How Kate Bush's 'The Dreaming' Made My Monsters My Own
NPR Music's Turning the Tables is a project envisioned to challenge sexist and exclusionary conversations about musical greatness. Up until now we have focused on overturning conventional, patriarchal best-of lists and histories of popular music. But this time, it's personal. For 2021, we're digging into our own relationships to the records we love, asking: How do we know as listeners when a piece of music is important to us? How do we break free of institutional pressures on our taste while still taking the lessons of history into account? What does it mean to make a truly personal canon? The essays in this series will excavate our unique relationships with the albums we love, from unimpeachable classics by major stars to subcultural gamechangers and personal revelations. Because the way that certain music comes to hold a central place in our lives isn't just a reflection of how we develop our taste, but how we come to our perspective on the world.
Oh, to become a monster! To feel the skin of your back strengthen into armor with every scale that forms across it. To grow a tail. A weapon. To feel teeth sharpening into blades, nails hardening, now unbreakable. You swell in size, become fearsome. No one will cross you, with that roar.
This kind of shape-shifting quickens many people's fantasies, so much so that it's become a central element of the mainstream's Marvel Comics Universe mythologies. Yet the thought of it also stimulates dread. In the real world, becoming identified as a monster is almost always a process of social exclusion – of shaming and banishment, even physical harm. Only the very powerful can claim the right to make themselves confrontationally huge, morphing into more than what others expect.
There are so many ways that women in particular are made into monsters. As girls, they bleed too soon, or grow too fat, or remain too boyish. They have the wrong color skin in societies that have turned lies about race into law. Becoming pregnant, they cannot contain themselves, losing the baby, or losing their firm bodies after the birth. Failing to become pregnant, they find themselves marked as barren, bony, half. Women may be called monstrous simply for keeping to themselves, unkempt and unbeautiful, especially as they age. Or for the opposite — claiming
