We're Cloudbusting, Daddy!

The other day I shared a very special music video with The Crier, by British songstress Kate Bush. Let's just say that Kate has a proclivity for making strange music, and even stranger videos, so now it's time to share some of that strangeness with a slightly larger audience.

I present "Cloudbusting," a single off of Kate Bush's 1985 album Hounds of Love. The subject of both song and accompanying video is the Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, and his invention, the cloudbuster. You see, Reich thought that rain-making clouds were actually accumulations of orgone energy (fun fact: "orgone" shares its latin root with the word "orgasm"), and that by focusing this orgone energy into the atmosphere with the aforementioned cloudbuster, he could create rain (fun fact: cloudbusters don't work, and orgone energy isn't real).

Figure 1: A cloudbuster

Reich also believed in nude massages and "orgasmotherapy" during his psychoanalyzing sessions, but that is beside the point. Kind of. Reich was taken into custody by the FBI in 1941, and it remains unclear why they decided to arrest him. It could be due to his status as a German-speaking immigrant living in the US during WWII, his communist connections, or simply the fact that he was a pervert who happened to own a copy of Mein Kampf.

Figure 2: Buster Bluth, a monster

But back to the subject at hand, the music video. It stars Donald Sutherland (and his magnificent moustache) as Wilhelm Reich, Kate Bush as his son Peter, who actually witnessed his father's arrest at a young age, and a cloudbuster as itself. Now that you have the full historical and pseudoscientific background to "Cloudbusting," please enjoy the following video!