Coiling Up That Hill: Nicki Minaj, Kate Bush and Traditions of Performance

Two of the highest-profile pop performances of the summer could not seem more different: Kate Bush's first live concerts in 35 years, which have been live-blogged, live-tweeted and dissected and Nicki Minaj's video for her song "Anaconda," which has broken the Vevo single-day record and similarly live-blogged, live-tweeted and dissected.

Others have done the job for me in terms of reviewing the various responses to "Anaconda," which range from what-about-our-children-ing to no-one-is-a-better-feminist-ing. Bush's performances, like I noted above, have been more than hotly anticipated since they were announced and may well be the gig of the century for music bloggers and reporters worldwide. They were also likely the impetus for the recent release of Running Up That Hill, a fascinating, if not simplistic, overview of her career. It's high time to examine each artist's current achievements in context of their individual performance practices--centering on "Anaconda" for Minaj and some of Bush's earliest, most successful videos--and check out where, if ever, they intersect.

The Gaze

Minaj and Bush both creatively draw upon their distinctive eyeballs to engage viewers. In "Anaconda," Minaj alternates between "come-hither" glances, maniacal stares and near-winks. Each eye movement serves the narrative: the "come-hither" glance starts to look ridiculous when she uses it while mouthing the chipmunk-style "Oh my God, look-at-her-BUTT." When Minaj violently slices a banana just after bedroom-eyedly covering herself in whipped cream, the effect is both jarring and humorous.

Bush's gaze can be similarly maniacal, but usually signifies a shift in the character she's portraying rather than Minaj's change in tone. The best example here is the famous "Babooshka" video:

Bush, well known for her preference to tell someone else's story rather than her own, particularly in her early work, has charmingly explained this tendency by saying that those other characters are simply more interesting than she is. In "Babooshka," her performance meanders between playing the role of "storyteller" and referencing the disguises the song's subject takes to test her husband. In the first minute or so, each meticulously planned sway is accompanied by either a squint or a deer-in-the-headlights stare, prefacing the shifts that are about to take place and the importance of her eyes in the role-shifting process. Around 2:47 of the video, Bush, still frozen in a stare, looks behind her for a moment and, when her gaze returns to ours, squints once more. If she blinks throughout the entire video, I missed it.

Both women subvert the male gaze, yes, by exercising agency over both their videos and actually making eye contact with whoever might be watching - acknowledging that while they're being watched, they can at least play at looking right back at those who are supposed to have control over their image - but in this subversion they develop their own traditions of performance that go beyond referencing the male gaze and toward creating a new form of vision entirely.

The Choreography

Minaj performs a choreography of repetition, even tedium, in "Anaconda." In the work-out scene specifically, she holds absurdly small pink weights while shifting her weight from leg to leg, occasionally taking a break to play puppeteer/yoga instructor on her backup dancers. The music under her sing-song rhymes, at this point in the tune, feels like a ticking time bomb due to the chorus's surprising explosiveness. While Minaj's raps have been frantically fast in the past, here her slowness accompanies the dance's redundant taunt, testing the patience of viewers awaiting the DRAKE LAP DANCE at the video's climax.

The video's climax, of course, is not really one at all-- Minaj denies Drake's touch and flounces offscreen, and his response is to place his heavy head in hand. Minaj's denial here, after making viewers wait for the celebrity cameo to rule them all, is deliciously dismissive and reminicent of the earlier point in the video where she slices and dices the phallus--I mean banana--after decorating herself in pseudo-ejaculatory substances.

Bush's choreography, much derived from her training with mime Lindsay Kemp, also employs repetition. For Bush, however, the repetition feels less like a taunt and more like a hex. This is particularly evident in "Wuthering Heights":

It's worth noting that Bush uses her gaze strategically once more, this time fluttering her lashes and actually blinking, referencing the romance of Wuthering Heights itself and the sleepiness of singing from the perspective of a ghost. Combined with the sleepwalking motion she enters on "Bad dreams in the night" around: 33, Bush retains the same gesture for a good three seconds longer than we expect her to, finally ensnaring viewers with a swirl leading to the iconic dance phrase of the chorus. The following phrase features her hands, grasping and pulling at the air in towards her core in exaggerations of the "come here finger" to again aid with the enchantment.

If Minaj's aim in "Anaconda" is to use movement to entrap only to deny, Bush's seems to be to enchant, entrap and then refuse to release her victim from her clutches.

Embodiment/Voicing

Finally, these performances rely on embodiment rather than explication. This embodiment occurs both through Minaj and Bush's aforementioned dances and their use of voice as a physical tool as well as a narrative device. Minaj's characteristic for switching accents, illustrated in "Anaconda" as she drawls out the word "cocaine" and in other hits such as "Superbass" where she whips out a London accent to proclaim having "always [having] a thing for American boys," intensifies the dexterity of her raps. This penchant also contributes to the listener's desire to imitate Minaj's rhymes, but there's a catch: that dexterity and her talent for dialects make her tunes very hard to imitate indeed. Her "dun-dun-dun-dundundundunduns" in "Anaconda," simple enough to intone aloud over the song but difficult to fully mimic, solidifies Minaj's unique use of her voice as another limb to dance with.

Where Minaj's code-switching skills and speed make her vocals a distinctive part of her performance practice, Bush's range spanning several octaves and acrobatic flutters are the hallmarks of her own vocals. Her mouth itself is often a focus in her choreography:

"WOW," which escapes Bush's mouth as a syllable, an exclamation and an animalistic yelp all at once, is framed by her arm movements, which conveniently make a "W" shape centering her mouth. The movement reminds us that Bush's "Wow" is a physical creation beginning with her vocal chords, traveling across her palate and ending outside her well-painted lips--it goes well beyond simply being a narrative device connoting amazement.

This is not to say that narrative isn't important: Bush is an admitted devotee of narrative, having written "Wuthering Heights" after reading the book in its entirety so she could get the "feel" right. Minaj fills the "Anaconda" verses with colorful anecdotes about her male conquests. But each artist complements narrative with a highly physicalized voice, unmistakable in the sea of pop performance available to listeners today.

Lorde and Her Demographic

"Tennis Court," Lorde's satire of the elite world she joined at the Grammys this year, isn't particularly convincing, but it has the best music video of the year. In one long close-up, Lorde stands in the middle of the frame in Neil Gaiman cosplay. At the beginning of the video and again in the middle she cracks, smiling and barely holding back her nervous laughter, and after that we watch for a few minutes as she raises and lowers her eyebrows, looks away from the camera, turns her head to the left and right, and so on. Béla Balázs wrote that in close-up the human face "speaks instinctively and subconsciously," beyond the control of the most talented actor; this video seems like a proof of his theory. By the end, though, as the fluorescents go up and down behind her, she's staring up at the camera with a kind of demonic concentration, totally committed to every repetition of the one line she gets. Every trace of a human subconscious has been successfully masked.

The intended association seems to be celebrity-as-demonic possession, as the distorted vocals suggest, and the video is certainly supposed to make us uncomfortable staring at a celebrity's face. That's valid, if pedantic, but it reminds me mostly of a job interview, the most common setting to exude determination and mask our nervousness. People who are good at job interviews have a way of stilling every tic, meeting every eye, and making their voice as sonorous as they can manage, even if they're bundles of nerves in everyday life. Usually, though, there's a seam, a moment of the grotesque when you can see them putting on the mask. The border between the two Lordes in the "Tennis Court" video is so thin—restricted to blinks and downcast eyes—that it's almost imperceptible, and by the end the lights have obliterated it. So we understand first of all that Lorde would be very good at job interviews. Good enough that I suspect she was bred for it in some kind of military facility.

Lorde's closest relatives—the ones grown in incubator tubes next to hers, we can conjecture—seem to be Grimes and Lana Del Rey. This would leave her in a high-end niche of the mainstream that was first chiseled out by Kate Bush, but KT's whole charm is in her digressions, her eccentricity, her invincible sense of humor. Lorde is not only relentlessly serious but also relentlessly focused in her topics. Kate Bush sings about doppelgängers, airplanes, kangaroos, military science, dead soldiers, Catherine Earnshaw, Molly Bloom; Lorde sings, to the exclusion of all else, about "the feeling of being my age and living in a suburb, and feeling as if there’s absolutely nothing to do." Her Siouxsian leanings aside, Lorde is callow and sincere. This brings her into the orbit of yet another prodigy: Taylor Swift.

The similarities here are bone-deep. The most important affinity between Lorde and Taylor is that they're both songwriters, and their labels work very hard to make that clear. Katy Perry can be a John Hughes character in one video and an Edgar Rice Burroughs character in the next because we don't expect the persistence of a persona; she's an interpreter, not an author. A Taylor Swift song, on the other hand, is a product of actual labor, an honest record of Taylor's real feelings, which opens it up to "serious" analysis. Let's take two Grammy performances: the aesthetic merits of "Dark Horse" are more or less irrelevant, because it's really the soundtrack to a theater piece: costumes, pyrotechnics, performance. Katy Perry herself is just a privileged part of the mise-en-scene. In "All Too Well," on the other hand, an auteur is at work. Taylor is alone, at a piano, on a dark stage, in a simple white dress; there are no distractions from the song itself. Taylor reminds us that she was there, that she remembers it. Taylor, like Lorde, is a creator. We can imagine her awake at night looking for the right word. 

Taylor and Lorde part company along class lines, though. Taylor's songs come from Taylor's life. She's naive, individualistic; she's a craftsman, not an artist. We're meant to understand that maybe she listens to Steve Earle or Patsy Cline for inspiration, but she doesn't study them. Whereas Lorde talks in interviews about her admiration for Grimes's "sexual politics," using the term with pointed familiarity. Taylor's provincial boredom is Lorde's deep ennui. Taylor's sincerity is like Springsteen's sincerity; Lorde's is like Sylvia Plath's. Taylor's sentiment that she's "feeling 22" is simple and plaintive; from Lorde's black lips it comes out transfigured into "I am only as young as the minute is."

Here the Grimes/Lana Del Rey affinity returns. We're looking for artistic legitimacy along with success. But Grimes and Lana Del Rey have read the wrong people for mainstream success. Grimes, with her Nabokov, is too much of a hipster; Lana Del Rey, with her Kerouac, is too naïve. But Lorde finally gets there. Lorde namedrops Raymond Carver and Sylvia Plath, authors that are safe to bring up at parties, and does so in a guileless way that emphasizes how young she is. She apprehends them, and applies their ideas, like a talented child.

It's this maneuver that makes it clear how perfectly Lorde is calibrated. By dwelling on transience she gives the sense that she's old before her time, bottomlessly self-conscious and sunk deep in her own monad, like her Millennial targets flatter themselves to be. By doing so in such precocious, idealistic terms, however, she makes it clear that being old before her time is just another part of the performance of her talent. I mean "talent" in the sense of "talent show," which, as all upstanding first-world Millennials know, is essentially what childhood is—a contest to differentiate yourself from your peers, to stand out from the crowd, characterized by a nagging sense that there are people doing it better than you are.

That's the world Lorde is from: a world of advanced classes, extracurricular activities, and talent shows, a world where the economic logic of competition slithers into every sphere of life. Lorde isn't as good a songwriter as Taylor Swift, and she isn't as funny as Lena Dunham, but she knows her audience better than either. She understands that her affluent, white demographic is obsessed with childhood because it's obsessed with potential, and she especially understands the way that, for that demographic, personal identity is a function of branding.

By discussing all this in terms of branding, I don't mean to give the sense that Lorde's whole persona has been calculated and imposed on her from without, by her helicopter parents or by the people at the label. On the contrary, I think it's perfectly possible that Lorde does all her own branding. Her audience does its own branding, after all—on Twitter, Tumblr and Instagram, and on endless job applications, and in every conversation, and in the music it listens to. If Lorde is doing the same thing, then it's a gesture of identification. Lorde is the first instance of full-fledged Elite Pop in the music industry. Or Intern Pop, maybe. Whatever it is, Lorde is very, very good at it, and it's the kind of pop a Harvard student could listen to without shame.