, the playlist or in any of the features and interviews I’ve read. I imagine that this was a purposeful omission – perhaps not wanting to be too obviously associated with such a particular vision – or maybe she just doesn’t like the record! Why then give it the same name? Having said all this, Campbell has her own deep artistic history based in cold places. Her cold travels have led to many other writings, including her 2019 book, The Library of Ice: Readings from a Cold Climate.
Despite the connection (in my mind at least!), it’s clear that Campbell and Bush are both intrigued by the language of snow and mythology that it holds. There are angels, gods, snow queens, snow men and women and other mythic and linguistic phenemona born and forged from snow in both the album and the book. Bush’s angels, for example, on the beautiful final track on her album (Among Angels) surround a loved friend as she sings to them –shimmering, “like mirrors in summer”. This might seem strange imagery in a winter album – but the song never feels out of place. Cambell’s Snöängels, on the other hand are the shapes that children (and playful adults) make when the snows come. The word is Swedish, though any child growing up with snow knows that urge to lie down, moving arms and legs to create a snow silhouette with angels wings. It seems like the kind of thing that Bush might also have sung about…
Fifty Words For Snow
“Ttutquiksribvik: A place with a layer of snow in shore-fast ice, near and Ince pressure ridge, where a boat and gear can be stored upside-down, and the sides of the boat banked with snow to protect gear under the boat. The bow of the boat is anchored to a piece of ice”
Nancy Campbell, #39, Ttutquiksribvik, from 50 Words For Snow
In some ways, I sometimes think that the title track is my least favourite song on Kate Bush’s album. At the same time, however, it is also at the heart of the record, and it’s hard to imagine the album without it! It’s the glue that pulls in the others songs and helps them stick together as a whole. And as it goes on and on to its full 8 and a half minutes, the track becomes hypnotic and intriguing, and my ambivalence melts…
A bit like Snowflake (the first track on the album), there’s a call and response here, with Kate Bush as narrator, while Stephen Fry’s fictional professor, Professor Joseph Yupik, articulates the 50 words. She encourages him, keeping him on track: “Come on Joe. Only forty four words to go!”, and the interplay brings bounce and humour to the song. The words are intriguing, of course, and a wry comment on the now disproven 50-words-Eskimo-myth. Most of the words are in English to start with and then the list develops into nonsense and even Klingon further down – Kate Bush playing with the myth!
However, there is a serious side. In Nancy Campbell’s book, she makes the link between the cultures of snow, their languages and the way in which they, and the world they depend upon changes as the climate warms. She writes: “The climate is a prism through which to view the human world – just as language can be”. As an example, Greenlandic (one of the Arctic languages) is on the UNESCO Languages in Danger list, and some of the languages featured have themselves become endangered, been oppressed as part of the colonialist project or even gone extinct. She informs us, rather than there being a ‘trivial pursuit’ style factoid about there being ‘50 or 100 words for snow’, that snow languages (like all languages) are contextual. For such peoples, snow and ice are the central contexts to their lives and cultures: “the working materials of this community”. These languages are ‘polysynthetic’ - “meaning they pack in a great deal of information into a single word”, like the wonderful Ttutqiksribvik from the Inupiaq, Kinikmiu or Wales dialect in Alaska.
The woman of the lake and the wild man
Taoist philosophy suggests that when there’s an abundance of any natural matter, a life will come forth from it… And so it follows that a woman may be generated in the heart of a snowdrift.
Nancy Campbell, #2, Yuki-onna (snow woman), from 50 Words For Snow
Lake Tahoe is, like a number of tracks on 50 words…, a long one. And like Snowflake (a segment of which has become the film Little Shrew) it was edited for an animated video Eider Falls At Lake Tahoe.2 Kate Bush likes playing with and reworking her own material, I think! Lake Tahoe deals with the legend of a woman who fell into the lake and is still seen from time to time:
They say somedays, up she comes, up she rises, as if out of nowhere. Wearing Victorian dress. She was calling her pet, "Snowflake! Snowflake!
There’s something about these cold myths in which humans doing human things (laying tables, walking dogs) come face-to-face with the supernatural – or else the forces of nature. In Nancy Campbell’s book, there’s a mysterious figure who emerges, not from a lake, but out of a snowstorm: the yuki-onna - or snow woman. She appears like snow, then melts away – transforms.
Like Misty the snowman in Kate Bush’s next song on the album, the yuki-onna takes a human lover, disappearing in a puff of wind, a flurry or snow or melting away leaving only icicles or damp sheets. As Nancy Campbell asks about such fated, ghostly meetings:
“Are all human encounters with the elements so ill-fated? Is it possible to keep our most profound dealings with nature a secret? Will the snows stay forever or will winter turn to spring?”
In these days of climate breakdown, these questions are profound and necessary. For many people living in snow lands, grief for what is being lost is already a familiar emotion, and their responses (and ours) will have a transformative effect on the world and the human cultures that live upon it and weave around it. Music is a way of articulating this things, as it always has been.
A similar set of questions can be asked about the myth of the ‘wild man’ or ‘abominable snowman’. In Bush’s song she sings to the mythical ‘wild man’, empathises with his lonely fugitive existence and urges him to “run away, run away, run away” from those who would hunt him down. There’s a definite message in this song about the way humans treat ‘nature’ and how we mythologise and fear difference. Kate Bush put it like this an 2011 interview:
“I don’t refer to the Yeti as a man in the song. But it is meant to be an empathetic view of a creature of great mystery really. And I suppose it’s the idea really that mankind wants to grab hold of something [like the Yeti] and stick it in a cage or a box and make money out of it. And to go back to your question, I think we’re very arrogant in our separation from the animal kingdom and generally as a species we are enormously arrogant and aggressive. Look at the way we treat the planet and animals and it’s pretty terrible isn’t it?”
The ‘Wild Man’ of many legends – from cold and hot lands alike, has often involved dismissing such people as ‘animals’. Such echoes of white supremacy lie behind the colonial myths that have underpinned the ruining of the Earth, and the racist stereotypes that emerge from that project. However the ‘wild snowman’ is a creature of cultural myth too – every culture has had its monsters to scare their children and keep them from wandering in dangerous places! And there’s probably few more dangerous places on Earth than the high, cold snow worlds of the Himalayas from where the legends of creatures like the Kangchenjunga Demon, Dzonga or Yeti emerged.
The animated video is below, and the full Wild Man track in the bonus track section below:3
First snow, last words
Cheotnun: The word for snow, in Korean, nun, is the same word as is used for ‘eye’. And so if you experience the first snowfall of the year – cheotnun –with someone you have eyes for, it is said that true love will drift into your arms.
Nancy Campbell, #12, Cheotnun, from 50 Words For Snow
Who, in the Northern world, doesn’t hope for first snow? There’s something deeply evocative - even romantic - in the idea of snowfall, even if the practicalities are not always as positive and ‘christmassy!’.
Snowy New York in films. Tales of Yeti and Snow Women. Children making snow angels. Men and women – a little more darkly – making love to mythical snow people. The wonders of water transformed, as if by a magical alchemy, into snow and ice – these substances that can be skated upon, built with and hunted upon. Substances that create landscapes that can muffle and shroud (as Nancy Campbell puts it); whole worlds that form the foundations for vast ecologies of life, and human cultures too.
Climate change threatens all this, and musicians, poets and others, write and sing about the potential loss and grief that the world will experience if (or when) the snow disappears. And meanwhile, while it is still with us, the first snow - the Korean cheotnun - will still be a source of wonder and delight, and form the glowing backdrop for someone who might drift into your arms.
After all, Kate Bush’s album, like all the best music, is ultimately about love with all its ties, binds, joys, jealousies and contradictions:
I can see angels around you. They shimmer like mirrors in Summer. There's someone who's loved you forever but you don't know it. You might feel it and just not show it. Among Angels, track 7, 50 Words for Snow.
Coming up in 2025…
Thanks to everyone who has supported and subscribed to Ziggy’s Lament in its first year.
In my first and second posts in 2025, I’ll be bringing out my inner geek and publishing my first Ziggy’s Lament catalogue of all the tracks featured in all the posts during 2024. Some people do top 100s or 50s – or playlists of the year. These two posts, I guess, will be my versions of this. You’ll be able to click on any of the tracks, be taken to the YouTube videos and, hopefully, follow up from there!
Then as well as the mix of Liatening2… playlists, longer pieces and guest posts there’ll also be a new series, entitled My Musical Life: conversations with friends, musicians and others whose life revolves around music – in one way or another! These will be dialogues, interviews and features, as always accompanied by tracks and playlist to invite you down rabbit holes and into new musical worlds.
See you next year!!
Notes and bonuses
The track Hundslappadrifa (“snowflakes as big as dogs’ paws”) comes from the album by Jónsi (lead singer of Icelandic band, Sigur Ros) and Alex Somers on their 2019 album, Lost and Found:
A number of the tracks on Fifty Words For Snow are long, and Kate Bush did edited versions with short films, rather than releasing ‘singles’ as such. The full tracks are musically essential, however, so here’s the full Lake Tahoe track from the album.
And here’s the full track for Wild Man. The shorter version was made into an animated film (see in the main text above).