Kate Bush

The first star to embody twenty-first-century pop – in all its genre-defying, tech-forward, theatrical, profoundly feminine glory – made her recording debut in 1978. The rock world didn’t know what to do with her. “What is this supposed to be?” wrote one flummoxed journalist about teenage Kate Bush upon hearing her debut album, with its single “Wuthering Heights” based on Emily Brontë’s gothic romance. After the song hit Number One on the British pop charts, another critic described her wailing coloratura and unfettered songwriting as “a full-frontal attack on the brains of the nation.”