What does a Tory look like? Do they automatically come attired in Charles Tyrwhitt shirts and Barbour jackets, and have naturally booming voices? Does membership of the Conservative party automatically make you a subscriber to Horse & Hound magazine? Clearly such assumptions are ludicrous, but there is a sense among some music fans that Tory-loving pop stars should identify themselves – a badge, perhaps, or a special hat – in order that we may judge their acceptability.

This certainly would have prevented a world of grief for Kate Bush, who has just ended two years on the naughty step when she released a statement clarifying her political views. In an interview with the Canadian magazine Maclean’s in 2016, Bush was reported as having expressed support for the new British prime minister, Theresa May, prompting a fit of the vapours among her admirers. Taken in context, the meaning of Bush’s quotes was obvious. During a discussion about Hillary Clinton and the fear of women’s power, she voiced enthusiasm for having a woman in charge. But nuance rarely being a characteristic of 21st-century discourse, this was lost in translation, and our Kate was branded a Tory. More heartache ensued in the flurry of press around the release of her remastered back catalogue and a book of lyrics late in 2018, prompting – finally – clarification on her website.

So now we can sleep soundly – ideally while hugging The Kick Inside to our chests – knowing that Kate is not persona non grata after all. She has been marked safe. But does it matter either way? Were Bush to have really outed herself as a card-carrying Tory, my delight in her records would be undented. It’s a symptom of the modern age to righteously weed out dissenters from our social media pages and freeze them from our social circles – see John McDonnell’s assertion that he could never be friends with a Conservative MP, or the bosom-heaving that followed Labour’s Stella Creasy going to a gig with the Tory MP Thérèse Coffey.

Now, it seems, we are doing it with our pop stars. But to look solely for musicians – or indeed film-makers, writers and painters – who reflect our worldview is not only to deprive ourselves of myriad artistic wonders; it gives a depressingly blinkered view of the world. Gary Numan may have had Tory sympathies, but Are “Friends” Electric? is still a banger. And while few would have gone to the Spice Girls for political guidance in the mid-1990s, Geri Halliwell’s professed admiration for Thatcher didn’t make them any less fun. Judging artists purely on political lines also gives credence to the belief among some liberals that those on the left are good and those on the right are inherently evil, as if contemporary politics were an episode of Scooby-Doo (although that actually sounds quite fun).

It is, perhaps, understandable in these tumultuous times that music lovers should want to delve beneath the surface and understand an artist’s motivation and belief systems. We mostly come to music young, without clear identities of our own, and looking for validation or new ways of seeing the world. But it’s not as if there aren’t plenty of artists out there to feed that impulse. Lately, we’ve seen an uptick in pop stars who are openly critical of our political overlords. Billy Bragg has been at it for years, but more recently Sleaford Mods, Damon Albarn and Lily Allen have been open about the iniquities of the Tory government. But this doesn’t mean that declaring one’s party preferences is in the job description.

If we insist on sifting the wheat from the chaff, perhaps a better method is to look at how musicians conduct themselves more generally. Morrissey’s every utterance makes me heave, not because of what I suspect he’d put on a ballot paper, but because of what he now seems to believe. I’m also not keen on the musicians who have turned out to be sexual predators – and, crunching the numbers, there look to be considerably more of those than ones who are Tory voters right now – but we all have our line in the sand.

While many of Bush’s fans may have felt dispirited at the idea that she could have planted her flag behind the architects of austerity and Brexit, it was never that plausible. At the height of her fame, she wasn’t exactly known for her party-political pronouncements, while her songs about gender, power, sex and domesticity could appeal to listeners of all stripes. And yet, ultimately, none of this really matters. Bush’s power and legacy lies in her peerless ability to tell stories and create beauty through music. The rest is just noise.

• Fiona Sturges is a freelance arts writer specialising in books, music, podcasting and TV