Running Up That Hill Again, and Again

Please don't make it the song the summer

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Let me make something enormously clear: I love Kate Bush and I love “Running Up That Hill” and I am very happy for her and expect great things of her garden, which I’m sure will see many a new tomato plant now that she has received this overwhelming tidal wave of royalty checks.

I am not opposed Kate Bush’s renewed popularity, but rather the reality that “Running Up That Hill,” a song released in the mid ‘80s, may very well be the song of the summer. It has gloriously returned via the cultural juggernaut that is Netflix’s Stranger Things and now, just as you would hear Harry Styles playing in the ambient American street, so too would you hear Bush’s baroque pop floating through the mall wind.

In many ways, it’s cool. It’s cool that a song as good and wierd and singular as “Running Up That Hill” is where it is today culturally. But it saddens, and even concerns me, that we must return to decades far past to get our fix of bizarre chic.

I am, I suppose, future-oriented. At least aesthetically. And the reality that we, as a culture, are dredging up the great culture of the past and repackaging it as novel denotes a certain artistic amnesia. A culture that repurposes the old as the new so unthinkably must be undergoing something. Only such a change in a culture’s perception of time and aesthetics could produce such a gold-fish-relationship to media. “It’s new because it’s front of me” seems to be the feeling of the music-consuming public at large. And how could you blame them? There’s simply so much music, from both now and the entire history of recorded music, that all of it may as well be brand, sparkling new.

In an incisive piece about the death of music snobbery in the algorithmic age, writer Drew Austin uses “Running Up That Hill” to illustrate the growing reality of universal newness. He writes,

“Kate Bush is a bridge connecting the old world—where shibboleths of good taste mattered—to the new world where we wake up as clean slates each morning, primed for algorithmic feeds and streaming platforms’ curation to reprogram us anew. Amnesiac TikTokers have no choice but to proclaim everything a trend because the past is more of a mystery than the future. Who cares if you knew about Kate Bush before someone else did? The clock just reset to zero again. We are all constantly starting from scratch now, and if you actually remember the past, your curse is to get annoyed when others naively unearth.”

There is no history or continuity in an age where everything can be repurposed and re-contextualized. The historical specificity that produced Bush and “Running Up That Hill” are void in lieu of the song’s use in today’s most popular TV show and its subsequent TikTok vitality. And maybe that’s exciting because in our age of relative aesthetic stasis, the old being repositioned as new may be a way to shock the boring out of today’s culture. If today’s cultural workers are too algorithm-brained and influencer-statused to make something risky and proactive, maybe we can offshore the work of pushing the edge to artists of a bygone age, and they can remind us of more extreme, more thoughtful aesthetics.

At least that’s the hope.

The thing is though, that the economics of new music is shifting before us, and the possibility that the old beckons a change in the new is being replaced by an economic model that rather favors the old in lieu of the new.

A recent report by US market monitor Luminate (fomrmerly Nielson) confirmed previous studies that the popularity of new music is declining whereas that of older music (often referred to as catalog) is increasing. And not just by a little. Luminate found that total album consumption (a metric which combines streaming, downloads and physical sales) of new music was down 1.4% in the first half of 2022. Compare that with an increase of 9.3 % of total album consumption of all music. According to Music Business Worldwide, that means that “while the popularity of ‘Current’ music shrunk in the first half of this year, the popularity of ‘Catalog’ music grew considerably, up by 14.0%.” Continuing, they find that while “‘catalog’ took a 72.4% market share in H1 2022, ‘Current’ music’s share fell by a full 3% to just 27.6%.”

That report also found that the top 10 tracks of the first half of 2022 were played accumulatively 1 billion times less than the top 10 tracks of the fist half of 2019. In other words, the hits are hitting less, the popular is less popular, and everything is becoming more diffuse, decentralized and less driven by what’s new.

So, if catalog is what’s driving industry revenue, the potentiality of older music informing and inspiring new music is, at least from a label-investment perspective, not advisable. It’s certainly less cumbersome for labels to dig into their back catalog and find ways to reinvigorate songs from days passed than cultivate unknown talent, who are maybe doing something novel different, and turn them into pop stars.

In this sense, the wild popularity of “Running Up That Hill” (which currently sits at #4 on the hot 100) is less a signal of a changing, eclectic taste and more a harbinger of what’s to come: the recycling and repackaging of the old, less investment in what’s cutting edge and growing, and a culture that may be forever looping itself without breaking from it’s pre-conditioned moulds.

We, as members of a culture, have to grapple with this dynamic and really think for ourselves: are we content with chewing on the already chewed? Even if it’s as good as “Running Up That Hill.” Because there’s a sort of ideological stake here. It’s not that we simply love the new because newness feels fresh, but rather that we have an investment in the development of aesthetics and the perpetual bettering of culture. I love my favorite albums from decades passed, but I still engage with new music because I believe in the ability for young and new artists to improve upon existing forms. And I care about existing forms. And I want things to progress. Because progression is a good in and of itself.

I do see a glimmer of strange hope though. That same report by Luminate found something rather specific: much of that catalog music which has seen increased consumption comes from not that long ago. In fact, 23% of catalog streams come from music released in 2018 and 2019: Still not new, as in music of the moment, but music from two years back is no cheap nostalgia. So maybe, the hope for pushing aesthetics does not reside in our current moment, but in the ability for art from recent moments to endure. Maybe 3-4 years is our culture’s natural A&R, as the best music survives that awkward interim and finds delayed success. It would make a bit of sense given the absolute overwhelming amount of new music that’s released on streaming every day. But there’s much more to say about this, and maybe I’ll do that next week.