"Aerial" - Kate Bush: "Pi" vs. "Bertie"

[David]

Here's why I think "Pi" is a far greater song about Kate's son than "Bertie" is:

"Bertie" lyrics strike me as utterly conventional & therefore not insightful & not new -- we don't get any new insights from Kate about motherhood or childhood. All we get is the pedestrian ("The most truly fantastic smile/I've ever seen") perspective -- redolent of Hallmark cards -- from the parent's view; whereas in "Pi" Kate works the minor miracle of clarifying the young child's growing intellectual grasp of his environment. In "Pi," we actually witness that uncanny Freudian point in the boy's development between the state in which all of consciousness is pragmatic & literal & the more mature state in which consciousness wobbles back & forth between that pragmatism & conceptualization: the world of ideas. What other pop song (I can't think of any) succeeds at -- or even attempts -- painting that mysterious awareness of the figurative world, the the ideational world, which marks our growth?

However, the music to "Bertie" is great!