Rock history has excluded the maternal domestic interior as its subject

Evidence

What is fascinating about “Sea of Honey” is its exploration of the Mother’s bliss, which has by definition been excised from a history of rock that has endlessly staged the cutting of the apron strings, the rejection of the maternal. There’s something oppressive and cloying about this domestic space, something suffocating and greedily insatiable about the protected interiority Bush creates. The “domestic idyll” is literally agoraphobic, troubled by an Outside it seeks to keep at bay. “How to be Invisible” is a spell in which ultra-ordinary objects are brandished as protective charms, preservatives of a domesticity that has withdrawn from the wider social world. Yet the heimlich, the homely, is always, also, the unheimlich, the unhomely, the uncanny. In “Mrs Bartolozzi”, a widow’s solitude transforms laundry into a Svankmajer erotic dance, the boredom, loneliness and sadness of a confined mind transfiguring empty clothes into an animist memory-theatre. In these circumscribed horizons, washing the floor becomes a religious observance, an act of mourning and melancholy. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1077

Categorization

• XREF: The uncanny homeliness analysis parallels the reader’s interest in decorum toward domestic space and the Freudian heimlich/unheimlich framework used in other cultural criticism.