Tori Amos’s Boys for Pele 9781501321313, 9781501321344, 9781501321320

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BOYS FOR PELE Praise for Tori Amos’s Boys for Pele: In this remarkable book, Amy Gentry pulls off such fearless feats of feminist criticism I found myself hollering “Yes!” out loud, dog-earing and underlining entire passages. She dives deep into why we consider certain women and their art simply “too much,” and examines her own love and trepidation for Tori Amos’s work with relentless, righteous curiosity. This is an essential read, a barnburner of a book for anyone who thinks deeply about music and the people who make it. —Jessica Hopper, author of Night Moves and The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic When I was a teenager, “Boys for Pele” changed my idea of what a woman could be. Now, Amy Gentry’s book is changing the questions I ask when I think about women. Gentry wonderfully unpacks Amos’ masterwork, and her journey into the abject unearths urgent truths about why we’re compelled to dismiss and diminish art by inconvenient women. —Sady Doyle, author of Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear . . . and Why

Praise for the series: It was only a matter of time before a clever publisher realized that there is an audience for whom Exile on Main Street or Electric Ladyland are as significant and worthy of study as The Catcher in the Rye or Middlemarch. . . . The series . . . is freewheeling and eclectic, ranging from minute rock-geek analysis to idiosyncratic personal celebration —The New York Times Book Review Ideal for the rock geek who thinks liner notes just aren’t enough —Rolling Stone One of the coolest publishing imprints on the planet —Bookslut These are for the insane collectors out there who appreciate fantastic design, well-executed thinking, and things that make your house look cool. Each volume in this series takes a seminal album and breaks it down in startling minutiae. We love these. We are huge nerds —Vice A brilliant series . . . each one a work of real love —NME (UK) Passionate, obsessive, and smart —Nylon Religious tracts for the rock ’n’ roll faithful —Boldtype [A] consistently excellent series —Uncut (UK) We . .  aren’t naive enough to think that we’re your only source for reading about music (but if we had our way . .  watch out). For those of you who really like to know everything there is to know about an album, you’d do well to check out Bloomsbury’s “33–13 ” series of books —Pitchfork For reviews of individual titles in the series, please visit our blog at 333sound.com and our website at http://www.bloomsbury.com/musicandsoundstudies Follow us on Twitter: @333books Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/33.3books For a complete list of books in this series, see the back of this book.

Forthcoming in the series Peepshow by Samantha Bennett Southern Rock Opera by Rien Fertel Return to the 36 Chambers by Jarett Kobek One Grain of Sand by Matthew Frye Jacobson Hamilton by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins Switched on Bach by Roshanak Kheshti Tin Drum by Agata Pyzik Southern Accents by Michael Washburn Golden Hits of the Shangri-Las by Ada Wolin Timeless by Martin Deykers The Holy Bible by David Evans The Wild Tchoupitoulas by Bryan Wagner Jesus Freak by Will Stockton and D. Gilson Blue Lines by Ian Bourland Diamond Dogs by Glenn Hendler Voodoo by Faith A. Pennick xx by Jane Morgan Boy in Da Corner by Sandra Song Band of Gypsys by Michael E. Veal and many more…

Boys for Pele

Amy Gentry

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2019 Copyright © Amy Gentry, 2019 Cover design: 333sound.com All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: PB: 978-1-5013-2131-3 ePDF: 978-1-5013-2132-0 eBook: 978-1-5013-2133-7 Series: 33–13 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

This book is for every man who’s ever played a role in shaping my musical tastes, either by sharing his enthusiasms or by policing mine; giving me a new thing to enjoy, or an old thing to resist. To Mike and Paul and Larry, to Luke and Daniel and Aaron, to Ethan and Carl and that guy at the open mic who complimented my set but suggested I listen to more Dylan: Take a seat. Put on some headphones. Listen to this.

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Contents

Track Listing

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Introduction: On Being Grossed Out 1 Y Kant Tori Rage? 2 Y Kant Tori Kant? 3 Y Kant Tori Sit Still? 4 Y Kant Tori Rock? 5 Y Kant Tori Cop to It? 6 Y Kant Tori Grow Up? 7 Y Kant Tori Stop Looking at Herself? 8 Y Kant Tori Be Intersectional? Conclusion: Twinkle and Spark

1 19 45 61 75 89 103 119 139 151

Acknowledgments 157 Notes 159

Track Listing

Side 1 1. “Beauty Queen/Horses” (6:07) 2. “Blood Roses” (3:56) 3. “Father Lucifer” (3:43) 4. “Professional Widow” (4:31) 5. “Mr. Zebra” (1:07) 6. “Marianne” (4:07) 7. “Caught a Lite Sneeze” (4:24) 8. “Muhammad My Friend” (3:48) 9. “Hey Jupiter” (5:07)

Side 2 10. “Way Down” (1:13) 11. “Little Amsterdam” (4:29) 12. “Talula” (4:08)

T rack L isting

13. “Not the Red Baron” (3:49) 14. “Agent Orange” (1:26) 15. “Doughnut Song” (4:19) 16. “In the Springtime of His Voodoo” (5:32) 17. “Putting the Damage On” (5:08) 18. “Twinkle” (3:12)

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Introduction On Being Grossed Out

The first time I heard a Tori Amos song, I was disgusted. I was an eighth grader with an underdeveloped chest and all the attendant anxieties about changing in gym class that come with it. Though I know I must have first heard the twiddling piano and sulky opening lines of “Silent All These Years” while getting dressed in the morning, what I remember is not exactly my first moment of hearing it, but rather my first moment of shuddering over it in the locker room later that day. The buzz of the notes got under my skin, so much so that when I was performing the daily agony of wriggling from one shirt to another while exposing as little of my superfluous bra as possible, it came to me again: aggressively, intrusively. Foisting itself on my inner ear. Excuse me but can I be you for a while / My dog won’t bite if you sit real still / I’ve got the Antichrist in the kitchen yelling at me again . . . God, I thought in the universal middle-school language of disgust, which I could only indulge silently, since I was still a Christian and not allowed to take the Lord’s name in vain. Gaaawd.

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I’d only recently dropped my piano lessons, exhausted by the good teacher who yelled at me for playing by ear and bored with the bad teacher who gave out gold stars for nothing. When I heard the opening bars of “Silent All These Years,” I could feel the piano keys under my fingers, too close together, blurred into a lazy, dissonant drone by a lead-foot on the sustain pedal—a habit I despised because my piano teachers despised it in me. It was the kind of musical doodle you make when you’re tired of practicing and just want to move your fingers back and forth, punctuated by peevishly syncopated emphases: Duh-nuh-nuh-nuh. Duh-nuh-nuhnuh. Duh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-NUH-nuh-NUH. Not good enough, not pretty enough to be for anyone else, it sounded like someone just idly getting themselves off—something I’d also learned about relatively recently, but wasn’t exactly selling tickets to. The up-close vocals rasped over my skin like a cheese grater. I could hear the sound her lips made opening, a swallow here, a gasping breath there. She was performing something more than just a song. She was performing a body. And something about it was just . . . gross. So gross that I bought Little Earthquakes on cassette and listened to it again and again and again. It was 1991, the year the riot grrrl manifesto was first published in Bikini Kill Zine 2 and Hole recorded their debut album. But had I caught wind of the primal yells of Kathleen Hanna or Courtney Love or Kat Bjelland or any of the other women giving voice to anger over misogyny in the music scene, I don’t think they would have affected me the same way. I would have shied away, knowing those things weren’t for me, a safe little Christian girl, snug in her parents’ house 2

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in the Houston suburbs. They belonged to a different scene, a scene that I understood to be going on far away from me, among people I would be too intimidated to hang out with. Dangerous people. Cool people. Tori wasn’t part of any scene. She was a sui generis weirdo, a preacher’s daughter and a self-taught piano prodigy. As a small child she’d soaked up musical influences like so many languages, and voiced them through her instrument with a polyglot promiscuity. Her tendency to improvise, though relatively reined-in on Little Earthquakes, made her songs difficult to categorize, full of rabbit-trails and extra bars and strung-out bridges, deceptively pretty yet deliberately jarring. I, too, was a sui generis weirdo, but nobody knew it yet, least of all me. A year after moving to West Houston, where the girls wore hundred-dollar penny loafers and carried three-hundred-dollar purses, I had few close friends, so I made straight A’s and flew under the radar. Sit in the chair and be good now / Oh and become all they told you, Tori sang. I bought knock-off loafers and knock-off purses and when they didn’t work, I prayed for snow that never came. These precious things / let them break their hold on me, Tori sang. On lonely days, I hung out with God, whom I could see shining in the air sometimes, though now I take meds for that. My nights were alive with other miracles. I’ve been looking for a saviour in these dirty streets / Looking for a saviour beneath these dirty sheets, Tori sang. After listening to the opening twiddle of “Silent All These Years” enough times, I began to notice that the song starts on the last note of the riff, not the first note, so that it takes a full cycle for the ear to adjust to where the beat really is. This 3

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destabilizes an otherwise repetitive riff in a way that suggests at once barely contained danger, and also the boredom of having to control it. John Carpenter’s score for Halloween achieves a similarly off-balance effect with a five-four time signature, making every measure sound a bit longer to our four-four-trained ears. But the genius of the extremely simple Amos riff is that the same somewhat monotonous four-four riff manages to sound different at different points in the song, like a held breath at the end of every second measure. I’ve been here, sings the voice. Silent all these years. I listened to Little Earthquakes alone in my room on my girly lavender tape-deck with my ear right up next to the speakers, so that there was no danger of its lyrics finding their way to my parents’ ears. Hand me my leather, Tori whispered, cabaret-style. On “Precious Things,” she breathed percussively, hotly, into the microphone, while I listened, rapt. Whatever was disgusting about Tori Amos, I began to suspect it was disgusting about me, too. Amos’s second album Under the Pink came out in 1994, and I bought it right off the Sam Goody display on a trip to San Antonio with my parents. When I got a driver’s license, I discovered the Sound Exchange on Westheimer and started lurking in the imports section. My first CD was the “God” single, purchased before I even had a way to listen to it; the “Crucify” EP soon followed, and then I was buying singles and bootlegs as they came in. Tori Amos was the first music I bought because I and I alone liked it; not my big brother, who had introduced me, over the years, to Peter Gabriel and R.E.M. and Nine Inch Nails and King Crimson; not my school friends, who listened to Top 40 radio and the Reality 4

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Bites soundtrack; not my church friends, who sang along to Indigo Girls on retreats. If Tori Amos shaped my burgeoning musical taste, she also felt, in a way, shaped by my taste, her obsession with boys and God and sex and piano matching the precise dimensions of my own. As perfectly suited to my developing sense of self as if I’d invented her. And then, in my senior year, Boys for Pele came out. * * * Women and girls have a particularly complicated relationship with disgust. We learn at an early age to be grossed out by our bodies, with their ungainly fat deposits and nipples guaranteed to be the wrong size and slimy, bleeding, wrinkly holes. Later on, we learn that the things we like are also disgusting, because we like them. These things include, but are not limited to: unicorns, romance novels, the color pink, Tori Amos. * * * “When you hate a song, the reaction tends to come in spasms,” writes music critic Carl Wilson on the first page of Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste (2007), one of the best known of the 33 1/3 series. Putatively about a Céline Dion album, it is actually an interrogation of the concept of taste itself. “Hearing it can be like having a cockroach crawl up your sleeve: you can’t flick it away fast enough.”1 The comparison of an insect to a despised song is wonderfully apt, as is the sensation of barely noticeable— yet, once noticed, unendurable—penetration evoked by the thought of it “crawl[ing] up your sleeve.” Most appropriate 5

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of all is the choice of insect: not a bee or wasp or stinging thing, but a cockroach, the only real threat of which is contamination, and to which the only real response is a visceral disgust. Sound can scuttle into your ear faster than any insect, borne on the million invisibly scurrying legs we call vibrations, entering the body through an orifice and moving to sympathetic ecstasy a tiny physical structure called the eardrum. You could say penetration is the very nature of sound, which is why, of all the senses, hearing can be hardest to block. Only a bad smell is as invasive as a bad noise, and while plugging one’s nose in public is no more socially acceptable than plugging one’s ears, it tends to be more effective. Sound is a bodily vibration, linked to balance, and to the body’s very sense of itself; thus, soundwaves are stubbornly persistent, as anyone who’s ever crushed pillows over ears desperate to drown out a roommate’s thumping party mix knows. Even if you can’t hear them, you can often still feel them. Moreover, you might remember them. This, too, aligns with the experience of disgust. If you’ve ever been surprised by a roach on your neck, you know the imagined tickle of insect legs against skin that haunts you for days afterward. Our long memory for the precise sensation of the disgusting is part of a biological imperative against contamination that might threaten our health. We must not forget—we must remain vigilant, lest it creep back. When a song has the bug-like property of crawling mindlessly back up and into us again and again, penetrating us against our will—perhaps, like 1997-era Céline Dion, because of endless radio-play, but equally because of 6

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properties within the song itself referred to as “catchy”—we call it an “ear worm.” The ear worm is insidious because it can wriggle its way past the barriers of taste we have erected, and somehow, by some quality in the music, or most horrifying possibility of all, by some quality in ourselves, force us to like it whether we like it or not. This explains the vaguely bondageinflected language of the Wilson book, in which Dion’s music crushes, flattens, and foists; in one particularly pornographic analogy, Wilson describes the moment “My Heart Will Go On” became inescapable as the moment “Dion’s ululating tonsils dilated to swallow the world.”2 Vagina dentata, meet Céline Dion’s gaping tonsils, expelling, like the monster from Alien, a never-ending ear worm capable of penetrating and swallowing you at the exact same time. Although Wilson’s book professes to be “an experiment in taste,” and as such, takes an impressive tour through postKantian aesthetics and sociological theories, I’d argue that it is in fact a book-length exploration of disgust, tinted with a tentative optimism about overcoming it. “Will I find my inner Céline Dion fan?” Wilson asks.3 The answer is no, and Wilson’s research into who likes Dion remains shadowed with a disgust he seems eager but unable to quell. At one point, talking to a fan who credits Dion’s music with saving him from suicide, Wilson feels a flicker of identification with the idea of having your life saved by music, but immediately disavows it: “Usually the musician is someone like Kurt Cobain, the novel something like Catcher in the Rye. When the talisman turns out to be something as trite as ‘My Heart Will Go On,’ the empathy can shift to doubting the subject’s mental fitness.”4 To make such a remark about someone who 7

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has just confessed to being suicidal is callously obtuse— particularly since Wilson’s own origin story for hating Dion has to do with his blaming her, in a circuitous way, for the tragic 2003 suicide of the singer-songwriter Elliott Smith. According to Wilson, Dion’s barrel-chested performance at the 1998 Academy Awards so far eclipsed Smith’s gentler song as to elicit a sarcastic snort from Madonna. Wilson’s intense identification with Smith and lack of empathy for the Dion fan, his assumption that Kurt Cobain and Catcher in the Rye are universal touchstones equally accessible to everyone, while Madonna and Dion have the power to crush but not to save a life, says more to me about how taste really operates than anything else in the book. Bound up in a leftist fantasy of art as a refuge from latephase capitalism (at one point he envisions a “Unabomberlike retreat” from Dion’s music), Wilson is aware that his situation is, as we call it these days, “problematic.”5 If his book illustrates just how hard it can be to unlearn disgust, and how deeply ingrained our identifications are with certain forms of powerlessness over others, Let’s Talk About Love also raises something we don’t often talk about when we talk about taste: the fact that we sometimes hate to love or love to hate; that a surfeit of something enjoyable can make us feel physically ill, and that sometimes an overpowering sensation of disgust only serves to send us right back to the loathed object again and again, to poke at it and shudder and turn away, then back, then away again—just as Wilson, in chapter after chapter, does with Dion. And isn’t the real threat of a hated song not that we will be bludgeoned with it over and over again, but that we 8

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will secretly, by dint of being penetrated repeatedly by it, learn to like it? What might get in? And what might such a contamination say about us? * * * My first piece of published criticism was a pan of Boys for Pele for my high-school paper, The Stratford Oracle. In my review, cleverly titled “Why Can’t Tori Sing?” to reflect the fact that I knew about the Y Kant Tori Read bootleg even if I couldn’t afford to buy it, I conceded “a developing sense of depth” in Amos’s instrumentals, but lamented that her vocals too often tended toward a “breathy, weightless, shallow whine.” I called the lyrics “low-quality gibberish” and the album as a whole “self-indulgent” and rounded out my review with an arch lip-curl of condescension: “If only Tori had been guided by flow, and not overflow, the album would not have tasted so distinctly and sadly of might-have-been.” What did “might-have-been” taste like to a seventeenyear-old girl? Self-indulgence. Shallowness. Overflow. All the things a girl who wears scribbled-on Converse and plaid flannels stolen from her dad’s closet might be afraid of; the poetry she gave up writing years before; the parts of herself she can’t show her first boyfriend, who is into the Jayhawks and writes rhyming poetry that she listens to on the phone at night, when she’d rather be making out with him, with anyone really. The fear of being too much, and the intuition that too-much-ness is something that applies to her and not to him, and that it will follow her all the days of her life, if she isn’t careful to tamp it down, down, down. The truth is, I had listened to Boys for Pele only once on the brand-new CD 9

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player I’d gotten for Christmas that year before penning my review. I had to shut it out. It screamed too much. It started with the album art. The cover insert for Little Earthquakes had been in excellent taste, featuring lots of white space, its bulbous, phallic mushrooms the only hint that something wasn’t quite right; Under the Pink pictured a miniature Amos, etherized in flowing white and surrounded by crumpled cellophane like layers of atmospheric transparency. On the cover of Boys for Pele, she was life-sized and filthy, covered in mud and hoisting a gun in front of a dilapidated shack. In other images, her piano was engulfed in flames and appeared to be stranded at a truck stop outside of town, as if it had broken down on the road in the middle of the night. Amos herself seemed trapped in “The Waste Land” by way of an Erskine Caldwell novel. She suckled a piglet; she posed on all fours in a barnyard, among the animals and garbage, one shoe missing, face turned away from the camera, her once-white clothes now the same soiled color as the squalid mattress under her knees. The album sounded like a wasteland, too. A bull groaned in the background of “Professional Widow”—shades of Tobacco Road again—and other, less identifiable sounds presented themselves throughout the album. On some tracks, the piano was so distorted that it sounded as if it really were being set on fire; and although it still appeared on every track, it had been demoted, replaced as the dominant instrument of the album by the harpsichord, a piano with a head cold and a nasty sneer. Softness was all but missing from Boys for Pele; at once alien and archaic, the harpsichord is not capable of softness. The transitions were too abrupt, the stripped-down songs too 10

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stripped-down—“Twinkle” was a one-finger lullaby, “Beauty Queen” a single note plunked over and over—and the whole thing sounded as if submerged, not in musical white space, but in something like black space. The more complicated songs, “Blood Roses” and “Professional Widow” and “In the Springtime of His Voodoo,” were exhausting, the thread of their bizarre lyrics and multiple bridges and breakdowns and deliberately contorted vocals impossible to follow. Melodies were stretched like taffy and then suddenly interrupted to make way for abrasive, spitting lyrics: You think I’m a queer, I think you’re a queer! Chickens get a taste of your meat! Stag shit! Starfucker! It better be big, boy! Fragments of prettiness would reenter the scene, skewed and nonsensical, band-aids of grace just soft enough to hurt when ripped away. “Mannered” was not a word I knew to use in high school, but mannered it was. Boys for Pele was Tori Amos’s baroque phase. It was also the last time she ever allowed herself to be quite that ugly, and ugliness, I am now convinced, is much more important for an appreciation of Tori Amos than beauty, though both are always present. On Boys for Pele, their very coexistence is what disgusts. For a woman to be ugly in a way that’s not readable as rebellious, or punk, or cool—ugly in a way that, because of its proximity to the remnants of beauty, reminds you all the time of your potential failure to be the right kind of woman, to be any kind of woman at all—ugly because trying too hard, overflowing, whining and gibbering, too much—not a scream, but a broken soprano— not an abortion, but a pig hanging off a porcelain breast—is worse than tasteless. It’s disgusting. * * * 11

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Disgust is a biological response onto which learned responses are easily grafted, both by way of and as a means of social reinforcement.6 It is no less intimate for being learned, taking place, as it does, in the body. Like that other unruly response, desire, disgust gives the lie to the opposition between agency and passivity, what is learned and what is innate. It both can and cannot be controlled. Involuntary, it can be tamed; easily learned, it is difficult to unlearn and even harder to resist being taught in the first place. As a biological response, the benefits of disgust are selfevident: it keeps us away from bacteria-ridden, and thus potentially health-threatening, sites of animal waste, decayed or rotten foods, and any unidentifiable substance that might harm us. Research has shown, however, that there is a strong cognitive component to disgust, so that our feelings about what is disgusting change based on our ideas about the object. In one particularly memorable study, subjects inhaling a certain smell found it pleasant when told it was cheese, but when inhaling the same smell from a different vial, now labeled “feces,” found it nauseating.7 Part of the beauty of this example is that it’s so easy to imagine falling prey to the gag of the study; I almost gag myself just thinking about it. The disgusting does not discriminate between real and imagined offenses. Because of this psychological component, the disgust reaction easily morphs to attach itself to nonthreatening objects through association. At the risk of being redundant, contaminants contaminate—psychologically as well as physically. As the moral philosopher Kate Manne puts it, paraphrasing a 2014 study by psychologists Yoel Inmbar 12

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and David Pizarro, “Those who tangle with what disgusts us may become disgusting to us too.”8 This is precisely what lends the biological response of disgust its usefulness for social control, both in the enforcement of social norms and the punishment of behavior that is socially taboo. Entire categories of people have been tainted by their rhetorical association with biological agents of disgust, as when Jews in Hitler’s Germany were compared to rats and maggots. Obscenity law, ethicist Martha Nussbaum points out, is entirely based on assumptions about what a supposedly “normal” person finds disgusting. So were anti-sodomy laws, until 2003. Cultural beliefs about what is moral are thus closely entangled with physical or “gut” reactions of disgust thought to be universal.9 They are not universal, however, nor even consistent within a single person. As Manne usefully points out in Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, disgust is applied to marginalized populations selectively and pragmatically, rather than across the board, so as to punish those who disobey the unwritten rules of white-supremacist patriarchy. The fact that disgust can be held at bay for a preferred object of affection or approval is seen by some as a hopeful sign of its malleability (Manne calls this the “humanist fallacy”), but the fact that Adolf Eichmann had a Jewish mistress hardly exempts the architect of the Holocaust from charges of anti-Semitism.10 If anything, such exceptions may be a necessary part of justifying and acting on one’s disgust toward a marginalized population. Wherever misogyny is being exercised, we should expect the names of other women, better women, to be invoked as a bludgeon—though 13

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their “better woman” status may be revoked at any time, based on the needs of the moment. In her 2012 novel Gone Girl, the novelist Gillian Flynn immortalized this imaginary paragon, who materializes like a mirage whenever a negative comparison is needed, as the “Cool Girl.”11 I wrote the first draft of this book toward the end of a presidential election year. It still hurts too much to talk about all the ways in which disgust was martialed against the loser of that race, and by whom. Enough to say that during his campaign, the winner constantly evoked the disgust response to characterize various types of people—notably Muslims, Mexican-Americans, and women—as inferior. During the final days of the race, it became a high-stakes parlor game— higher-stakes than we knew, at the time—to point out the things Donald Trump had been publicly disgusted by. A New Republic article listed breast pumps, menstruation, and Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton’s bathroom breaks. The same article pointed to a large 2012 study strongly aligning disgust sensitivity to politically conservative voting patterns.12 This isn’t to say that a disgust response makes the disgusted person a Hitler, a Trump, a Republican, or even, necessarily, wrong. But unexamined disgust is a powerful if blunt weapon. It blocks thoughts and erases ideas, replacing them with a shudder. Whenever we feel that shudder, it is worth pausing before flicking whatever it is off our sleeves to examine the exclusionary social impulse buried in the seemingly physiological response. What is being called universal? What is being called relatable? What is being called human? At perhaps the nadir of Tori Amos’s popularity—postPele, pre-Geraldines—her reputation outside of a dedicated 14

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fandom became mired in disgust. I began hearing the singer snickeringly referred to as “Torn Anus,” an epithet that still bounces around comments sections in the murkier corners of the internet, perfectly conjoining the censure of feminine sexual availability with gay panic, and the fear of vulnerability with a contempt for what has been violated. A now-defunct Live Journal account in the name of “Tori Anus,” started in 2001 as an anti-fan site, offered up elaborate hate-fantasy posts, such as this hilarious masterpiece of disgust: “Tori Anus can suck a dark chocolate rice crispy treat out of my blown-out-in-buffalo hole while lactating her boosoms [sic] in a mason jar full of mice turds.”13 In its promiscuous mixing of out-holes and in-holes, nourishment and defecation, feminine animality (lactation) and feminine taste (the mason jar is a nice touch), it is a queasy banquet of abjection. Like the Dion joke Wilson sheepishly admits to laughing at—Why did they take the Céline Dion inflatable sex doll off the market? It sucked too hard—it resonates beautifully with Manne’s assertion that misogyny punishes women for failing to service men in ways they feel entitled to be serviced. Who would risk being the butt of that joke? * * * Within a month of my disgusted Boys for Pele review, I would dye my long hair red like Tori’s for the first time. Within a year of calling Pele “self-indulgent,” I had attended three Tori Amos performances and memorized the album front to back. I spent half the summer crying over my first breakup to the strains of “Putting the Damage On” and the other half 15

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practicing “Marianne” on the piano in the hopes of attracting boys in the freshman dorm. Unsurprisingly, I attracted only more Tori girls, and together we went to more shows, including one in the now-defunct Austin Music Hall where I met a winged girl who called herself a professional fairy and a goth girl who was dying of cancer. I have lost track of how many Tori Amos shows I attended over the years, even after I quit following her career closely. If it’s true that at some point I stopped needing her quite so much, it’s also true that every time I showed up for a live performance, I remembered why I’d needed her in the first place. * * * What if disgust were something every woman had to navigate in order to access the idea of taste—in music, in art, and in life? What if an aesthetics of disgust could show us that what we despise in others is actually something we fear within ourselves—and, with the dreadful, frightening persistence of the disgusting, teach us to love it? Many of these questions were inspired in their present form by Wilson’s book, and in answering them, I have followed his path through the byways and genealogy of modern Western taste, but with a difference. Instead of a book-length essay on taste using a despised object, I have written a book-length essay on disgust using a beloved one. Boys for Pele is an exemplary text for such an exploration. A break-up album recorded during one of the short periods in Tori Amos’s life when she was single, it shows no interest whatsoever in servicing men—or, for that matter, anyone. Its very length suggests an excess of the self-regard we find 16

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hardest to swallow coming from a woman, and yet it refuses the comfort of empowerment. It wallows and writhes, it shrieks and self-pities and stares in the mirror. Its ambition is in terrible, terrible taste. In learning what it has to teach us, we may unlearn habits of disgust dressed up as habits of taste, and perhaps move beyond both. The subtitle of Wilson’s book on Dion—A Journey to the End of Taste—is a winking pun. It alludes to A Journey to the End of Night, a novel by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, by reputation one of the most obscene and abject depictions of the horrors of war in the French language. The pun is intended to suggest to those in the know that listening to the other Céline—Céline Dion—is tantamount to the worst kind of torture. An aesthetics of disgust, however, might take up this idea of a journey to the end of taste, embarking on a quest to find out what’s on the other side, and if it’s worth a visit.

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Tori Amos’s biography has been well and faithfully canonized over the years through her unusually forthcoming interviews with fans, journalists, and biographers—particularly the music journalist Ann Powers, who collaborated with her on the memoir/biography hybrid Tori Amos: Piece by Piece.1 It’s worth going over briefly here, not only because her songs often draw on her autobiography, but because Amos’s life story, as she tells it, is characterized by an alternating pattern of phenomenal achievement and embarrassing rejection. Record label disputes and twenty-first-century fluctuations in her critical reputation fit neatly into this pattern, which seems, in some ways, perfectly designed to turn every failure into a future memory of obstacles overcome as the artist surmounts feelings of shame and self-loathing associated with being, at various times, a failed musical prodigy, a survivor of sexual assault, a disappointment to her label, and even a laughing stock. This pattern has propelled her through an incredibly productive life in music: Tori Amos has never had a fallow period, continually writing and performing music, releasing records, touring with intense

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zeal, and finding new types of projects to challenge herself since her early teens. If we look more closely at the pattern, however, we might sidestep the typically teleological account of an artist’s roads-not-taken and find pockets of resistance throughout Amos’s work, some of which were rewarded and others of which weren’t. Tori Amos was born Myra Ellen Amos in 1963 in Newton, North Carolina, where her parents were visiting her mother’s family, and raised in Baltimore, Maryland. She began playing the piano around two or three years old after listening to her older siblings practicing, and soon began composing short pieces herself as well as playing snippets of songs by ear. Recognizing her talent, her parents enrolled her at Baltimore’s Peabody Conservatory of Music at age five; she was the youngest student ever accepted at the time. Yet her continued preference for playing by ear rather than reading music, as well as a penchant for embroidering classical pieces with her own improvisations rather than playing them straight, got her scholarship revoked at age eleven. This was all but the same as being kicked out, and Ellen Amos—she went by her middle name—did not return. A year later, auditioning again for Peabody, she was rejected. After a year or so of depression, Amos won a teen talent competition with prize money attached. Her father, Methodist minister Edison Amos, suggested the thirteen-year-old, who had long played the organ in church, begin performing music professionally. Amos began playing regularly at various gay bars and lounges in D.C., accompanied at first by her father or both parents as chaperones. Over the next five years, she scored gigs at hotels and other venues, appeared 20

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on local television shows, and continuously worked toward a career in the music industry. Amos explains her parents’ willingness to ferry her to and from the charnel houses of sin as motivated by compassion for their disappointed daughter, but also by their ambitions for her, suggesting that her father’s thwarted dreams of fame as a TV minister and her mother’s renunciation of a career in education may have made her a proxy for their ambitions. Either way, it seems to have preserved Amos’s relationship with her parents, despite the often-angry criticisms of Christianity that have been an enduring feature of her music throughout her career. While still in high school Amos cut her first single, a corn-syrup-drenched civic anthem called “Baltimore” (“I’ve got Oriole baseball on my mind!”) co-written and performed with her brother, for which she received a citation from the mayor. “Baltimore” betrays Amos’s later style only in a hint of manic brassiness here and there, but her ambition was already much in evidence; the bubblegum sensibility of her B-side composition “Walking With You” strained against its four-and-a-half-minute length. During this time, her father, demonstrating further ambition on his daughter’s behalf, began writing letters, tapes enclosed, to a random assortment of entertainers, asking them to help her break into the business. Eventually Amos, who changed her first name to Tori at the suggestion of a friend, recorded a demo at a San Francisco recording studio, and by 1984, she was moving out to L.A. to begin the usual painful round of auditions and performances. The first years in L.A. were a struggle. Amos was told repeatedly that she would never get a recording contract 21

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because her act was passé: “The girl and her piano are dead. That time in history is over.”2 In response, she put together the synth-pop band Y Kant Tori Read, whose deliberately misspelled name, with its evocation of ‘80s hair-metal naming conventions, seemed designed to distance her from the “girl and her piano” image, while at the same time slyly referring to her rejection from Peabody for refusing to read music. In Los Angeles, Amos underwent a traumatic sexual assault that would have an impact on her songwriting and ultimately prove formative for her career, eventually inspiring the first single on her first solo album, the a cappella rape survivors’ cri de coeur “Me and a Gun.” Y Kant Tori Read was eventually signed with Atlantic in 1987, though by the time their first and only album was recorded, most of the band members had been replaced by more polished session musicians at the label’s insistence.3 The producer who supervised the recording of Y Kant Tori Read’s debut was Joe Chicarelli, who had worked with Pat Benatar, and the resulting self-titled album had a bit of the Pat Benatar sound and feel: theatrical and synthy, with layered, heavily produced arrangements and Amos’s deliberately roughed-up, throaty vocals. The lyrics were a quirky mix of New Wave and overblown fantasy pop, a little bit Cyndi Lauper, a little bit Bonnie Tyler, a little bit Kate Bush, and even a little bit Prince-protegé, with occasional spoken-word intervals.4 Amos’s piano breakdowns are present, but nearly lost among guitar and sax solos, synthesizers and bagpipes and mandolins; more than thirty musicians were brought in to work on the album, including the keyboard player Kim Bullard, who came up with elaborate loops for an earnest ode 22

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to pirates called “Pirates.” There are seriously dated missteps on the album, such as the rapped verses and sex-kitten purrs on “Fayth” (though they don’t sound much sillier than Debbie Harry’s rap on “Rapture”), but ultimately, it’s hard to separate the album’s sound from its place in Amos’s selfnarrated story as a massive failure. Released in 1988, Y Kant Tori Read was barely reviewed. When it was, though, it was not the laughing stock it has come to be known as since. The Billboard capsule review reads, in its entirety: “Classically trained pianist pounds the ivories on her pop-rock debut, belting out self-written material with a forceful, appealing voice. Unfortunately, provocative packaging sends the (inaccurate) message that this is just so much more bimbo music.”5 These days, most critics agree that the album’s “provocative packaging” was, in fact, a grievous mismatch for its gothy, synth-pop sound. On the album cover, Amos’s hair is teased up into a giant spike-banged halo, and her wardrobe features puffy sleeves, tight pants, corsets, plenty of cleavage, and a sword—nothing that would look out of place on David Bowie’s character in Labyrinth. The video for the first Y Kant Tori Read single “The Big Picture” only emphasized this image. Directed by Marty Callner, who’d directed videos for Poison and Whitesnake, it consisted of Amos alternately waving her sword around between revving motorcycles in her Goblin King drag and playing a white piano in a minuscule dress directly over a wind machine. The video opens with Amos complaining to a cop that someone has broken into her car and stolen her underwear (“I mean, that’s gross,” she intones hollowly)—only to watch the cop himself walk away with her lacy red thong 23

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tucked in his back pocket. The winky, salacious take on a woman’s violation by a male authority figure is a sour fit for Amos, and reads as leering rather than empowering, in keeping with the deliberately corny, over-the-top sexual humor of ‘80s hair-metal videos like Van Halen’s “Hot for Teacher” and Aerosmith’s “Love in an Elevator” (the latter of which was also directed by Callner). If Amos, who often looks awkward and unmoored when she’s not behind a piano, lacked Pat Benatar’s earnest charisma and Joan Jett’s better-than-the-boys badassery, she also wasn’t convincing as a slinky, writhing Lita Ford-type rocker; as a friend reportedly told her, “Lita Ford does Lita Ford a little better than you do.”6 It’s worth noting that all these images of female performers were of fairly recent vintage at the time, and that the rise of MTV had made fixing on such an image an urgent part of marketing any female musician. For Amos, the damning b-word—“bimbo”—seems to have eclipsed everything else in the Billboard review, despite the exonerating parenthetical that calls this image “inaccurate.” In interviews she has repeatedly invoked the word to describe Y Kant Tori Read’s reception as a rockbottom moment: “They called me a bimbo.” This quote is often accompanied by Amos’s story about walking into a restaurant in her Y Kant Tori Read outfit and running into a pair of record industry acquaintances who snickered and ignored her. Amos interpreted this as a sign that she’d gone “from a prodigy to a joke at twenty-four”7 and peeled off the thigh-high boots. After another bout of depression, she rented a piano and started over with the confessional songs that would eventually become Little Earthquakes. 24

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So far we are dealing with an origin story every Tori Amos fan knows by heart, documented in her authorized biography, assisted memoir, and countless interviews and fan sites. It has a familiar rhythm of failure and triumph to it, each setback—the music school dropout, the humiliating first album—followed by a renewed stint of determination and hard work. For thirty years, Amos made it a condition of her contract with Atlantic and subsequent labels that the first and last album by her misbegotten hair band would never be rereleased, which, of course, gave it a mythos all its own. For years a highly prized bootleg, it was finally rereleased in a digitally remastered version in 2017, during the time this book was being written and edited, though with very little fanfare or explanation other than that she had finally “made her peace” with it. But as many fans had already discovered by that time, when the packaging was stripped away, there was more continuity between Y Kant Tori Read and solo performer Tori Amos than you would think. “Cool on Your Island,” which Amos started covering while touring for Unrepentant Geraldines, features slant rhyme, wordplay, and unconventional rhythm in the hook: “I want you more than the stars and the sun / But I can take only so much cool on your island / Is it cool on your island.” And many of the songs, however theatrical, do seem to draw on Amos’s autobiography; “The Big Picture,” the song with the thong-and-sword video, was obviously written by an artist thirsting for and finally getting her big break, ready to change herself to make it stick, but conflicted about the results: “Got to make more money / gotta get, gotta get there faster than / the rest . . . What about what I want? / 25

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Somehow it got lost somewhere inside.” Would it be a bridge too far to suggest that Y Kant Tori Read flopped, not because it was a knockoff of something on the brink of being left behind, but because it was—god forgive me—a little ahead of the curve? At least one contemporary reviewer thought so. Derek Oliver, writing for the British heavy-metal magazine Kerrang!, called the album “strange but brilliant,” made comparisons to Kate Bush and Meatloaf, and finished by lamenting, “For most folk, however, Tori’s music is just too damn bizarre and she is destined, I fear, to enter the realms of eternal obscurity. Pity.”8 * * * Whether it was a retrograde rock sensibility or a forwardlooking one that curtailed Y Kant Tori Read’s success, the biggest sign that it wasn’t entirely a career-killing flop is simply that it didn’t kill Amos’s career at all. Atlantic refused to let her out of her contract, meaning someone in a suit thought her talent and ambition would eventually result in a record that hit pay dirt. Little Earthquakes, recorded in 1990– 91 and released in 1992, was that record. Though often portrayed as pure, diaristic, and confessional, Little Earthquakes was the result of an artist wrestling with professional demons as much as with personal ones. After the humiliation of Y Kant Tori Read, Amos had to reconceptualize her image if not her entire art, and she had to do so under the often-punishing gaze of studio executives who were underwhelmed by her first album’s performance. During this time, after writing and 26

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discarding a song called “The Underwear is Black” with Mr. Mister guitarist Steve Farris, who contributed backing guitars to Y Kant Tori Read, Amos began working on the suite of songs that would eventually make it onto Little Earthquakes, as well as fan-favorite B-sides like “Take to the Sky,” “Sweet Dreams,” and “Upside Down.” Doug Morris, then-president of Atlantic, paid her a personal visit to listen to her progress on the album, initially reacting to the new songs with “What is this shit?” and “I thought you were going to give me Rocket Man . . . so where’s Rocket Man?” but apparently coming around after a longer listen.9 Eventually, the label moved her to London, where it was thought that Amos’s quirky act would gain more traction. Working with producer Ian Stanley, she began playing intimate club gigs and hosting private performances for music journalists and record company execs in her apartment. The song “Me and a Gun,” written after a viewing of the newly released Thelma and Louise triggered memories of her own rape, grabbed the attention of music journalist David Stubbs, who wrote in a rave review for Melody Maker that the song made for “absolutely compelling, but uncomfortable listening.”10 “Me and a Gun” became the album’s first single, and Little Earthquakes was released in the UK early the next year. Of the twelve piano-driven songs on the breakthrough album, many retain the lush, angry theatricality of the Y Kant Tori Read days; some, like “China,” were in fact written in the same time period. The bridge of “Precious Things” contains a primal scream and a whiplash; the bridge of “Girl” reinterprets its pop-pretty hook as a series of rhythmic growls. Even “Crucify,” with its throaty, screamed outro 27

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(“Whyyy doooo weee”), could be a Y Kant Tori Read song, with just a little tweaking. Moreover, Little Earthquakes still has a cushiony, highly produced studio sound, with elaborate arrangements that occasionally crowd out the central piano. Because of technical limitations and limited studio time, Amos’s piano and vocals were recorded separately, the piano tracks laid down quickly in the studio on a Yamaha CP80 piano before the two went back to Rosse’s improvised studio to record vocals and add sampled strings and drum tracks. The four tracks re-recorded and co-produced by Amos and then-boyfriend Eric Rosse on a shoestring budget— “Girl,” “Precious Things,” “Tear in Your Hand,” and “Little Earthquakes”—have, if anything, even more in common with the Y Kant Tori Read sound than the first round of tracks produced by Davitt Sigerson.11 The biggest difference was in the packaging. In stark contrast to the corsetry and fog machines, Little Earthquakes featured minimalist art direction and photography by Cindy Palmano, who shot a barefoot Amos in jeans and slip dresses, crouched in a wooden box with a miniature piano and surrounded by copious white space. This new look repositioned Amos as a solo artist, putting Amos and her instrument front and center. On Y Kant Tori Read, Amos is credited in the liner notes only as “Tori,” no last name; Little Earthquakes features the artist’s name looming hugely in wooden block letters, the album title font tiny by comparison. “Winter,” “Mother,” “Happy Phantom,” and “Leather” are almost exclusively piano songs; “Me and a Gun,” the riskiest track and the one that attracted the most attention, is performed entirely a cappella and lists 28

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no production credit at all (it was recorded in London by Ian Stanley). Though the tracks feature a host of session musicians, including guitarist Steve Caton from the Y Kant Tori Read days, it’s clear that Amos has gone from being her album’s star to being her album’s world. And yet the album art of Little Earthquakes—how to put this?—minimizes her rage. On the cover, Amos is singular but also miniaturized, boxed up with a child’s toy piano. Even the album title is diminutive; the earthquakes are little, the sexual reference oblique. Compared to the sexy, sneering, sword-wielding pirate on the Y Kant Tori Read cover, the barefoot, bare-faced beauty on Little Earthquakes looks almost shy. Comparing these two albums side-by-side, it’s hard not to see a trade-off between Amos’s ability to express aggression and her ability to be at the center of her work, as if, in order to put herself first on her own album, she needed to play up her vulnerability and authenticity. I’m not so much casting doubt on the authenticity of the confessions in Little Earthquakes, but asking what, when we demand authenticity from a woman or reward her for delivering it, we’re really asking for from her. Amos had been harshly punished for her first attempt to take center stage in the “big picture” of her music career; her tough-girl image as frontwoman of Y Kant Tori Read had, paradoxically, left her feeling exposed, “a joke.” The singer-songwriter aesthetic, with its emphasis on softness, vulnerability, and nakedness, was a less threatening vehicle for subject matter that hadn’t changed all that much. People who weren’t going to listen to a woman in bondage-gear waving a sword in their faces were suddenly willing to listen 29

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to the same woman sing about actual bondage (“hand me my leather”)—not to mention sexual violence, blasphemy, and the rest of it—once she put down the sword and climbed into a wooden box. No matter that the album was festooned with mushrooms shot to look like giant, bulbous penises; it was pretty. And, as Julia Roberts, another curlyhaired, wide-mouthed redhead who hit pay dirt in the early 1990s, could certainly attest, a pretty woman was an easier sell than a powerful one, then as now. * * * Amos’s sophomore album as a solo artist, 1994’s Under the Pink, represented a major stride forward in her sound, with soundscapes both dreamier and more precise than those of Little Earthquakes. The album was recorded in a small house in Taos, New Mexico, with a rented Bösendorfer piano whose darker, richer, more reverberating tones Amos loved so much she soon purchased one (and has played only the lovingly handmade Austrian pianos ever since). The piano and vocals were recorded at the same time to preserve the intimate quality of live performance Amos favored, with heavy foam baffling between the keyboard and the harp section of the piano to prevent crosstalk on the mics. The production feels at once more spacious and more intimate, with exquisite moments of tenderness. Amos recorded “Bells for Her” in one improvised take on an old upright piano detuned by Rosse and John Philip Shenale, and, in “Baker Baker,” quietly describes the emotional fallout of having exposed her sexual assault on “Me and a Gun.”12 The lyrics were dreamier, with long, complicated forays into obscurity. 30

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A more mature album, it was also more elusive, its brief outbursts of rage—“I believe in peace, bitch,” screamed  in “The Waitress”—hemmed all around with cold sarcasm and spacy imagery. The album art, too, was ethereal; Amos is pictured in long shot on the front cover, airborne on a white, misty globe on the back, and, inside, asleep in a circle of bones and feathers, having shrunk roughly to the size of a butterfly. Amos’s star was still on the rise, and during the promotion cycle for Under the Pink, she was often placed in the pantheon of contemporary female alt-rock solo artists. The trouble was, it always had to be a pantheon. In May 1994, the UK music magazine Q ran a cover story jointly profiling Amos along with PJ Harvey and Björk.13 Photographed in matching white outfits, leaning in like self-conscious sorority sisters at a slightly awkward rush week brunch, they don’t look thrilled to be in the same frame, despite their off-camera friendship. In the article, the three musicians alternate between dutifully answering and artfully dodging the interviewer’s questions about whether they’re flattered that “elder statesmen of rock” like Elvis Costello and Eric Clapton like their records. They seem to be having a good time, openly commiserating with one another about the way they’ve been covered by sexist journalists—but then politely answering yet another sexist question about why they write about sex so much, or what it feels like to be an “object of lust.” Only Amos says out loud what all three of them must be thinking: that it’s impossible to imagine three of the most ambitious “alternative male musicians” from the same era being gathered together in the same article, squashed onto the same cover. “If you think 31

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about Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page, and Eric Clapton, they were all much more similar to each other than we are,” she said. “We have tits. We have three holes. That’s what we have in common. We don’t even play the same instruments.” The front-cover teaser puts a tasteful, girl-power gloss on the quote, while somehow reinscribing exactly the thing Amos is critiquing: “Hips. Lips. Tits. Power,” it reads over the three women’s faces. At the time, Amos seems to have had male scions of rock very much on her mind. Talking with SPIN about her friendship with Trent Reznor, who’d been a friend since she name-checked Nine Inch Nails on Little Earthquakes and who had provided backing vocals for “Past the Misson” on Under the Pink, she said, “I love the screaming male aggression of his music, because I’m not in touch with that part of myself so much . . . I think there ought to be a raging-male cruise line we could take, go to seven islands and just watch these guys act out.”14 It’s important to understand the context for this quote, which to modern ears may seem to take a reductionist view of men as aggressive and rage-y, and women as needing to watch men to learn how to express their own rage. Many of Amos’s female contemporaries, including those in the riot grrrl movement, were insisting on their right to a specifically female rage, one that acted out against patriarchal culture and misogyny in the music scene more particularly. But as the Q cover shows, Amos, despite her solo success (or, more accurately, because of it), seemed to be hitting a glass ceiling. Having been rewarded for adjusting her own self-image to suit an audience that did not care for her as a sword-wielding

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pirate, she was now experiencing the flip side of that reward. She was being treated like a good woman—a Cool Girl—a little bit naughty, a little bit weird, but safely condescended to in articles that grouped her with other “exceptional” women. And she was noticing that male musicians with ambition similar to her own were not treated that way. Moreover, between the recording of Under the Pink and the genesis of Boys for Pele, Amos had undergone a painful breakup with her co-producer and partner of seven years, Eric Rosse, and was looking for an independent voice. A series of post-relationship hook-ups and rebounds (rumored to have included Reznor, though both parties avoid the subject) had shown her how desperate she was for masculine approval, and how cruel and self-serving men could be in the face of that desperation. Later, she would tell Greg Kot of the Chicago Tribune that she realized she had been an emotional vampire, borrowing energy from the men in her life.15 These themes started spontaneously erupting in her music during the 1994 Under the Pink tour, when she would often stop playing mid-song, improvising fragments of the songs that would eventually become Boys for Pele. Her “raging-male cruise line” didn’t involve watching rage-y men, but rather visiting a (female) spirit guide in Hawaii, who helped her get in touch with her darker, angrier, male-rage-ier side through a series of hallucinogenic sessions. Cementing this declaration of independence was the announcement that Boys for Pele would be Amos’s first self-produced album. If there were ever a time for the essence of Tori Amos to come out, it was now.

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Which is why it shouldn’t have come as a surprise that the album that dropped in January 1996 was seventy minutes long and really, really strange. * * * Boys for Pele begins with a small constellation of minute, shuffling clicks and the mosquito-like whir of a Leslie cabinet. For eleven seconds, this atmospheric buzz is the only audible sound. Then a single note, the G below middle C, is struck sixteen times in succession, like the toll of a ceremonial bell, each note sustained for two full measures. Amos’s vocals begin with drawn-out, breathy vocalizations; the hushed lyrics, sung in an eerie minor key, don’t begin for a full fortyfive seconds. “She’s a beauty queen. . . .” The opening track on Boys for Pele was the closest thing to an a cappella track that Amos had released since “Me and a Gun.” But in stark contrast to the earlier song’s numbedout, dissociated feel, “Beauty Queen” feels buzzingly, shudderingly alive. The Leslie speaker lends the opening track an unmistakable feeling of presence. When “Horses” follows on the same track, featuring the pretty, arpeggiated voicings more typical of Amos’s piano style, the amplification faintly curdles the sustain pedal’s reverberations, giving a faint toy-piano tinniness to the Bösendorfer’s high notes and an extra throb to the bass notes. Just before the last verse, the Leslie speaker emits an audible click and the distortion increases, so that in the song’s final minute, the air around the piano seems to shudder and vibrate, a portal opening up in an empty room.

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That sense of a strange and alien presence, more than any one instrument or style, is what unites the otherwise disparate tracks of Boys for Pele. The instrument that represents this presence best, and that seems to dominate the album sonically, is the harpsichord, which appears on five of the eighteen tracks. Amos had become interested in the older instrument while touring through Belgium. Due to its association with composers of the baroque and classical eras, the prickly, spidery sound characteristic of the harpsichord naturally sounds archaic. When it appears in rock or pop music, it’s often there for only one part of the song, to provide contrast, as in the mincing breakdown of the Linda Ronstadt/ Stone Ponies song “Different Drum,” or to evoke an archaic folk-ballad feel, as in Blood, Sweat and Tears’ “The Battle.” It’s hard to think of a rock or pop song, much less an entire album, in which harpsichord plays so dominant a role. The album’s second track, “Blood Roses,” a gothic take on a waltz in three-four time, offers no relief at all from the harpsichord, and its vocals are alternately hissed and hollered. With “Blood Roses,” Boys for Pele plunges into a nightmarish vision from which it never fully awakens. The first half of the album is dark and frequently ugly. “Caught a Lite Sneeze,” the seventh track and first single, introduces the closest thing to a radio-friendly vibe, but with its harpsichord riff, fractured song structure, eerie soprano backing vocals, and lyrics that seem to invoke the sacrifice of young boys to a volcano goddess, it’s still a deeply weird song. After the midpoint of the album, the beautiful, wallowing break-up song “Hey Jupiter,” the tracks on the album’s second half invoke serial

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killers in “Way Down,” racial violence in the American South in “Little Amsterdam,” the mass death of World War I pilots in “Not the Red Baron,” and the Vietnam War in “Agent Orange.” Stretching twenty minutes past the average length of a pop-rock album, Boys for Pele includes three songs that, at less than two minutes long, are barely more than fragments (“Beauty Queen,” “Way Down,” and “Agent Orange”), two fully improvised songs (“Marianne” and “Not the Red Baron”), and an actual scat session (“In the Springtime of His Voodoo”). More than seventy-five musicians worked on the album, including a brass band, a gospel choir, and a string orchestra, many of which were recorded live with the piano and vocals. Besides the harpsichord, Amos plays a clavichord and a harmonium organ. Found sounds were recorded from the surroundings and sampled on many of the tracks, including a bull credited in the liner notes as “Bull.” The coda, “Twinkle,” is about a woman in hiding after having killed a man, the perfectly perverse grace note for a deeply perverse album. Boys for Pele was recorded in Ireland in Christ Church, Delgany, County Wicklow, a “light Gothic building with a steeple rising 30m” finished in 1789, according to the Delgany Heritage website.16 Amos had first considered recording in the American South, according to a promotional video for Boys for Pele sent to media outlets with the initial release, but settled on an Irish church instead, drawing on the Irish heritage of southern music; parts of the album, including the gospel choir on “Way Down,” were recorded in New Orleans. Although in the same video Amos refers to “currents” of energy she can feel within the church, she doesn’t mention faeries—perhaps 36

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having grown tired of faeries as a central facet of her coverage—instead citing Irish resistance to English rule and her own lifelong resistance to the Christian church’s oppression of women as factors in her choice.17 In addition to currents, the church also had fantastic acoustics. The piano, harpsichord, backing vocals, and brass were all recorded in the open church, where, to keep the vocal recordings from getting picked up on the instrumental mics, sound engineers Mark Hawley and Marcel Van Limbeek built a wooden box lined in foam just large enough for Amos to stand up in, with cutouts in the sides for the piano and harpsichord keyboards. If it’s hard to resist the irony of Amos once more having to climb inside a box to find her voice on the new album, she seems to have regarded the constraint as cheerfully as she regarded those of the technically demanding harpsichord. In the promotional video, she seems delighted with her first completely self-chosen crew of sound engineers, most of whom had worked the Under the Pink tour, and one of whom, Mark Hawley, she eventually married. In one part of the video, Amos sits outside in a field of yellow Irish wildflowers, the wind tousling ginger waves held back from her face with pink sunglasses. An offscreen interviewer says, “Let’s go back to the subject of your producing this record.” Amos looks up and lets out an enigmatic little laugh—“ha.” As the interviewer continues the question, she makes a strange gesture to someone off-camera with her two forefingers, squinting with a smile and pointing back and forth jerkily several times, as if signaling to crew members standing behind the camera. The look on her face is 37

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a combination of wry deflection and genuine appreciation— she’s all but saying, Okay, but it’s really these guys. She restrains herself, however, and answers the question, starting out a little uncertain, but finding herself midway through and looking the interviewer in the eye: “Yeah, this is the first time where, um—I guess I’m in the driver’s seat.” Having found her stride, she repeats it, more confidently: “I like being in the driver’s seat.” She has stayed there, ever since. * * * Some critics liked Boys for Pele and some hated it, but very few claimed to understand it. Generally speaking, complaints fell into a handful of categories. The lyrics don’t make sense; the experimental instrumentation is weird, precious, or just muddled; the album is too long and too self-indulgent. The language of the negative reviews tended to oscillate between condescension and anger. “Seriously self-indulgent,” scoffed the LA Times.18 “Frustratingly opaque,” said the Boston Phoenix.19 Writing for the San Jose Metro, Gina Arnold called it “too internal and obscure to be meaningful to anyone who isn’t actually Tori Amos” and predicted that most of the listening public would dismiss it as “the rantings of an irrational witchypoo.”20 These were generous assessments compared to the Louisville CourierJournal reviewer, who compared it to “the unedited diary of a precocious, pretentious teenager,”21 and the Edmonton Sun reviewer, who called it “a nauseating melange of morose piano noodlings, cryptic lesbian overtones and unbearable overemoting.”22 Worst of all, Rolling Stone, which had positively reviewed Little Earthquakes and Under the Pink, gave it two 38

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stars; Evelyn McDonnell all but panned the album, calling out Amos’s “mushy-headed New Age feministspeak” and ending one paragraph, “I suggest she immerse herself in Babes in Toyland.”23 (Never a bad idea in general, but in context an oddly domesticating one, in that it seems to demand that all misbehaving women misbehave in the same way.) Moreover, critics couldn’t seem to agree about whether Amos’s latest album was too angry or not angry enough. Female critics tended to yearn for more anger and loss of control. “She doesn’t seem to know how to rage,” lamented McDonnell, while Arnold observed, “Like many women, Amos has a tendency to pull her punches.” By contrast, reviewer Roger Catlin of the Hartford Courant offered the suggestion, “If she wants to truly connect, she needs to calm down, take a drink of water and make a little bit more sense.”24 Mansplaining wasn’t a word in common usage at the time, but it’s rich to hear a Hartford music writer conjuring up the hysterical woman stereotype to give Amos advice on how to connect with audiences—by 1996, she was regularly selling out stadium shows on a 150-stop tour. Even the most sympathetic and thoughtful reviewers of Boys for Pele admitted they were stumped when it came to the lyrics. SPIN reviewer Erik Davis called her lyrics “part clasp-key dream diary, part coded message, part erotic Rorschach test . . . so hermetic they’ll set you tripping,” and suspected the album was “a veiled journey to Lesbos.”25 (Incidentally, I’d be delighted if I could claim to have found lesbian overtones in Boys for Pele, but since I cannot, I am tempted to conclude that anything not expressly aimed at pleasing men is susceptible to this interpretation.) 39

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At least Davis pointed out that Amos’s instrumental experimentation—“laced with brass filigrees and melodic tendrils, cut with shadows and grit”—had gotten short shrift in other reviews. Reviewers often referred to the album as radically stripped-down, which describes only a few of the songs while ignoring the over-the-top, baroque arrangements of others; the Boston Phoenix reviewer called the album’s multi-instrumental sound “basically her lustrous soprano voice and piano, with the occasional and generally unobtrusive garnishing.” Others just sounded confused. Arnold called the album “Christmas-carol-style music” (possibly because it was recorded in a church?) and “a quavering mass of arpeggios.” McDonnell at Rolling Stone said Amos “painstakingly draws out note by tinkling note in dreamy songs that are part show tune, part church music,” ignoring the power-chord-banging “Professional Widow.” All in all, most reviews of the album do a rather poor job of describing its overall sound—something I’m more sympathetic to now that I’ve tried it myself. Although it makes as intense an impression as any album she’s ever recorded, it’s far more difficult to hold all the pieces in your head at once. When all else failed, critics who admitted they didn’t understand what Amos was doing concluded, with Jean Rosenbluth of the LA Times, “The Cornflake Girl is really just a flake.” This epithet, drawn from Amos’s most recognizable hit, comes up in reviews from this era again and again. Even Greg Kot, who praised the album, couldn’t resist leading his Chicago Tribune profile with the quip. As a sometime critic, I am familiar with the appeal of the lede that writes itself, 40

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but it’s hard not to feel a little frustrated on behalf of one of the most reliably hard-working and hard-touring women in music, who’d been gigging professionally since the age of thirteen, regularly getting called a “flake” because reviewers couldn’t be bothered to figure out what she was doing. To push the point further, it seems like a willful misunderstanding of one of her most easily parsed and popular songs—one that was manifestly about not being a “cornflake girl,” but rather a “raisin girl” (by which one understands that she means darker, rarer, and, well, chewier)—just at the moment when she had produced her first record that was pretty much all raisin, all the time. * * * Amos’s most ambitious album to date, Boys for Pele represented a direct bid to claim ultimate authority over her art, a project she’d begun with Little Earthquakes, but which was accompanied at the time by her need to appear nonthreatening and normative—at least enough to pass. Boys for Pele’s theme of getting in touch with her masculine side allowed Amos to explore with thorough, unforgiving nastiness the ways men had treated her—and to fantasize about behaving just as badly. Years earlier, Amos had been mocked by a journalist for saying she was “Sven the Viking” in a former life,26 in a quote she insisted was drawn, out of context, from a conversation about compartmentalizing her personality in order to survive her rape.27 Boys for Pele undid that compartmentalization, allowing Sven the Viking, along with Lady Macbeth and a handful of other murderous women, to come out and rage. It also gave 41

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her a chance to play Robert Plant in her version of a Led Zeppelin song, after years of covering male-written rock songs in slow, haunting live performances. Engaging with the men who had exerted power in her personal and her professional life, Boys for Pele doubles, at times, as a critique of the industry itself. Although Boys for Pele sounds nothing like Y Kant Tori Read, I can’t help but be reminded, when I listen to it now, of the brashness and boldness of that earlier incarnation of Tori—the swashbuckling, sword-swinging pirate, alternately snarling and romantic, sexy and glum. Perhaps Amos really wasn’t being true to herself in those early days; or perhaps her ambition was just showing too much, or in the wrong way, a misstep whose correction may have obscured other facets of her musical personality. In any case, Boys for Pele sallies forth with the confidence of that early mistake, and I have titled the chapters of this book in homage to its wonderfully bad taste. Boys for Pele debuted at a career-high of number two on the Billboard charts, selling 109,000 copies in its first week and going platinum the summer after its release.28 However, Amos’s critical reputation after this thorny album never quite recovered, and neither did her sense of fearless experimentation. While her follow-up foray into danceelectronica, From the Choirgirl Hotel, was well-received and generally acknowledged to be more accessible than Pele, Amos’s reputation did not carry over into the new millennium. Some of the blame for this can be placed on a bitter label dispute that sapped Amos’s energy, yet her output has never suffered for ambition; in the last decade 42

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she has worked on projects like a Broadway musical score and the classical album Night of Hunters, as well as releasing some excellent albums in her old pop-rock vein. But for sheer weirdness and lashing-out freedom, Boys for Pele has yet to be matched. It represents a high watermark of artistic audacity. To learn what is special about Boys for Pele, you have to take the negative responses to it seriously. You have to look not just at what Amos was doing right with the record, but what she was doing wrong—what norms she was violating, and why. You have to understand just what some people find so disgusting about Amos’s music, and what we can learn from having the bad taste to love it. And to do that, we need to talk about the origins of taste itself.

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The concept of taste was developed in a world in which women were not intended to be artists. To grasp the effect this has had on our contemporary, commonsense understanding of how aesthetic judgments work, it helps to go back—even further than Immanuel Kant’s groundbreaking Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), aka the Third Critique, where Carl Wilson begins his aesthetic history in Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste. Kant’s Third Critique, from which we draw so many of our modern ideas on the subject, was influenced by a century of philosophical conversations about beauty in which women appear only as problematic examples, never as judges or creators. In fact, the Third Critique derived a great deal of its staying power from the masterful way in which it resolved certain philosophical problems raised over and over again in these prior treatises by the very existence of women’s bodies—as well as, in different ways, by non-Western, non-white bodies. To understand why and how the body, or rather physical responses to art, first came to be excluded from judgments of

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taste, and what effect this has had on our ability to accept not only certain types of art but also certain people as creators and judges of art, we have to go at least as far back as the British philosophers whose work directly influenced Kant, most notably Edmund Burke. Before the Enlightenment, aesthetic philosophers largely followed Plato and Aristotle in defining beauty as a fixed quality inhering in objects or forms. In the eighteenth century, however, aesthetic philosophers shifted their investigations of beauty and other aesthetic terms from the objects themselves to our sensory experience of those objects, drawing on the empirical methods of John Locke. This empiricism is so built into our understanding of how art works—by affecting the senses, rather than by, for example, revealing divine will—that “taste,” a word borrowed from the senses, is still our primary word for the criteria by which we judge art today. Yet while the Enlightenment philosophers had shifted the aesthetic conversation away from fixed or divine forms and toward human perception, they still remained eager to find some rapport between moral virtue and aesthetic virtue. Focusing philosophical investigations into beauty on our human response to beauty raised serious problems for this project, problems that crystallized around one particularly trenchant physical response that did not align with the moral virtues of the day at all—sexual desire. Because men were writing the critiques—as well as painting the pictures, composing the scores, and writing the plays—women’s bodies became central sites for working out this conflict.

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In the century before Kant’s Third Critique, moral and aesthetic philosophers like Francis Hutcheson and Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury, struggled to keep women’s sexual beauty from muddying the discourse about pure artistic beauty. As a result, sex just keeps rearing its head in treatises of the time. Since I’m primarily interested in tracing Burke’s influence on Kant, we’ll drop the needle just before Burke, on a treatise that made a favorable impression on him: printmaker William Hogarth’s 1753 essay “The Analysis of Beauty,” a notable example because it argues from the artist’s point of view. Perhaps it’s this practical perspective that makes Hogarth’s arguments more concrete and less abstract than those of his peers, and thus more straightforwardly lustful. Hogarth claimed that aesthetic value in works of art came from their use of the “serpentine line,” a curvy line that seduced the viewer by “lead[ing] the eye a wanton kind of chase,”1 analogous to the way a man feels watching a woman dancing. Similarly, a woman’s curly hair, another example of the serpentine line, “ravish[ed] the eye with the pleasure of the pursuit.”2 In Hogarth’s treatise, the foundational serpentine line, which mimics a woman’s curves, becomes almost a woman itself, the object of the (implicitly male) beholder’s sexual pursuit. This feminine principle of beauty is inherently passive, Hogarth argues, inciting creativity in men even as it invites its own ravishment by them. Four years later, Edmund Burke, in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757), agreed with Hogarth’s central arguments about beauty, but recognized a moral snag in the argument 47

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that seemed to equate aesthetic judgment with lust. Burke’s treatise takes great pains to emphasize that appreciating a beautiful woman is different from lusting after her. Yet again and again he, too, falls back on a woman’s body to illustrate the principle of beauty, in terms that seem no less lustful than Hogarth’s: “Observe that part of a beautiful woman where she is perhaps the most beautiful, about the neck and breasts; the smoothness; the softness; the easy and insensible swell; the variety of the surface, which is never for the smallest space the same; the deceitful maze, through which the unsteady eye slides giddily, without knowing where to fix, or whither it is carried.”3 (Hey Burke, my eyes are up here!) Note the adjectives like “wanton” and “deceitful” that insert themselves into such descriptions, evoking Eve’s “wanton ringlets” in Milton’s Paradise Lost, and thus depicting man’s appreciation for beauty as temptation rather than edification. Burke seems genuinely troubled by this collapsing of women’s aesthetic beauty with their sexual appeal (to and for, it bears repeating, him). Enter Burke’s sublime, the masculine and morally improving aesthetic of the eighteenth century. Influenced by British gentleman-philosophers who had traveled to the Alps and recorded impressions of their terrible grandeur, Burke described the sublime as a “delightful horror” caused by contemplation of that which threatens to overwhelm or hurt us. Although others had described the sublime, Burke’s innovation was to maintain that the beautiful and the sublime were completely separate, even opposite, aesthetic categories, and to assign them gendered traits. Burke’s sublime is associated with masculinity and power; unlike 48

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beauty, which threatened to feminize the viewer by giving him a feeling Burke describes as “that sinking, that melting, that languor,” the sublime had a kind of bracing or stiffening effect, causing tension and rigidity.4 Burke’s treatise attracted Kant’s attention, and shortly afterward, in 1764, Kant published his own Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime, forcefully restating Burke’s idea that men naturally tend toward sublime virtues, while women embody qualities of the beautiful. Interjecting the masculine quality of the sublime into aesthetic conversations had powerful and long-lasting effects. First, it gave aesthetic philosophers a way of talking about art without reverting to prurient language of pursuit and conquest that might threaten their idea of beauty as morally uplifting. More subtly, it delivered a refuge from beauty’s feminizing influence (“that sinking, that melting, that languor”). But in so doing, it created another problem: by putting the viewer in the passive position of being overwhelmed, overpowered, and threatened by a more powerful aesthetic object, it implicitly feminized the viewer yet again. To combat this passivity, freedom and mastery had to be restored to man’s experience of the sublime. Decades later, Kant’s Third Critique would do precisely that. The Third Critique began by introducing the key concept of disinterest (though this concept also had its forebears, including in Hogarth). A person with true taste, Kant says, must have no personal interest at stake in the artwork. This makes a kind of intuitive sense. We wouldn’t expect the judge of an art contest to be able to make an unbiased decision if, for example, his employer or his wife were among the artists. 49

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Kant extends this principle, insisting that all of our aesthetic judgments, official or no, must be shielded from similar conflicts. Any kind of personal interest a person takes in an artwork will interrupt the apparatus of free choice that Kant insists is central to true aesthetic judgment, compromising the universality of the opinion. (Wilson gives an excellent gloss on the universal aspect of Kantian judgment in Let’s Talk About Love.) Kant’s disinterestedness isn’t just a matter of relationships to others, but of our relationship to ourselves, as well—or, more specifically, to our bodies. For Kant, an artwork must not arouse sensations like hunger, fear, and lust, because the associated needs (to eat, flee, and fuck) represent the body’s interest in the art object, which would, again, tamper with the universality of the results. The fact that museums are full of paintings depicting food, violence, and naked women isn’t a problem for Kant, because a skilled artist is able to transform a subject that would normally induce lust or fear into an art-object worthy of disinterested aesthetic judgment. Even ordinary ugliness can undergo this transformation: “Beautiful art displays its excellence precisely by describing beautifully things that in nature would be ugly or displeasing.”5 By holding the sublime to the same standards of disinterest, Kant neatly dispenses with the problems of Burke’s sublime, which threatened to unman the viewer with terror. In fact, the sublime is the most important aesthetic for Kant precisely because it’s a test-case in elevating mind over matter, showing man’s ability to use reason to disinterestedly apprehend something that should feel overwhelming. Just as we can’t experience infinity with our senses, but we can 50

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grasp it conceptually, the sublime stimulates heroic acts of human brain-power in the mere contemplation of it. In Kantian aesthetics, man always comes out on top; his taste isn’t a need, but rather a demonstration of mastery over the body’s needs, an emancipation from hunger, fear, lust, and the senses. And if a true judge can’t get past those things, the fault is with the execution of the artwork, because just about anything can be aestheticized. Well, almost anything. “There is only one kind of ugliness which cannot be represented in accordance with nature, without destroying all aesthetical satisfaction and consequently artificial beauty,” writes Kant: “that which excites disgust.”6 * * * Before we move on to that term, “disgust,” take a moment to savor how strange it is that “taste” is the word we use to describe this thing that is not supposed to have anything at all to do with the body. Taste governs what goes into the mouth, guarding the passage between outside and in, notme and me. The fact that we call aesthetic judgment “taste” at all serves to underline how concerned we are with the essentially hygienic question of which art we “let in”—and which we keep out. Art, like food, can change us; can even, in a sense, become us. Whenever we lean on the extended metaphor of artistic taste as consumption—“taking in” a movie, “devouring” a book, “absorbing” an album—we tell a little story about our radical penetrability by art, followed by our eventual mastery over it. We enter the aesthetic encounter primed to be changed, within reason. Taste is there to dictate the limits of that last phrase. 51

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For Kant, the limits are: the disgusting. Even a skilled painter cannot make the disgusting beautiful. “In this peculiar sensation, which rests on mere imagination, the object is represented as it were obtruding itself for our enjoyment while we strive against it with all our might”— think of Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On,” obtruding itself on Wilson while he strives against it with all his might. Moreover, per Kant, “The artistic representation of the object is no longer distinguished from the nature of the object itself in our sensation, and thus it is impossible that it can be regarded as beautiful.”7 In other words, the body will react to a representation of the disgusting with the same nausea as if it were confronted with the real thing, rejecting a painting of feces as if were actual feces. This experience lines up with recent research on the contaminating properties of disgust, which tend to hop from object to object and idea to idea. Because of this potential contamination, the disgusting must be cordoned off vigorously from the aesthetic satisfaction it is always threatening to destroy; no disinterest can survive that nauseated flinch, and without disinterest there is no true aesthetic judgment. The disgusting is, in this respect, almost the opposite of the sublime. The sublime art object should be threatening but isn’t, because man’s reason is able to triumph over his body. The disgusting art object shouldn’t be threatening but is, proof positive that the body has triumphed over reason. And for the body to triumph over reason reduces us to our senses, which all animals have, and us to animals. It takes away what Kant says is the moral distinction of art. By presenting a physical need that can’t be overcome whether 52

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by art or by will, the disgust exception opens up a loophole in Kant’s arguments about the nature of art itself, threatening to unravel the whole thing. Disgust punctures the carefully maintained distance between representation and reality, between taste as metaphor and taste as taste. Disgust isn’t just bad taste, it’s the anti-matter of taste. Under these circumstances, the famous Paul Valéry quote, “Le goût est fait de mille dégoûts” takes on a whole new meaning. Usually translated, “Taste is made of a thousand distastes,”8 the original French plays on the relationship between goût, the French word for taste, and dégoût, which translates literally to disgust (goût being etymologically related to the “gust” of gustatory and gustation). If taste is made of a thousand disgusts, is that because disgust drives you away from the things you hate toward the things you like—or is the word taste itself a defense against the horror of actual taste, because to acknowledge the role of our bodily needs in art would be, well, disgusting? Because if we did acknowledge it, we might have to look at the history of Western art, all those fruit bowls and battle scenes and naked women, and acknowledge that when we exercised such excellent taste in liking them, we weren’t really moral, we weren’t really universal, we weren’t really free? What could be harder to swallow than that? * * * But those are fusty old philosophers, and philosophy isn’t the only lens through which to examine the concept of taste. Among the most compelling twentieth-century critiques of Kantian aesthetics Wilson mentions in his 53

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book is sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of distinction.9 Influenced by Marxist materialism, Bourdieu conducted extensive sociological surveys of French tastes in music, art, film, and so on. His research showed that taste followed depressingly predictable patterns, lining up almost perfectly with class divisions. Far from being “free” in the Kantian sense, taste was, for Bourdieu, utterly determined by class background and upbringing, suggesting that all our talk about what we like and dislike is merely intended to position us to some advantage within our class-determined social fields, maximizing status by emphasizing our belonging to the right group and disdain of the wrong ones. Bourdieu paraphrases Valéry, saying, “Tastes are perhaps first and foremost distastes, disgusts provoked by horror or visceral intolerance of the tastes of others.”10 On one hand, Bourdieu’s distinction eviscerates the whole idea of disinterest. Where Kant argues that the aesthetic realm starts where use-value stops, Bourdieu argues that the aesthetic is nothing but use-value—a different type than cash or food or tools, maybe, but one that exists on the same plane as cash and food and tools. If tastes are just another form of currency, so much “cultural capital,” then no one version of taste is better than any other—it’s simply the coin of a different realm. And yet one wonders if the Bourdieuvian critique really repudiates Kant, or just translates him into a different language. After all, Kantian taste exists as a demonstration of the ultimate “distinction”: freedom. For Kant, freedom from the tyranny of the senses, artistic judgment free from the body’s demands, taste free from taste, is what distinguishes humanity from the animals. Bourdieu glosses this as “each taste feels itself to be 54

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natural.” One could even go so far as to argue that a strong belief in human exceptionalism and individuality—a belief that the nature of man is to be above nature—is itself a competitive advantage in the social field. After all, it endows the individual with the illusion that he alone, the perfect judge, is free, while those whose tastes are encumbered or constrained by needs— the need to make or save money, the need to persuade with art or be inspired by it, and above all, the need to be comforted by it through pain and misery—are simply not quite as human, because not quite as free. It’s not at all clear to me that Kant would disagree with this characterization of his work. In his treatise on the beautiful and the sublime, he suggested outright that women, though endowed with a natural disposition toward beauty, are unable to cultivate a fine enough understanding to achieve true aesthetic judgments, much less the mastery of the sublime that exemplifies freedom in the Third Critique. NonEuropean cultures are even further outside the pale, mainly used to test the limits of Kant’s premise that men feel their own tastes are universal: “A Negro must necessarily have a different normal idea of the beauty of a figure than a white, a Chinese person a different idea from a European,” he writes, in a passage followed immediately by, “It will be exactly the same with the model of a beautiful horse or dog (of a certain breed).”11 In other words, Kant’s conclusion that they over there have different beauty standards suggests that he is perfectly aware of the Bourdieuvian fact that multiple tastes exist which distinguish one culture from another; for Kant, these distinctions are natural, but they are also naturally hierarchical. The same disinterested universalism that 55

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distinguishes man from animal turns out, unsurprisingly, to distinguish white men from everybody else, making them just a little more universal, a little more free, and a little more human than their non-white counterparts. In the end, Bourdieu’s sociological lens merely neglects what Kant purposely excludes: the body’s role in aesthetic experience. The reduction of taste to a function of class markers can feel strangely impoverished to people whose bodies are marked by other forms of difference—among them race, gender, sexual orientation, and disability— differences that exceed class, even if they inflect and are inflected by it. Our bodies are marked by the individual histories of what we have done, and how we’ve been done by. If I’ve taken hallucinogens which heighten my perception of some aspect of a Pink Floyd song, is that a function of class? If I’ve been raped to the strains of Butthole Surfers and can no longer listen to their music, is that a function of class? Mary Maynard once said, in what has become shorthand for feminist critiques of theories that overemphasize the reproduction of meaning through signs at the expense of bodily experience: “Not everything is sign or text, as any rape survivor, homeless person or starving child will testify.”12 Neither Kantian judgment nor Bourdieuvian distinction seems particularly suited to predicting the music a rape survivor, a homeless person, or a starving child will want to listen to. (Such reductions and limitations to the range of human experience are embarrassing even to type—but why? One Céline Dion fan interviewed in Wilson’s book grew up in a refugee camp.) At least Kant seems capable of predicting, 56

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with a reasonable degree of accuracy, what the response to such reminders of the inescapable body will be. * * * An aesthetics of disgust might reintroduce the body, with all its brutal needs and messy pleasures, into the conversation. To do so, it would have to take into account the social and psychological work being performed by disgust, while at the same time identifying some correlative quality in the object that inspires disgust. French philosopher Julia Kristeva’s The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1980) draws on Freudian psychology to outline such an aesthetic. Kristeva defines the abject as whatever is expelled from the body, shed, or discarded as waste—feces, vomit, hair, fingernail parings. The abject horrifies and disgusts us because it undoes the distinction between subject (me) and object (everything else). This is why it is anathema to taste, which invites the outside world in, to be absorbed, mastered by, and assimilated into, the subject. The abject, once a part of us, is now on the outside, and yet it is not quite an object, either, over which we could exert mastery; even at a distance, it makes us gag. As such, it reminds us of the terrifying bookends of our consciousness—birth, in which we ourselves are expelled from another human, like waste—and death, in which we complete our mission on earth of becoming insensate matter. Once was us; now is trash. That is the abject in a nutshell. When the abject comes calling, Kristeva says, “desire turns aside; sickened, it rejects. A certainty protects [desire] from the shameful—a certainty of which it is proud holds on to it.”13 That certainty is taste, 57

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condom of the soul, by which we protect ourselves from the contamination of knowing what—not who—we are. Drawing on the long history of purification rites around menstruation and childbirth, Kristeva argues that in patriarchal cultures, women are closely aligned with the abject via their reproductive functions. The disgust and outrage reserved for women who step into spheres where they are not welcome—such as the political sphere, or the aesthetic sphere of taste—is thus at its root a function of the dread of contamination. A constant warding-off has to be enacted, almost ritualistically, to remind women who show up in those spaces that they are not really there in a meaningful way. These ritualistic gestures take the shape of reminders of the embodied (and therefore estranged from art) status of women, words and actions that put women “back in their place” by reminding them, again and again, of the reproductive and sexual function of their bodies. In August of 2015, a record of these ritualistic shaming gestures in the music industry surfaced on Twitter after music critic Jessica Hopper tweeted the following question: “Gals/other marginalized folks: what was your 1st brush (in music industry, journalism, scene) w/ idea that you didn’t ‘count’?”14 Hopper was deluged with responses from hundreds of women in the music industry—musicians, journalists, photographers, engineers, managers, publicists, and more—sharing detailed accounts of being verbally belittled; sexually harassed or assaulted; mistaken for groupies or sent to fetch coffee by male musicians they had come to interview; told outright by their male bosses that women are simply not good at making/playing/writing 58

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about music; passed over for promotions or gigs based on explicitly stated gender bias; reminded that they would need to quit someday to have a baby; told they were either too pretty or not pretty enough to do their jobs; and subjected to constant monitoring of other women’s bodies along the same lines. These claims are almost overwhelming in their sheer repetitiveness and volume. There is a depressing consistency in these warding-off gestures. It would seem that very little has changed since 2001, when Kembrew McLeod wrote, in his study of North American rock criticism, “Despite the almost yearly celebrations of the ‘year of the woman’ in rock in the 1990s, the rock industry continues to remain a male dominated sphere of activity.”15 Yet the promise of Kristeva’s abject is that it carries within it the seeds of disgust’s undoing, by attracting us to the object again and again. Along with the spasm of disgust we experience in response to the abject, we are “drawn toward an elsewhere as tempting as it is condemned. Unflaggingly, like an inescapable boomerang, a vortex of summons and repulsion places the one haunted by it literally beside himself.”16 Beside ourselves, haunted with our own otherness, we can perhaps, with the aid of an aesthetics of abjection, take a good, long look. In the following chapters, using Kristeva and other theorists as a jumping-off point, I will ask what is abject in the performance style, instrumentation, songwriting, production, and themes of Boys for Pele, and to what ends: survival, revenge, contamination, self-acceptance, or solidarity? Let’s find out how such exquisitely good music could be in bad taste, and why we should listen to it anyway. 59

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“And speaking of the piano, just what is she doing to that instrument on stage, anyway?” asked Greg Kot, writing for the Chicago Tribune in January 1996, by which time Tori Amos’s unorthodox posture and movements at the piano—“Amos sits astride the bench as though she were riding a palomino, while grinding, writhing and moaning,” Kot went on—had been mentioned in hundreds of profiles and reviews. From the beginning, music journalists had aimed slanted sexual remarks at Amos’s performance style. “I feel as though I’ve just cheated on my wife,” wrote David Stubbs in the October 1991 Melody Maker notice that kick-started her career. Others used winky-winky musical metaphors, like Greg Rule writing for Keyboard Magazine: “She slings a mane of red hair and writhes masterfully toward a double-encore climax.”1 In January 1994, writing for the Independent, Justine Picardie described Amos “writhing about on a piano stool in her fake-orgasmic way.”2 But by 1996, what Picardie called “fake” began to be described as very real. Kot, writing for syndication in daily papers, could only raise the question,

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but glossies could state outright what they thought was going on. Evelyn McDonnell, reviewing Boys for Pele for Rolling Stone in February, wrote: “Even when she’s ‘fucking the piano,’ as one observer put it, Amos has always seemed very conscious of her charms.” Calling Amos’s performance a sex act in anonymous quotes, attributing it without really attributing it, McDonnell distances herself from the obscenity while making it into conventional wisdom—Don’t blame me, she seems to imply, it’s what everyone is saying. Other writers repeated this conventional wisdom without the quotation marks: “In concert, she humps her piano bench,” wrote Gavin Edwards bluntly for Details in March 1996.3 Eventually, “fucking the piano” began to look like a critical commonplace, such that a journalist for the German magazine Brigitte could write, “Probably she feels great satisfaction when a critic writes about her excessive shows: ‘She fucks the piano.’”4 Who said it first? The original source of the quote wasn’t a critic at all, but a friend of Amos’s, and not a particularly obscure one: Sandman writer Neil Gaiman had contributed glowing remarks about Amos for a Creem cover story called “Sex & the Single Pianist” in March 1994. Gaiman spoke at length about Amos’s personality and music, but here’s the quote that stuck: “‘As a live performer she’s stunning,’ Neil marvels. ‘I mean she sits there and she fucks the piano stool!’”5 There’s no doubt Gaiman meant it as a compliment— and it’s worth noting that the f-bomb would have sounded considerably more racy to American ears than to British ones, especially in 1994. At the same time, it’s telling that Gaiman was such a substantial source for this article. A 62

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voluble, intelligent source like Gaiman is a joy to talk to, of course, but it’s possible to feel irked that so much space is devoted to this already-famous man’s description of his upand-coming female friend’s art—almost as much space is devoted to Gaiman as to Amos in the article. When Gaiman’s affectionate characterization of his friend was taken out of context, anonymized, and ascribed to increasingly impartialsounding but apocryphal sources (first “an observer,” then “a critic,” then just “critics”), it gave music journalists leering, faux-shocked shorthand for Amos’s performance style for years to come. The suggestion that Amos was either trying to arouse the audience sexually or was herself sexually excited while she was playing proved such irresistible journalistbait that as recently as 2005, Ari Bendersky, writing in the Chicago Tribune Metromix supplement, opened his interview with the question, “You’ve been known to get a little excited while playing. Have you ever given yourself an orgasm on stage?”6 Amos responded, rather generously, with a deflecting comment about chakras, and, when he continued with the subject, a gentle reminder that she was now forty years of age. Perhaps I’m reading into things, but this deflection sounds embarrassed to me. The interview ran at less than four hundred words, and is titled “Tori Am . . . oh . . . oh . . . oh . . . YES!”—a title that, like “Sex & the Single Pianist,” seems to ignore Amos’s own description of what she may or may not be doing in favor of a man’s description of it. Suspending for a moment the question of exactly why Amos plays the way she plays, let me just suggest that I have a hard time imagining a reporter asking a male musician with a sexually charged performance style, such as Mick Jagger 63

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or Prince, whether his pelvic thrusting had ever resulted in onstage ejaculation. To do so would be to risk having one’s baseline understanding of musical performance—perhaps of performance in general—questioned. Maybe as a culture we are simply too knowledgeable about male anatomy and sexual pleasure for that question ever to be asked of a man. (Female rock critics at least knew better than to believe Amos was literally getting herself off, instead using lip-curling “she’s doing it for the attention” language: “fake-orgasmic,” “conscious of her charms.”) In Amos’s case, looking at the broad swath of reviews and profiles, I am forced to conclude that the public spectacle of uninhibited movement in a woman must be rare enough to muddle even the most seasoned music reporters. This would all be easier to take if Amos hadn’t answered the question of “just what [she’s] doing to that instrument” years earlier. In fact, early in 1996, she discussed her physical stance in terms no journalist had ever speculated on—its effect on her sound. In a lengthy and much-syndicated New York Times profile that led Boys for Pele press coverage, Ann Powers wrote that Amos demonstrated the effects of her posture on her body, and thus on the sound coming from it, placing a hand on her abdomen: “I’ll show you how it affects the muscles . . . . My back leg gives me support, and that’s what pulls up my diaphragm and my body, so I have the power to play and sing.”7 As responses go, it’s admittedly pallid in comparison to “fucking the piano.” It’s not that I blame journalists for preferring the sexier explanation, which Amos, especially early in her career, seems to have encouraged. And it is very much worth noting here that the spectacle of a woman 64

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masturbating is itself something of an abject reminder, given that women’s orgasm is always seen as something extra, unnecessary for carrying out the female reproductive role, and thus potentially rendering masculine sexuality and reproductive sex obsolete. This is doubly so for an artist like Amos, who has thematized female masturbation and female orgasm explicitly in her work (“Icicle,” “Raspberry Swirl”). As I will touch on in later chapters, the slur of “selfindulgent” as applied to female artists carries within it the fear that a woman may be taking too much pleasure in her own creation, to the point where she doesn’t care about creating meaning for anyone else. But ultimately, the hysteria of critics over the assumption that Amos is performing or miming an auto-erotic sex act during her shows is easier to understand than the remarkable lack of curiosity as to what else could possibly be happening onstage that it obscures. By 1996, Amos was clearly tired of the hysteria and ready to set the record straight. Her own explanation in the Powers interview emphasized the physical labor of music and performance, opening up room to notice other effects gained by straddling the corner of the piano bench (which, in my opinion, resembles neither “riding a palomino” nor fucking, though I only have personal experience with one of those). It’s easy to identify a handful of these effects from watching any one of her performances. Most significantly, it allows her to cheat out toward the audience, so that she can interact with the audience during her performance through her facial expressions and occasional banter, perhaps a holdover from her days as a lounge pianist. Her unorthodox use of her left foot to work 65

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the sustain pedal may also be intended to free up her body for this type of audience interaction; grand pianos on stage are typically faced so that the left-hinging lid is opened toward the audience, so keeping her left foot near the pedal rather than the right gives her room to pivot her right knee in and out, tap or stomp her right foot, and lift herself off the bench to bounce to the beat as needed, all standard moves. All of these moves help this tiny woman stake out space in front of her nine-foot-long instrument, which seems to be both a comforting anchor and a useful constraint to work past. They lend her the kind of physical confidence and charisma that the excessive props and costumes in the Y Kant Tori Read video didn’t, and which are necessary for projecting enough energy to fill a sold-out concert hall; they are noticeably diminished in her harpsichord performances, where she is obviously concentrating harder to play the less familiar instrument. In fact, far from the spectacle of a woman narcissistically (or exhibitionistically) enjoying herself, the corner-of-the-bench position is a physically demanding one that delivers all of Amos’s energy outward, away from herself and toward spectators. “I think I’m more turned on at the dentist,” she quipped to Powers, calling up another image of the body’s stubborn persistence in existing outside of sexual meaning, even for singers who happen to be women. But by then no one was listening. Live or recorded, Amos’s body is very much at stake in her music. It’s just that women’s bodies aren’t always about sex—or just about sex—to us. * * * 66

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In 1972, French critic Roland Barthes coined the term “the grain of the voice” to describe the audible traces of the body in music.8 More than just timbre, grain is “the body in the voice as it sings”—particularly those unglamorous bits of the body shared with the digestive tract, “the tongue, the glottis, the teeth, the mucous membranes, the nose,” which Barthes felt had been neglected in favor of more ethereal qualities.9 Grain isn’t personal, he said; it’s interpersonal, anti-personal, “special” in the sense of being related to a species. Think of it like wood-grain, or fingerprints. Given a big enough database, it might, theoretically, be possible to identify a particular tree by the grain of its wood or a person by her thumbprint; but the primary thing these marks communicate to us in everyday life is that either a tree or a human has been here. “I shall not judge a performance according to the rules of interpretation, the constraints of style,” Barthes vowed, “but according to the image of the body (the figure) given me.” The grain is what gives that image. Amos’s voice is a particularly grainy one. Unlike the diamond-hard vocals of Kate Bush, to whom she is often compared, Amos always sounds extremely human, as if her voice were pressing up against the walls of her body on all sides. It is this quality that made such a strong impression on me when I first heard “Silent All These Years,” with its faintly audible click of saliva, quiet swallowing, and slight lisp on consonant combinations in phrases like “how’s that thought for you,” “jeans of yours,” “until finally there is nothing left.” The sensation of intimacy and closeness conveyed by “the tongue, the glottis, the teeth, the mucous membranes,

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the nose” was once unbearable to me, tripping a kneejerk reaction of disgust. These qualities are much heightened on Boys for Pele, perhaps due to the stripped-down production, but more because Amos doesn’t seem to put as much effort into controlling them. She lisps “thisz little masochist” in “Hey Jupiter,” lets the consonants of “hominy / get it-on the plate, girl” splatter like kitchen grease in “Little Amsterdam,” and audibly gulps before the last chorus of the same song. Moreover, on Boys for Pele these tics are accompanied by bizarrely distorted vowel pronunciations, frequently called “affected” in reviews. In “Beauty Queen/Horses,” “I got me some horses” became “I gut me some ho-ses.” In “Blood Roses,” “graces” became “grey-eeeeeces,” and “dead,” “duhd.” In “Professional Widow,” “Congressman” became “Congreeze-men,” and in “Caught a Lite Sneeze,” “big loan from a girl zone” becomes “beg lay-own from a gerhl zay-own.” Fan-forum discussions of Amos’s vocal range and qualities over the years tend to attribute these pronunciation tics to a bone deformity discovered in Amos’s jaw when she was fifteen, and associated TMJ (temporomandibular joint disorder) that sometimes prevents her from opening her mouth widely or keeping it open for long periods of time. This is such a clear-eyed (or -eared) account of Amos’s vocal tics that I was somewhat shocked to find it mentioned almost exclusively on fan forums. The anomalies come and go in live performances, but in general they get more pronounced over the years; within songs, they are most noticeable during loud, emphatic, and vocally challenging parts of the song. Moreover, they often take the form of flattening vowels that 68

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require an open jaw, like “o” or “eh,” into close-jawed vowels, especially on syllables that are emphasized, or moving to close the vowel sound very quickly on drawn-out notes. TMJ disorder can also cause issues like too much or too little saliva in the mouth, which can lead to excessive swallowing and slurring, and problems with teeth. Perhaps it’s because I have painful TMJ myself (by my early teens the cartilage disc between jawbone and skull had basically disintegrated) that I find this explanation so compelling. Moreover, TMJ is a gendered disease; ninety percent of patients with severe TMJ disorder are women, for unknown reasons that may include lifestyle stress and estrogen receptors in the jaw, and it often correlates with other little-understood chronic pain syndromes like migraine, fibromyalgia, and vulvodynia that disproportionately or exclusively afflict women. Unsurprisingly, Amos doesn’t like to dwell on how her jaw deformity might affect her singing. In profiles, it tends to come up only when interviewers witness her tending to the substantial pain it causes with a cold or hot compress. “It’s boring for everybody,” she told a Rolling Stone reporter on one such occasion in 1998. “And I hate to bore people.”10 The information is out there, however, and by ignoring it, critics who continually draw attention to Amos’s body as a sexual object (fucking the bench) and to her vocal style as affected have long ignored her actual physical body, in particular what it needs to perform the tremendous physical labor of singing and playing. But if Amos’s determination not to bore people with her pain threatens to make her into the stereotype of the 69

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tragic, long-suffering woman, it’s equally clear that on Boys for Pele, Amos is determined to make her pain as interesting as possible to listen to. The resulting sound is defiantly embodied, and not without considerable artistry. Amos’s anomalous pronunciations often perform a strange alchemy on the words they distort, pulling “greeeeaze” out of congressman like a rabbit out of a hat, making “runs” in the line “it runs in the family” sound like it’s actually running, turning words that have no matching sounds at all but only a rhythmic sympathy due to their position in the lyric—words like “light” and “gold” in “Talula”—into the near-rhymes you suddenly feel they should have been all along. What is lost in intelligibility is gained in resonances, such as, on “Blood Roses,” the sexual gleam added to the line “He likes killing you after you’re dead” by pronouncing it in a way that could be mistaken for “He likes killing you after you’re done” (With sex? With life?). The body’s friction, the clenched jaw and glottal garbling, animates the song, as though, in Barthes’s words, “a single skin lined the inner flesh of the performer and the music.”11 A single skin lining the inner flesh of performer and music—the combination of beauty and David Cronenbergstyle body horror in the Barthes quote is instructive. Any demonstration of the body’s power and skill is always a hair’s breadth from calling to mind its struggles and infirmities, and performers who dramatize the latter—think Gene Kelly’s powerfully labored dancing rather than Fred Astaire’s magical glide—often trade on the exciting proximity of failure. But on Boys for Pele, Amos seems to be pushing herself right up to the brink of failure and beyond, so that 70

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her body remains insistently, forcibly present, reminding us that we are, as the next track will elaborate, “nothing but meat.” When, on “Blood Roses,” she temporarily slides into animalistic clucking or braying, it feels like an anti-Kantian rebuke: we’re all animals here. We sing, yes. But we also bite, we clench, we grind. We feed, we fuck, we shit. In the chapters that follow, this startling knowledge of the body’s intractable meatiness, its resistance to “the rules of interpretation and the constraints of style,” as Barthes would have them, will haunt every track, a stubborn kernel that testifies only to presence. Which is, as “Silent All These Years” makes clear, another word for survival. * * * But if Amos-turning-animal on “Blood Roses” isn’t enough, there’s a real animal on the album as well, conscripted both to sing and pun. The bull sampled on “Professional Widow” is testimony of an actual animal body in space and time (the paddock next to Delgany church at the time of the recording), a found sound that openly flirts with the divide between nature and culture (a bull being essentially a farm animal, however dangerous) as well as the sacred and the profane. If, as Paul Hegarty writes in Noise/Music: A History, “Music heightens the separation of the world into desired, organized sounds, and unwanted noise”—most of which takes place outside—“The status of western art music depends upon this excluded other, and even doubles this exclusion when it attempts to represent nature or specific sounds within it.”12 Only in a pre-modern past were noise and music undifferentiated elements of ritual sacrifice, a reference that 71

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Amos will pick up in “Caught a Lite Sneeze,” a song that plays with the idea of human sacrifice. The question of who gets to live on whom, and what undigested remnants remain to be buried or uncovered (the shoveling of the bull’s shit is mixed into the drum loop) persists on the album. Found sounds run riot through Amos’s first entirely selfproduced album, continual reminders of where, when, and how the music was recorded. During the hook of “Father Lucifer,” the rapid, rhythmic pumping and releasing of the sustain pedal forms part of the percussion. The church bell that tolls on “Blood Roses” is the Delgany church bell. A conversation between sound engineers Mark Hawley and Marcel Van Limbeek is audible at the beginning of the track “Not the Red Baron,” the entirety of which was improvised and recorded during a mic check. On “Caught a Lite Sneeze,” the music pauses while Amos turns from harpsichord to piano and back again. The processes of singing, playing, and recording are everywhere embedded in the crystalclear production like bubbles in champagne, giving the entire album a feeling, sometimes unsettling and sometimes exhilarating, of orchestrated spontaneity. Even the production itself has a grain on Boys for Pele. The first instrument to appear on the album isn’t a piano or a harpsichord or Amos’s voice, but an old Leslie cabinet that Amos described in In the Studio as “partly broken down”—more traces of County Wicklow, since it was the only Leslie that could be found there on short notice—and set up in the graveyard outside the church because there was no room inside.13 An amplifying and distorting device originally invented to give electric organs the more resonant 72

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sound of an acoustic pipe organ, the Leslie creates the effect of a vibrato by running the sound signal through internal speakers rotating at varying speeds, which creates a Doppler effect. The moving parts of a Leslie make wind noise, and the relay that controls rotation speed clicks audibly; the cabinet is usually miked at a slight distance or muffled with foam windshields to avoid picking up these noises. The Leslie cabinet on “Beauty Queen/Horses” is obviously close-miked, and the echoing click of the speaker being turned on, its initial fan-like acceleration, and the barely audible buzzing that shifts mosquito-like from ear to ear add a wiry aliveness to the track, like an electrical current. It feels as if the album itself has a body, and that body is holding its breath for what comes next.

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When, in a 1994 NPR interview, Noah Adams asked Tori Amos if she would ever consider a digital piano, she answered emphatically: “No, no, of course not. There’s no sustain. This is the biggest part of my sound. . . . I play the sustain like it’s a whole ‘nother instrument.”1 The sustain pedal works by lifting dampers off all of the piano strings at once, not only lengthening and amplifying the notes played, but also allowing the unplayed strings to vibrate in sympathetic resonance, adding a mild layer of distortion that fills the empty spaces between notes and lends the piano nearorchestral possibilities. The sustain pedal can layer chords that fingers could never stretch to reach, with beautifully harmonic results—and, when used for longer durations, produce interesting and even unpleasant dissonances. By allowing the whole piano harp to resonate at once, it also heightens the dynamic range and intensity of the notes played, allowing for dramatic contrasts between quiet and loud that Amos frequently uses to great effect. The sustain pedal had been a recognizable part of Amos’s sound since the blurry opening riff of “Silent All These

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Years,” but by 1994 she had begun to lean further into its most dissonant excesses, experimenting with its ability to “turn” suddenly from a romantic sound to something slightly unnerving. Whereas the generous sustain in the introduction to Little Earthquakes’s “Mother” layers notes from arpeggiated chords with relative decorum, its deliberate overuse in the introduction to Under the Pink’s “Icicle” laps whole musical phrases over one another, building a subtle tension that culminates in a climactic pounding whose messy resonance lingers into the main riff. The B-sides from Under the Pink lean further into this expressionistic tendency; on the instrumental piece “All the Girls Hate Her,” notes pile up on top of each other with promiscuous abandon, the sustain pedal swirling grace notes and accidentals into sonically dissonant pools from which new melodic lines emerge. A genre chameleon, thanks perhaps to her lounge pianist days, Amos often plays with recognizable song tropes only to submerge them in sustain until they run like tilted watercolors, creating a sound that’s off-kilter or even sinister. Listening to these tracks, it’s no surprise to hear her pledge allegiance to the sustain pedal. So it’s almost bizarre that the signature sound of her very next album after that interview comes from a keyboard instrument with no sustain pedal at all: the harpsichord. The moment its prickly strains start up on “Blood Roses”—the second track, originally intended to be the album opener— it’s clear we are in for a very different type of Tori Amos song, and album. Unlike a piano’s strings, which are struck with hammers, the harpsichord’s strings are plucked, producing a thin, twangy sound Jen Fleissner astutely called, in her 76

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review of Boys for Pele, “the banjo to the piano’s guitar”;2 to me, it sounds nasal, almost sneering. Certain stops and dampers can shorten the notes, but there’s no way to lengthen or sustain a note. Nor are there dynamic options: whereas the piano derives its original name, the pianoforte, from its ability to play both soft (piano) and loud (forte), the harpsichord plays at the same volume whether its keys are tapped or banged, and it is much quieter than a piano to begin with. For a piano player like Amos, who builds entire compositions around the dynamics and resonance of the sustain pedal, this is a significant, even punishing departure, one that requires much greater control of the instrument without yielding greater control of the sound. Why this sudden dive backward, into “the bloodline of the piano,” as Amos put it in interviews?3 It wasn’t to please rock critics, that’s for sure. Many of them seemed put on edge by the instrument’s anachronistic sound, drawn from a European classical tradition rather than an American folk tradition. It’s hard to imagine Gina Arnold wasn’t referring specifically to “Blood Roses” when she called the album “Christmas-carol-style music” and “the apex of Renaissance Faire form.” Meanwhile, Evelyn McDonnell at Rolling Stone complained about the album’s distance from more favored forms of keyboard rock: “While Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard pounded their demons out in big barrelhouse chords, the classically trained Amos painstakingly draws hers out note by tinkling note in dreamy songs that are part show tune, part church music.” Even Erik Davis’s positive Spin review cautioned that the harpsichord was “dangerously twee.” 77

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What, exactly, did rock critics find “dangerous” about the harpsichord? And why did Amos embrace it on Boys for Pele? * * * “Blood Roses” opens with a spidery harpsichord riff, handfuls of eighth notes prickling with appoggiatura like serifs on a gothic font chasing each other up and down a minor-key circular chord progression in waltz time. The arpeggiated voicing of the chords, each note delineated and given equal weight by the no-sustain, no-dynamic harpsichord, evokes the rigidity and order of precise dance steps, but below the surface runs an undercurrent of chaos. One beat shy of the four-four time signature that is the backbone of rock and roll, waltz time often feels a little unfinished to modern ears, as if each measure were stepping on the last; this gives it the whirling or sailing energy of the dance it was intended to accompany. Moreover, the time signature of “Blood Roses” actually alternates between true waltz time (three-four, or three quarter notes) and compound duple time (six-eight, or six eighth notes), giving it the manic energy of a tightly spinning top. To get a sense for the breathlessness that can be created by alternating these two time signatures, think of the hook of Leonard Bernstein’s “America,” which jumps rapidly from one to the other. The pace of the eighth notes, rapid but slightly labored, sounds both virtuosic and pained, almost frantic; this as a song about dancing to someone else’s tune. The lyrics lay images of abuse and exploitation over this baroque dance riff, interspersed with sudden pockets of resistance voiced in hollers and hisses. While the song has a fairly standard structure (verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge78

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verse-chorus), variations in pitch, key, and time signature mark sudden, haunting lurches in tone among relatively sparse (for Amos) lyrics. The first verse opens with the witchy, incantatory line that will ground the song: “Blood roses, blood roses, back on the street now.” In addition to describing a rejection that is also a physical ejection, the phrase “back on the street” evokes the theme of prostitution that will characterize the singer’s view of herself in sexual relationships with men. The verses continue to develop the scene of this rejection, adding images of vampirism, exploitation, and masochism—“You gave him your blood and your warm little diamond”; “You’ve cut out the flute from the throat of the loon / at least when you cry now he can’t even hear you.” But the shift caused by the romantic rejection isn’t only one of spatial relations—back on the street, inside to outside—but a warp in temporal relations as well. The first verse ends in an invocation of memory: “I can’t forget the things you never said / On days like these, starts me thinking.” This memory triggers a chorus as disturbing as a recurring nightmare: “Chickens get a taste of your meat,” repeated twice. The time loop continues into the second verse with the line, “He likes killing you after you’re dead,” which suggests the circular logic of retraumatization, the way new abuse reinscribes itself over and reinforces past abuse. Amos’s usual contrasts of loud and soft, prevented by the harpsichord’s flat dynamics, are replaced by strong contrasts in vocal register and piano pitch; when she finishes the second verse with the soprano hiss, “You think I’m a queer / I think you’re a queer,” the accompaniment goes up to a high, 79

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tinkly octave, played in a mincing three-four time that feels both slower and more emphatic than the six-eight time of the previous lines. This heightens the contrast between the second verse and the second chorus, “I’ve shaved every place where you’ve been, boy,” sung in a low alto and accompanied by a bass riff and a wheezing harmonium organ. A key change on the bridge introduces another unholy break-up line, this one repeated four times in a hollering bellow: “God knows, I know I’ve thrown away those graces.” In the background, something that sounds like an electric bass begins to crackle and buzz—it’s actually the Bösendorfer run through a fuzzed-up Marshall amplifier, an effect Amos first recorded for a cover of Jimi Hendrix’s “If 6 Was 9” on an Under the Pink B-side. The addition of these instruments and frequent changes in pitch and key during this middle part of the song heighten the precarious feeling of the circular riff threatening to spin out of control. The second half of the bridge goes back up to the highest pitch for the lines “the Belle of New Orleans / tried to show me once how to tango / wrapped around your feet / wrapped around like good little roses.” This sequence develops the themes of prostitution and submissiveness, punning on the use of the Delgany church bell that appears in the opening bars of the song. Pauses in the instrumentation deliberately emphasize the breaks between these song sections, many of which are only a few lines long, riddling the song with holes and making the virtuosic, finger-flying waltz feel limping and broken. The strangest and most disturbing gap comes with the reprise of the first chorus: “When chickens get a taste of your meat.” In the coda, Amos follows the chickens line with an ad-libbed 80

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repetition of “come on” for five bars, deliberately exaggerating the passagio or gap between vocal registers usually hidden or smoothed in trained vocalists, resulting in a cracked, wobbly yodel. It’s a shocking, off-putting moment replicated in live performances of the song, an ugly performance of deliberate out-of-controlness, as if the singer were losing the power of speech, transforming into the clucking chicken from the chorus. The final lines restate the song’s thesis clearly in the couplet, “When he sucks you deep / Sometimes you’re nothing but meat.” There’s hardly any better description of the Kristevan abject than the line “nothing but meat.” Cast off, twicekilled, sucked dry, and fed to the animals, the subject of the song, sung alternately in first- and second-person, is in fact a non-person. If the grain of the vocals and production of Boys for Pele serve as a reminder of the physical limitations of the body, “Blood Roses” is the song that makes the stakes of those limitations clear. The abject is what must be rejected, expelled, or exorcised in order for us to feel human, rather than animal; the singer of “Blood Roses” identifies thoroughly with that abjection. It’s uncomfortable listening, to say the least. * * * Amos has repeatedly said that “Blood Roses” is about a series of degrading sexual encounters she had immediately after her breakup with Eric Rosse, in which she offered herself up to men in humiliating ways (“wrapped around your feet”), only to be used up and tossed aside. But Amos’s personal and  professional lives are never separable—Rosse was her 81

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co-producer, and therefore her creative collaborator and business partner as well as her romantic partner. In a description of “Blood Roses” for the Baltimore Sun, she explicitly mingles the personal and the professional: “‘Blood Roses’ . . . was that feeling of ripping open your vein and going, ‘This blood has sold millions of records. This blood can do many things.’ And [the men are] like, ‘Yes, Tori, and this blood isn’t enough for us.’”4 It’s easy to see what might have led to a statement like that; after all, the seven-year relationship with Rosse had seen her transform from struggling musician to multiplatinum artist. Dating again, the dissonance between her professional power and her inability to negotiate terms within a romantic relationship must have been disorienting, to say the least. She has hinted that her eagerness to take a sexually submissive role with these men was a kind of emotional vampirism on her part, a fear of being alone and thus being forced to take ownership of her own creative force. The pain of being rejected despite this submissiveness is part of what “Blood Roses” is about. Yet it is also a song about the traumatic memories triggered by these encounters (“On days like these, starts me thinking”). Other interviews tie “Blood Roses” to Amos’s violent assault by an audience member when she was first trying to make it in L.A., a miserable time both personally and professionally. Though Amos rarely goes into details about her assault, she has indicated that she was kidnapped, raped and cut by her attacker over the course of a night. The horror-movie aspect of “Blood Roses,” its preoccupation with blood and cutting, certainly feels like it could have been inspired by such an attack; but beyond that, the images of submission in the song 82

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gesture toward the horrifying necessity of appeasing and placating her attacker in order to come out of the situation alive. Separating from Rosse, her first serious romantic partner in the wake of this event (and, one imagines, a psychic buffer against its trauma), may have reawakened those feelings of vulnerability and fear, tinged with shame and self-loathing. “I was in absolute horror that I allowed myself to be raped,” she told Musician Magazine in May 1996. “‘Blood Roses’ is the on-the-knees version of that, the ripped-open veins and the blood dripping going, ‘Why is this my fault now?’”5 This startling quote captures the circular logic of victimhood, the way the shame of having been treated as less than human is relentlessly internalized, such that even the gut-cry of “Why is this my fault now?” has to be delivered from a position of supplication, “on-the-knees.” Amos’s multiple accounts of the song, along with its own imagery, link her masochistic behavior within relationships to the internalized shame that so often silences survivors of sexual trauma. In this sense, “Blood Roses” is as much a sequel to “Silent All These Years” as it is to “Me and a Gun”—whose imagery, it is seldom noted, is filtered through a scene in which a would-be victim is actually saved from her attacker. No such saving filter applies to “Blood Roses,” which has the structure of a wound reopened again and again. It’s no wonder that Amos’s account of rebounding from this relationship sounds so much like a horror film—like being “kill[ed] after you’re dead.” In fact, there’s a specific horror film called to mind by the brittle, circular riff of “Blood 83

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Roses”: The Exorcist, with its high-pitched, tinkling score drawn from the Mike Oldfield composition “Tubular Bells.”6 Amos’s memoir paints an Exorcist-like picture of this time, when she was attracted to “Baby demons . . . who will defecate on women in any way” (an image she repeats in multiple interviews).7 Moreover, it was on the Boys for Pele tour that Amos first began incorporating bits of “Tubular Bells” into her improvisational live performances, notably on the bridge of “Father Lucifer.” The debut of this particular composition in her repertoire at the same time as the harpsichord’s debut draws attention to the instrument’s eerie retro-futurism. Ultimately, the harpsichord’s thin, piercing notes sound less like the digital pianos of the 1990s—many of which, after all, had some version of a sustain pedal—than the early synth keyboards of the 1970s, popular during Amos’s childhood years. Perhaps it is just a coincidence that 1974, the year the “Tubular Bells” album became a worldwide chart-topper in the wake of The Exorcist’s December release, was also the year eleven-year-old Amos was kicked out of Peabody Conservatory for taking too many liberties with classical European composers. If it is only a coincidence, it’s an evocative one, suggesting, as it does, yet another backward dive into the bloodline of the piano, and into Amos’s personal and (proto-)professional trauma. “Blood Roses,” with its waltzlike form and chamber-piece sound, can be seen as Amos’s first sustained stylistic engagement with her own childhood as a conservatory musician—and specifically with the long-dead white men whose harpsichord compositions coexisted with, and indeed emblematized, the development 84

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of Western ideals of taste. When she was ejected from Peabody—thrown “back on the street,” where she would eventually, when playing for Georgetown bars as a young teenager, hang out with prostitutes—perhaps the image of twelve-year-old Linda Blair stuck with her. Possessed by a demon but also a baby demon herself; non-human, beyond human, spewing vomit and blasphemy into the face of a priest. (A few years after Pele, when a radio DJ suggested Amos’s songs “[took] her over” or possessed her, she chided him, “You’re making me sound like Linda Blair.”) In any case, the unforgiving harpsichord sneer, playing its everlasting waltz too quickly for feet or fingers to keep up with, stands in for the distinctly indoor classical tradition that had rejected Amos as a young girl. With “Blood Roses,” she seems to enjoy her chance to sully that tradition, wallowing in her rejection, her abjection, screaming of blood and the barnyard. * * * Speaking of the barnyard, there is one other sense in which possession figures into “Blood Roses.” The line “Chickens get a taste of your meat” is a reference to the 1992 Alice Walker novel, Possessing the Secret of Joy, about female genital mutilation. (The title of the book is an ironic reference to a white colonialist’s description of Africans: “Black people are natural, they possess the secret of joy.”) Amos not only had read, but had been deeply influenced by the book; “Cornflake Girl” was directly inspired by the depiction of, as she put it, “women betraying women, and how the mothers really sold their daughters to the butchers, and had their genitalia removed.”8 If Amos’s division of women into boring cornflake 85

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girls and rebellious raisin girls was a somewhat shallow response to a book about diasporic African identities, “Blood Roses” drew on a deeper aspect of the book: its structure of repressed trauma, triggering memories of abjection. The protagonist of the novel, Tashi, recovers repressed memories of her sister’s genital mutilation at the hands of a village elder, who disposes of the severed clitoris afterward by throwing it to the chickens: It was so insignificant and unclean that she carried it not in her fingers but between her toes. A chicken—a hen, not a cock—was scratching futilely in the dirt. . . . M’lissa lifted her foot and flung this small object in the direction of the hen, and she, as if waiting for this moment, rushed toward M’Lissa’s upturned foot, located the flung object in the air and then on the ground, and in one quick movement of beak and neck, gobbled it down.9 It’s a horrifying, dehumanizing image, both for its visceral shock and its implication. So great is the taboo against female sexual pleasure that the tiny piece of flesh associated with it must be dragged through the dust between the toes to avoid contaminating the hands on its way to feeding the livestock— livestock that are themselves considered food, and less valuable because they are themselves female. Robbed of its ability to create joy, it is “insignificant,” signifying nothing—“nothing but meat,” that is—existing outside of patrilineal reproduction— “not a cock”—and therefore, of language and meaning. As I’ll discuss in detail in Chapter 9, Amos’s history of cross-racial identifications and appropriations in her songs can be problematic. As a white woman with Cherokee 86

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heritage raised in the American South, she has often claimed a heightened consciousness of anti-black discrimination and violence, and, since the very beginning of her career, drawn equivalencies between the Native American and black experiences that can be painfully clumsy at times. (One of the unrecorded tracks on the Y Kant Tori Read demo tape, called “Trail of Tears,” has a hook that is simply, “Cherokee, Africa,” chanted over and over.) Yet her critique of white patriarchal culture, including the women who are often its enforcers, has remained consistent over her three-decade-long career. Clitorectomy is arguably not her trauma to sing; nevertheless, like hysterical bleeding and being defecated on, it is, for Amos, a figure for a kind of rejection that goes beyond objectification, all the way to abjectification—becoming-woman, becoming-animal, becoming-other, becoming-waste. The beautiful ugliness of “Blood Roses,” and what makes it the tone-setting centerpiece for this album, is that it shows the contaminating power of the abject cutting both ways, as if the mirroring line “You think I’m a queer / I think you’re a queer” were a kind of magical, I’m-rubber-you’re-glue spell. Indeed, queering is exactly what Amos is doing to the harpsichord: exerting mastery over it and its avatars at last, setting the baroque itself askew, getting blood on the keys, and even giving the chickens their own voice. “Blood Roses” is tasteful music caught in the act of becoming-abject; it’s what happens when taste tastes you. No wonder rock critics snubbed it. The history of rock relies on the cannibalization and colonization of folk traditions that are figured as “natural,” in order to possess 87

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them and their supposedly joyful secrets. The danger is always that the possession will go both ways; that the abject will come back “wrong,” in the form of a repressed memory or a regurgitated split-pea spume, contaminating the subject and dominating the dominator. Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard may “poun[d] their demons out in big barrelhouse chords”; in “Blood Roses,” Amos is the one being exorcised, note by tinkling note. But she’ll be back.

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If “Blood Roses” gives a voice to abjection, “Professional Widow” enacts its monstrous revenge. A multilayered, much-segmented song featuring some of Amos’s most contorted vocals, it’s the fourth track on the album and the second to use the harpsichord. But “Professional Widow” abandons the archaism of “Blood Roses.” In the opening riff, the harpsichord that wore a powdered wig for “Blood Roses” shows up to “Professional Widow” in full Led Zeppelin drag, pounding out a series of power chords in the four-four time of classic rock.1 In the half-measure rest after the opening riff and before the drums and bass kick in, the harpsichord’s justreleased strings resonate with a metallic shudder, almost a groan, which is picked up and repeated throughout the song in the heavily distorted and guitar-augmented sample of a roaring bull. The first line of the verse invokes the abject in language that could have come straight from the mouths of the weird sisters in Macbeth’s opening scene: “Slag pit / stag shit / honey, bring it close to my lips.” Although the song that

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follows often feels chaotic, its structure barely discernible under tumultuous instrumentation and mannered vocals that stretch lyrical fragments out like taffy, it never falls apart. In fact, it’s a standard verse-chorus-bridge structure, but with a pair of mismatched bridges whose contrasting and irregularly alternating time signatures take up more time in the song than the verse and chorus themselves. To underscore this imbalance, the song never returns to the chorus after the second bridge, extending into an outro instead. This makes the song feel unresolved, as if it were dominated by exceptions, and vaguely unnatural. The first bridge moves from harpsichord to piano, replacing the four-four rock time signature with a reassuringly genteel slow-waltz. The lyrics offer up a refuge from a world of potential traitors in Amos’s suddenly sugary-sweet soprano: “Rest your shoulders, Peaches and Cream / everywhere a Judas as far as you can see / beautiful angel, calling. . . .” But the soprano is just a little too sweet, its playful coloratura on “ca-ah-ah-ahl-ling” hinting with a disconcerting wink that this brief respite shouldn’t be trusted. Even the time signature undercuts the comfort of the bridge, throwing the three-four waltz time off with random extra beats in every other measure. The second verse resumes the harpsichord theme abruptly, in a lyric drawn from an Edgar Allen Poe story: “Prism perfect / honey bring it close to my lips / What is termed a landslide of principle proportion, boy / It better be big.” (In “The Sphinx,” an invalid mistakes a death’s-head moth on the windowpane for a giant monster in the distance; like the black widow, the death’s head moth is a creepy-crawly marked with a symbol of doom.) 90

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After the second chorus, the coda moves back into the waltz time and chord progression of the first bridge, but this time with the sweetness sucked out. Flipping a reassuring melody-line of descending notes into an anxietyheightening melody of climbing notes, Amos sings the lines “Mother Mary, china white / brown may be sweeter / she will supply” with a rhythmically exaggerated and increasingly wild tremolo, bouncing the words “whiiiite” and “sweeeet” like skipping stones across extra-long measures that tip into from three-four into four-four and even five-four time over a swelling crescendo of instrumentation. Manu Katche’s kickdrum pounds the waltz into the ground and Steve Caton’s guitar wails like a siren in the background as Amos yells, “Gimme peace / love, peace / love, gimme peace / love and a hard cock”—pronounced “cahhhhhhck”—a callback to that clucking chicken from “Blood Roses,” as well as one last crotch grab before exiting the stage. If “Blood Roses” was about a woman who “allowed herself to be defecated on,” “Professional Widow” is about the moment when she grabs a shovel. In one of the album’s many mordant jokes, the drum loop underscores the lyric with the crunchy, sloppy sound of actual shit being shoveled. * * * Speaking of bullshit, some critics called it on Amos over “Professional Widow”—the one song everyone seemingly knew exactly how to interpret. “Like many women, Amos has a tendency to pull her punches, either by hiding her feelings in obscure prose . . . 91

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or, more effectively, by pure denial,” wrote Gina Arnold for Metro in February 1996. “The song ‘Professional Widow,’ for example, seems like an obvious comment on the antics of Courtney Love, with easy-to-spot references like ‘don’t blow your brains out’ [sic], ‘starfucker, just like my daddy,’ and ‘China white.’” Arnold continues: “Yet in a recent issue of NME, Amos, who came to prominence by covering Love’s late husband’s, Kurt Cobain’s hit song ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’—flat out denies the connection. One can only wonder why Amos doesn’t just cop to it.” By way of an answer, one could start by assuming that a public cat-fight between female alt-rock musicians just didn’t sound as appealing to the musicians in question as it would have to a music journalist—especially one who was herself one of Love’s detractors. But Arnold was far from alone in interpreting “Professional Widow” as a straightforward condemnation of Hole frontwoman Courtney Love. This reading is borne out—or at least, not contradicted—by the album’s most frequently quoted line, which Amos delivers with breathless, almost gleeful anticipation early in the first verse: “Don’t blow those brains yet / We gotta be big, boy / We gotta be big.” This seemed to many like a direct restatement of the ugliest accusations of Nirvana fans and conspiracy theorists—that Love used Cobain’s depression to further her own agenda, supporting his drug abuse and cynically exploiting his greater talent for her own gain.2 Music insiders further interpreted the line “starfucker / just like my daddy . . . it runs in her family” as a direct reference to Love’s father, a famous roadie for the Grateful Dead, and drew corroboration from heroin references—“china white” 92

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and “she will supply”—in the second bridge and coda. And of course, there’s that last line, “gimme peace [a piece?], love [Love?], and a hard cock.” Less than two years old, the tragic demise of one of the most promising and galvanizing young voices in alternative rock was still extremely fresh for industry people as well as fans, and trying to get Amos to confirm on the record that she was, in fact, blaming Love for Cobain’s death became a favorite game for journalists covering Boys for Pele. The NME interview which Arnold calls out for Amos’s “flat deni[al]” is a case in point. When asked about “Professional Widow,” Amos told reporter Sylvia Patterson, “It’s about my own experience.” Patterson wrote: Er, of being a starfucker? “Being a child prodigy,” she states, unfeasibly, “is a double-edged sword. It’s about my father, the teachers, the father figures, where y’know, I was only as good as . . .” It’s happening again. The quake, the shake, the mist . . . “Where I was only as good as the recitals I played,” concludes Tori.3 The editorializing eye-rolls as Amos clarifies her original answer with a childhood story are telling. Patterson’s choice to interpolate her own thoughts, her interjection of the word “unfeasibly,” and the generous use of ellipses, among other things, make it sound as if Amos is trailing off or losing the thread, when she seems to have concluded her thought with relative ease. Read without interruptions, it sounds like the same description of Amos’s experience getting kicked out of Peabody that she had been giving to reporters since the 93

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earliest stages of her career. In 1992, she told a similar story to BBC television host Caron Keating: I don’t think people realize when you’re a kid how much that affects you. You don’t understand why you’re being rejected, you just think, “I’m 11 now, and I’m a disappointment.” . . . Rejection isn’t going to stop, but when somebody can talk to a kid and say . . . . This isn’t necessarily you, that you don’t have something special. Maybe you’re just not in the right place. These people don’t understand you . . . I’m not blaming anybody, but it’s taken me years to understand that.4 Two years later, in 1994, Amos’s child-prodigy upbringing was still solid enough journalist-bait to feature prominently in her SPIN cover story for Under the Pink. But by 1996, it’s easy to imagine that an interviewer might be tired of hearing about Amos’s childhood, frustrated at the lack of a new angle, and excited by the prospect of lyrics that seemed to refer to one of the biggest recent controversies in music industry news. What’s strange is how insistently that reading of the song, when deployed at the expense of all others, reinscribes a story of masculine authority, creativity, and originality that the song seems directly to subvert through its allusion to the black widow archetype. In interview after interview, Amos called “Professional Widow” her “Lady Macbeth song,” claiming that “if this was 10 years ago they would think it was about Yoko Ono.”5 The black widow archetype is a woman who derives an unnatural vitality, unearned authority, or unfair acclaim from her proximity to a man 94

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she sucks dry (Courtney Love), severs from his working relationships with other men (Yoko Ono), or drives to a tragic death (Lady Macbeth). If women are intended to be used as natural resources for men—“nothing but meat,” as in “Blood Roses”—then the natural order of things is for men to draw on that resource, using women for inspiration for their music and art. The implication that men can inspire or support creative, ambitious, or authoritative women instead of the other way around is so threatening that the women in question must be depicted as unnatural, unsexed, even monstrous, like the black widow spider devouring her mate. This archetype of feminine culpability, talentlessness, and two-facedness had already been used to paint Courtney Love as a “black widow” character in the press. Though Love is clearly a presence in “Professional Widow,” it’s easy to see why Amos might have been careful about uttering her name in interviews. The two had been pitted against each other in the press before, and some incidents from Love’s biography suggest she had once been a factor in disrupting the development of a friendly relationship— perhaps more—between Amos and Trent Reznor, who had contributed backing vocals to a track on Under the Pink. Rather than yielding to the story in which two cat-fighting women compete for the love of yet another creative man, Amos chooses, on “Professional Widow,” to identify with her. As Amos herself suggested in the NME interview, “Starfucker / just like my daddy / selling his baby” sounds as much like her own childhood as Love’s; in her memoir, Edison Amos, after all, is the one who tirelessly wrote letters to established musicians, including Michael Jackson and 95

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Johnny Cash, asking that they listen to his daughter’s demo and send her advice on how to get into showbiz. Under her father’s influence, Amos became a “professional” at thirteen. “Professional Widow” even seems to evoke the D.C. bars where she played in those years, the deals that “ma[d]e him feel like a congressman.” Amos’s career had taken shape under the tutelage of men ever since. Her first shot at stardom and subsequent comeback were monitored by label bosses like Doug Morris, producers like Joe Chicarelli, Davitt Sigerson, and Ian Stanley, and directors like Marty Callner. She had been vocal about the anguish of having to perform under the eyes of these men—“The big picture / is staring at me”—and described suffering under their disappointment and rejection during her “failures” at ages eleven and twentyfive. Now, she had lost the major romantic relationship of her adult life with yet another professional collaborator and influence, co-producer Eric Rosse. When she earnestly tells Patterson for the NME interview, “I never got a boy without [my piano],” it’s easy to hear her anxieties about her worth as a desirable woman apart from her considerable talent— anxieties explored in “Blood Roses.” The flip side of that anxiety, explored in “Professional Widow,” concerns the role men have played in the expression and shaping of that talent. With Boys for Pele, the newly independent and selfproducing Amos was a “professional widow” in the sense of having lost her creative and business partner, struggling with how to be a self-determining musician as a woman. As well as developing her sound in a male-dominated music industry, Amos had always drawn musical inspiration from male musicians. The license she felt to make their music 96

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her own had landed her in trouble before, when she riffed on classical composers at Peabody. As a lounge singer gifted with training, virtuosity, and a near-perfect ear, she developed this skill much, much further. Amos spent her teenage years taking customer requests, and thereby acquiring a working repertoire of thousands of songs. Profiles in local D.C. newspapers from this time period always point out the way Amos riffed on requests, incorporating fragments of her own compositions and freely mixing classical with pop references, just as she had at Peabody. “She may start with a song about how hard it is for a woman to go home alone, then swing into an accented ‘Thank Heaven for Little Girls,’” wrote one Washington Times reporter in 1983, when Amos would have been twenty years old.6 Another reporter observed her ability to cobble customer requests as disparate as “Tiny Dancer” and “The Marine Corps Hymn” into entertaining and fluid sets by mixing in some heavily popped-up Beethoven and her own compositions.7 This freedom to cover, and specifically to cover men and make their music her own, was an important part of Amos’s sound from the beginning. But that kind of inspiration is only supposed to go one way, as we see from Gina Arnold’s dig about Amos having “come to prominence” by covering the Nirvana song “Smells Like Teen Spirit” early in her career. The word “starfucker,” like the word “groupie,” demands a clear understanding of who’s a star and who’s a fucker, and violating that order, as Love and Amos both tried to do, can draw an unbelievable level of ire. The live “Teen Spirit” cover, released on Amos’s “Crucify” EP in 1992, was a sore spot for Nirvana fans (and, to make things more confusing, sometimes for Love herself), 97

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but it would be hard to make a strong case that Amos was riding Cobain’s coattails to fame in May 1992, any more than she was riding those of the Rolling Stones or Led Zeppelin in her covers of “Angie” and “Thank You” on the same EP. On “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” Amos’s slow, cold drip of sarcasm and melancholy over a thudding, clockwork piano grumble of bass notes couldn’t sound more different than the original. But where Nirvana fans saw a woman corrupting the authentic pain of a male genius with feminine sentimentality, Amos acknowledges no difference between camp feeling and real feeling. As an article about the nineteen-year-old lounge singer had once observed, “She seems to parody cocktail pianists . . . asking for requests and then peppering the expected ‘feelings, whoa, whoa, whoa feelings’ fare with her own acerbic observations.”8 (She clearly felt, and still feels, entitled to them—imagine that!) Her 2001 recording of Strange Little Girls, an entire album covering songs written and performed by men from the point of view of made-up female characters, was the culmination of this career-long interest in what men’s words and music would sound like funneled through her own voice and instrument. It’s worth noting that Cobain himself always maintained, with typical self-deprecation, that “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was his deliberate attempt to copy the Pixies.9 Because Cobain’s words are filtered through a familiar story about tragic male genius, his critics and fans have no trouble taking this statement at face value without feeling that it undercuts his talent or originality in any way—nor should they. If anything, it shows a sophisticated manipulation of multiple levels of irony and talent at once, since the song 98

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itself is Cobain’s comment on the hollowness of his role as an entertainer. The same courtesy, however, has never been extended to Amos, whose detractors are always quick to throw the “Kate Bush ripoff ” label at her. For a woman to steal from another woman—and she will always be found to have stolen from another woman, no matter how different they sound, because to many rock critics all women sound alike— already means she’s a no-talent hack. But for a woman to steal from a man is a much more serious crime, a pathetic plea for relevance she can’t possibly be garnering on her own— even if she’s simultaneously paying him the compliment of equating him with Led Zeppelin or the Rolling Stones, and selling out her own shows in venues that are increasingly “big, boy.” Arnold of all people should know this, having received death threats from Rolling Stones fans for her early defense of Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville, a song-by-song response to the Stones’ Exile on Main Street, and written her own 33 1/3 book about, among other things, the “uglier side of the indie music scene” Phair’s album brought out.10 * * * But whatever journalists, Nirvana fans, or even Love herself may believe, the character in “Professional Widow” certainly didn’t start with Love. In one interview with the Albuquerque Journal, Amos wrapped up her answer to a question about “Professional Widow” by saying, “Sort of like Humpty Dumpty. Custard, baby.”11 The reporter has no comment about this seeming non sequitur, but in fact, Amos is referring to one of her earlier recorded songs: the Little Earthquakes B-side “Humpty Dumpty,” released as an exclusive on the 99

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“China” single in 1992. An earlier exploration of the black widow archetype, “Humpty Dumpty” imagines the nurseryrhyme egg on a Bonnie-and-Clyde-style crime spree with his girlfriend, Betty Louise. As the two are gloating over their crime, Betty Louise coaxes Humpty to sit on a wall—that wall—and the rest is history. We even get to find out what she did with the body: “Betty Louise, she said, ‘I like / custard in the summer, honey.’” (Custard, if you don’t know, is made with eggs.) “What it takes to be queen,” yells Amos in the outro with obvious relish. If “Humpty Dumpty” was about what it takes to be queen, Amos’s Lady Macbeth song is about what it takes to be king. It’s about getting to be Robert Plant or Mick Jagger or Kurt Cobain; owning both the songs you write and the ones you “steal”; being seen as a genius, not a copycat or a collaborator or one of a group; relying on yourself and your male support staff without anyone looking over your shoulder; telling music journalists about yourself and your songs, and having them believe you. It’s a fantasy, of course; women don’t get to do any of those things with impunity. But with “Professional Widow,” she calls the fantasy into being for four minutes and thirty-two seconds, and that is a powerful conjuring. In the same NME interview, Amos describes her reaction to men who’ve lost respect for her because of her messy emotions— “half my blood would be over some guy’s Stussy shirt . . . I’m going, ‘Oh, shut up, I could negotiate your deal for you in a minute, honey.’” That’s custard in the summer for you. If Amos was trying to “show her work” by handing journalists the range of references involved in the song’s composition, including her own back catalog, she might 100

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have saved her breath. The song continued to be interpreted primarily as a diss track. There had been similar confusion around “Me and a Gun,” which was (and still is) often mistaken for a literal description of Amos’s own sexual assault. It’s hard to imagine anyone calling a song less “authentic” because it doesn’t divulge painful personal details in raw, unedited form; yet some nineties rape truthers cited this so-called discrepancy as evidence that Amos had never been attacked at all. After that experience, Amos had plenty of reason to go into “Professional Widow” wary of naming names. Is it any wonder that the cover image for the Boys for Pele album reads as a not-so-subtle revision of her most controversial, and perhaps on some level, most misunderstood song? On the cover of Boys for Pele, Amos sits in a rocking chair on the front porch of a crumbling house, shotgun at the ready, waiting for the first intruder with a half-smile. It’s her and a gun again, but this time she’s holding it. And it’s big, boy.

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The fifth track on Boys for Pele, “Marianne,” is a quietly sublime reflection on the perilous transition from girlhood to womanhood, composed and recorded in one take during soundcheck. The instrumentation, mostly just the improvised piano accompaniment with strings added on the bridge, is less experimental than the other significant tracks on the album; it’s easy to imagine it on the downhill slope of Under the Pink, perhaps sandwiched between “Space Dog” and “Yes, Anastasia.” It feels like a caught breath between harpsichord riffs, and yet it is not overshadowed by the much louder and more complex songs around it. In my own highschool review of Boys for Pele, I called it “a sad, tuneful little thing.” There is a deliberate minorness to “Marianne.” And yet “Marianne” occupied a disproportionally negative place in criticisms of Boys for Pele, where its first line was often cited disapprovingly as an example of Amos’s indecipherable lyrics: “Tuna, rubber / little blubber in my igloo.” In fact, “Marianne” has one of the more straightforward backstories on the album. Unlike other “character” songs like

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“Blood Roses” and “Professional Widow,” “Marianne” has a single, real-life source, according to Amos: Maryanne Curtis, a high-school friend of Amos’s who overdosed at the age of fifteen. “And they said Marianne killed herself, and I said, not a chance, not a chance,” Amos croons, angrily recounting the gossip around Marianne’s death: “Don’t you love the girls, ladies, babes, old bags who say, ‘she was so pretty, why, why, why, why did she crawl down in the old deep ravine?’” Despite leering reviewers’ comments about “cryptic lesbian noodlings,” the singer’s “thoughts of Marianne” are pretty clearly not sexual (certainly no more so than the “brothers and lovers she and I were” line from the similarly improvised song “Bells for Her” on Under the Pink); and yet there was something there that deeply unsettled both male and female critics. It’s a fun game and not too difficult to unpack the song’s densest lyrics, though it helps to know the song’s genesis. You could start with that lilting, nonsensical opening line, almost a hum: “Tuna, rubber / a little blubber in my igloo” has a rhythm more like listening than singing, or possibly even “tuning in” to some hidden frequency. Tuna is also, of course, one of the many creative euphemisms for female genitalia on the album (my personal favorite being the “furry mussels” on the previous track, “Mr. Zebra”). Amos seemed to confirm this in a 1996 interview with Keyboard: “For me to say that line another way would just make it really gross and crass.”1 To risk a bit of crassness, a “tuna rubber” might be a masturbating girl, like the one from “Icicle” (“getting off, getting off . . . in my pumpkin PJs”); or there might be someone else involved (“rubber” = “rub her”); or a condom 104

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(“rubber”). In any case, the sexual valence of the line sits uneasily next to the nursery-rhyme feel of its tightly rhymed trochees. To blubber is to cry, which broken-hearted young girls may do from time to time; blubber is also fat, which young girls are not supposed to be; and, as the igloo reference suggests, it’s the way marine mammals protect themselves from the cold. So the first eight words have introduced, almost subliminally, a girl’s sexuality and her sadness, her protection and its potential failure. The third line is addressed to Marianne herself: “And I knew you, pigtails and all / girls when they fall.” “Pigtails” is a young word for fifteen, but in context, it’s also oddly animalistic. The rest of the song retraces Marianne’s fall, represented musically by the shift from the pretty, music-box piano motifs that open the song to a lurching bridge in the lower registers, the “old deep ravine” where Marianne’s body was found. The lyrics in the bridge, augmented by swelling strings, are apparently drawn from Amos’s childhood, her imaginary and real friends—“the weasel squeaks faster than a seven-day week,” “Timmy and that purple monkey,” “pesters and lesters and jesters”—but without knowing that, they still register as increasingly psychedelic and distressing. After the bridge, an instrumental piano breakdown reprises Marianne’s music-box theme, and the final movement, which returns to the line, “I’m just having thoughts of Marianne,” elegizes a girl who grew up too fast and paid the price, the “quickest girl in the frying pan” who could “outrun the fastest slug.” Marianne runs recklessly toward womanhood, dodging bullets (“slugs”) only to become food for worms. Finis. 105

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I used to play an impoverished but adequate version of “Marianne” on the piano. The voicings are easy enough, a restless murmur in the left hand, a chiming in the right. The hardest part of it is trying to internalize the pattern of Amos’s improvisational style, the way she begins with standard arpeggios, then cracks open the chords, digging fingers in between the intervals to split open the eerie dissonances within. Meanwhile, the left hand cycles a little faster through its pattern, until it seems to trip over itself, as if illustrating how easy it is for a precocious young girl to trip and fall on the way to womanhood. Marianne’s voice haunts the song, not in the words, but in the broken music-box piano riffs in between. Perhaps playing the song is the key to intuiting its meaning; still, it’s not a particularly difficult song to understand, even if you don’t know the backstory. It should be obvious by now that “Marianne” is one of my favorite tracks on the album, as integral to its success, I believe, as the more formidable “Blood Roses” and “Professional Widow.” If it’s truly hard for me to understand why more female critics in particular didn’t identify with its haunting evocation of girlhood, I have to count my former self in the pack. Speaking mostly of “Marianne,” seventeenyear-old me wrote, “At first glance [Amos’s] unrelated nouns and entangled sentences can often be mistaken for nonsense; however, on Pele one is tempted to believe that’s all they really are.” The time has come to talk about Tori Amos’s reputation among female rock critics. The fact that some of the most cutting criticisms of Boys for Pele came from women who identified as feminists and explicitly championed women in 106

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rock has been hard for me to reconcile, a continually daunting thought as I wrote this book. “Marianne,” a minor-key fairytale about a girl broken on the cusp of womanhood, strikes me as the best place to start looking for a reason. Because fairies are very much part of the problem. * * * “It’s hard to get past the fact that Amos has thanked ‘the faeries’ on all her albums,” Evelyn McDonnell commented in her two-star Boys for Pele review for Rolling Stone. Amos had early on described making fairy rings out of her songs and talking to the little people in order to complete her albums. The album art for Under the Pink, in which a tiny, miniaturized Tori lies peacefully among pebbles, bones, feathers, broken bottles, and other found objects arranged in a circle, seems to allude to these magical rings, even as it makes Amos herself into one of the little people. To this day, the quickest way to cut down any Amos defender is to make an allusion to the plethora of girls wearing fairy wings at her concerts. (Implicit in this smear, of course, are the other type of “fairies” who like Tori Amos—gay men.) If it’s hard to argue with the uncoolness of fairies, especially when spelled with an “e,” it’s even harder to put your finger on exactly why. I’m not here to rehabilitate modern-day paganism as subversive, though there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be, given its explicitly anti-patriarchal associations and aims; nor will I do a deep dive into Amos’s spiritual beliefs, of which she has supplied as thorough a guide as we are likely to need in the conversations with Ann Powers compiled for Tori Amos: Piece by Piece. It’s enough to point 107

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out that other women in the ‘90s alt-rock canon, notably Kate Bush and P. J. Harvey, had availed themselves of pagan and Celtic imagery with no great sacrifice to their credibility. Why is Amos’s fairy-love beyond the pale? Another quote from the Rolling Stone review offers a clue. “There’s a fine line between precocious and precious,” writes McDonnell, neatly twinning the positive meanings of precocious with its negative associations by proximity to the loaded word “precious.” Precocious (from the Latin root for early, prae-, and verb coquere, to grow or ripen) is only a compliment if given to a child; even then, it implies a mild rebuke at a talent or knowledge perceived as inappropriate or overreaching. Precious (from pretium, the Latin for cost or price) is a similarly double-edged word, implying something valuable, but also something that has potentially been overvalued. Children are precious; adults are being precious. The implication is that Amos, once a child prodigy, is still, on her third album, a child; that, talented as she may be, her reach exceeds her grasp; that she is being willfully naïve, inappropriately precious, and perhaps, a little too cute. “Precious” is a word that means a lot to Tori Amos fans; not only is “Precious Things” a beloved Little Earthquakes track, but the briefest scan of Amos’s song titles shows a preponderance of related diminutive words (“sweet,” “little,” “pretty,” “sorta,” “twinkle”); small and vulnerable creatures (“frog,” “butterfly,” “firefly,” “dove”); words associated with stereotypical girlishness (“frock,” “fairytale,” “parasol,” “daisy,” “roses,” “petals”); and, of course, the word “girl” itself. The album titles replicate this trend; Little Earthquakes, Under the Pink, From the Choirgirl Hotel, Strange Little 108

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Girls, and American Doll Posse all contain diminutive and stereotypically girlish language. And that’s only the titles; the songs are chockablock with ice cream and pigtails, posies and hosies and horsies and all manner of fairy-tale nonsense. If there is a fine line between precocious and precious, Amos has crossed it many times over. This “precious” or cutesy language, along with Amos’s diminutive or childlike image, seems to provoke female critics in particular to heights of disgust. This despite the fact that the ‘90s alt-rock scene was rife with signifiers of little-girlhood, from the Hello Kitty accessories of the riot grrrl movement to the vintage babydoll dresses and princess tiaras of “kinderwhore,” the look favored by Kat Bjelland, Courtney Love, and Kim Shattuck. Punk bands like Babes in Toyland and The Muffs played up the contrast of peter-pan collars with heavily sexualized lyrics and shredding guitars, while Bikini Kill reclaimed girlish iconography alongside feminine crafts and DIY in service of “revolution, girl-style.” But Amos was neither a grrrl nor a kinderwhore, and she didn’t seem to be either reclaiming girliness or troping on it ironically. Rather, she had been writing songs from the perspective of girls and adolescents since early in her career. Little Earthquakes had the sweet, sad coming-of-age ballad “Winter” (“snow can wait, I forgot my mittens”) and the percussive anger of “Precious Things” (“in the seventh grade / running after Billy”). Under the Pink had “Bells for Her” (“bells and footfalls and soldiers and dolls”) and “Icicle” (“Greeting the monster in our Easter dresses . . . he’s in my pumpkin P.J.’s”). These are not songs that take an either ironic or empowering distance from their objects. They are songs 109

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that adopt the perspective of teenage, or more often preteen, girls. And actual teenage and preteen girls are one of the most despised demographics in popular culture, even as they have been its drivers, at least since hundreds of them melted down onscreen during the Beatles’ fateful Ed Sullivan appearance. Whatever teen girls become too invested in— the Twilight books, One Direction, Instagram selfies, Justin Bieber—suffers a fatal loss of mainstream credibility, even as sales and clicks skyrocket. In this more enlightened era, boys and adult men who enjoy girl culture may be seen as subversive; adult women may, to a certain extent, do the same. But actual preteen girldom, when not filtered through an “empowerment” framework, is still something of an embarrassment—even and especially when there is a suggestion of continuity with the interiority and sexuality of grown women (witness the even more embarrassing prospect of Fifty Shades of Grey, which began its life as erotic Twilight fanfic for adult women). Rock music loves teenage girls as jailbait; when they exercise agency, not so much. Boys for Pele had been characterized by one male reviewer as “the unedited diary of a precocious, pretentious teenager,”2 but the disses by female critics are always more interesting to me, and they’ve never stopped. In 2014, the Dallas Observer prepped readers for Amos’s upcoming live show by running a quiz called “Tori Amos Lyrics, or Girl Shitting with a Pen?” Riffing on an article style notoriously associated with teen girls’ magazines, Jamie Laughlin asked readers to identify the source of various lyrics, some drawn from the Tori Amos back catalog, some (supposedly) copied from the stall walls 110

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of Dallas public bathrooms.3 The literal meaning of “shitting with a pen”—shitting while writing—joins its metaphorical meaning of shitting out writing to depict adolescent girlhood as a veritable fountain of excrement. Clearly, the level of disgust on display merits a second look. * * * Precious things are not typically associated with Kristeva’s abject, which is repellent and disgusting, not cute and pretty and nonthreatening. And yet cuteness undoubtedly provokes a disgust response in certain contexts, especially where aesthetic taste is at stake. It was Dorothy Parker who most memorably codified this response to cutesy language in her “Constant Reader” column in the New Yorker, when she wrote, of A. A. Milne’s children’s books: “And it is that word ‘hummy,’ my darlings, that marks the first place in ‘The House at Pooh Corner’ at which Tonstant Weader Fwowed up.”4 In “The Cuteness of the Avant-Garde,” the literary critic and aesthetic theorist Sianne Ngai explores this abject quality of cuteness: “The formal properties associated with cuteness—smallness, compactness, softness, simplicity, and pliancy—call forth specific affects: helplessness, pitifulness, and even despondency.”5 These are the effects of vulnerability and victimhood. Indelibly linked with childhood, cuteness is also somewhat surprisingly linked with brokenness, maiming, and abuse—think of the Island of Misfit Toys, or the long-suffering dog Max in How the Grinch Stole Christmas. A constant reminder of our ability to inflict harm, what is cute can “provoke ugly or aggressive 111

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feelings, as well as the expected tender or maternal ones.” Anecdotally, our desire to crush the cute ranges from cheek-pinching (“I could eat you up!”) to the more fatal fondlings of Lenny in Of Mice and Men; psychologically, the impulse is fairly well-documented. One 2013 study led by Rebecca Dyer, then a graduate student in psychology at Yale University, found that subjects expressed greater hostility and aggression after viewing baby animal pictures such as the ones on the website Cute Overload. Dyer speculates that these negative emotions might be caused by a sense of emotional incontinence or “lost control” when faced with the cute.6 This accords with Ngai’s assertion that the cute, even as it needles us with reminders of our own capacity for violence, can have a reciprocally violent effect on us. We express a peculiar helplessness in the face of helpless things, as a friend of mine recently did when she posted under an Instagram of my newborn son, “I’M DEAD OF CUTE.” Certain strains of kawaii, the Japanese culture of cuteness, lend themselves to violent imagery, as documented in the 2005 book Drop Dead Cute and in Ngai’s work on Takashi Nurakami. Moreover, cuteness has a contaminating or “deverbalizing” effect: “In soliciting a response along the lines of a murmur or coo, the cute object shows its ability to infantilize the language of its infantilizer, dissolving syntactic divisions and reducing one’s lexicon to onomatopoeia.”7 As the famous Dorothy Parker line demonstrates, negative critical judgments are no guaranty of immunity to this contaminating effect. This type of “contaminated” language is everywhere on display in Gina Arnold’s review of Boys for Pele. Its 112

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hallmarks are a childlike repetition of words (“pretty-pretty piano playing”), nonsensical rhyming (“ooky-spooky organ”), diminutive versions of words (“witchypoo,” but also “cute” itself, originally a truncated version of “acute”), and transcriptions of deliberate mispronunciations (“fwowed up,” but also the word “twee,” originally a babyish version of “sweet”). If the gagging noise we make when the cute comes our way seems to align the aesthetic with the abjection of vomiting, it’s also the hallmark of a closed airway, a silencing of critique, and what Derrida called “the quintessence of bad taste.”8 If adorableness doesn’t literally drive you crazy, warding it off might make you sound that way; and for female rock critics, who are always in danger of being tarred with the same cutesy brush as the women they cover, this is a particularly pungent threat (and one to which Arnold, who defended Liz Phair during the ugly backlash to Exile in Guyville, was no stranger). Evelyn McDonnell, like Arnold, is associated strongly with championing female musicians; she covered riot grrrl in the early nineties (giving context but not content to her suggestion that Amos listen to Babes in Toyland) and has written books on The Runaways and Björk, as well as cofounding the advocacy group Strong Women in Music. In her review of Boys for Pele, McDonnell seems to intuit the potential uses of preciousness, observing that “fantasies are the refuge—and sometimes the revenge—of the powerless.” For McDonnell, as for Arnold, it is the impenetrability of Amos’s language that forecloses on this possibility: “But as usual, the lyric’s meaning is oblique and unclear; Amos goes for the shock and giggle without going for the throat.” Similarly, Arnold faulted the lyrics for not “refer[ring] to a 113

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universal feeling or condition,” calling them more obtuse than “Gravity’s Rainbow, written in Greek.” Both reviewers, however, seem drawn into a fascinating internal split around Amos’s lyrics. They are at once infantilized (“precious,” “witchypoo”) and too accomplished or difficult (“precocious,” “pretentious,” “Gravity’s Rainbow, written in Greek”). The West Coast music critic Jean Rosenbluth, who helped report on sexism in the music industry for an Entertainment Weekly article in 1991, replicated this split perfectly in the lede of her Boys for Pele review for the LA Times: “There are only two possible explanations of the utter indecipherability of Amos’ lyrics: 1) She is an enemy spy sending brilliantly encrypted messages to her compatriots in foreign lands or 2) The Cornflake Girl is really just a flake.” The word “flake,” as I have already pointed out, is a kind of ur-moniker for critics’ problems with Amos. In its North American usage, “flake” condenses several meanings into one, suggesting, crucially, not just a dimwitted or eccentric person, but also someone unreliable or unstable, someone likely to “flake” on you, meaning to fail in some duty or obligation.9 Neglecting the Occam’s razor explanation for the “utter indecipherability of Amos’ lyrics,” which is that she herself has simply failed to decipher them, Rosenbluth admits the possibility that there might be meaning and intelligence in Amos’s lyrics—but hints that if there are, the meanings are sinister, the intelligence foreign, and Amos herself is a criminal mastermind. Rosenbluth is now a U.S. Magistrate Judge in the Central District of California, which casts a strange backward 114

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meaning on her judgment of Amos. Only about 33 percent of U.S. state and federal court judges are women; it can’t be an easy career path. Yet when Rosenbluth spoke to a bar association newsletter about her personal experiences facing discrimination, it was sexism in the music industry, not in law school or academia, she remembered: “I had been up for a job that I really, really wanted and I was (if I say so myself) eminently qualified for. I knew a person who worked for that publication. He told me that he had told the people in charge of hiring that I was not good at my job (we had worked together previously) because he was married and felt attracted to me. I just felt so powerless.”10 In another article, Rosenbluth cited this powerlessness as one of her motivations for going to law school.11 It says something about how deeply entrenched sexism is in the music industry that for at least one gifted woman, going to law school looked like an easier way to combat it than fighting it from within. As a seventeen-year-old Tori Amos fan and co-editor of my high-school newspaper in 1996, I would never have believed that internalized misogyny played a role in my pan of Boys for Pele. At most, I might have admitted that I felt pressure to be “fair,” even a little extra tough on Amos because I felt so connected to her work, and wanted to show that I could be impartial. And yet the circuitous thinking of internalized sexism is clearly there in my sentence structure: “At first glance [Amos’s] unrelated nouns and entangled sentences can often be mistaken for nonsense; however, on Pele one is tempted to believe that’s all they really are.” By writing in the passive voice, I avoided admitting that I often did not understand Amos’s lyrics on the first listen, or the 115

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second, or third. Usually the click of understanding would eventually happen on long night-time drives to and from church, where I was busily playing the part of a Christian teenager, attending an ongoing round of events and practices and committee meetings, while slowly, on the inside, losing my faith. Driving down Houston streets at nine or ten o’clock at night, alone with Tori’s voice, the clenched fist of unexpressed feelings would loosen in my chest, and I would suddenly hear—no, feel—the truth of a line I’d thought was only nonsense before. In those moments, it was like she was speaking directly to me. If she was, in fact, a double agent, I already knew I was her “compatriot in a foreign land,” the intended recipient of her coded messages. And yet I couldn’t extend my past experience even a few months into the future for that Boys for Pele review. Instead, I joined the chorus of moral outrage, contempt, and disgust, indignant that Amos thought she could “get away with slapping the label of ‘avantgarde’ on low quality gibberish”—even as I would have fought to the death anyone who used the word “gibberish” to describe, for example, R.E.M. lyrics. As Michael Stipe and many others could testify, the world of rock criticism has never been lacking for self-appointed guardians of the faint, ever-shifting line between ambition and pretentiousness. Many male artists have been criticized for obscure or ambitiously artistic lyrics, but the terms of the critique tend to sound different when it’s a man. When critics tire of trying to deal intelligently with the difficult music or lyrics of Costello or Stipe or even Dylan, these men may be depicted as effete, pale, limp, impotent—femininized through the typically ablist language that equates masculinity 116

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with health and vigor—or, in the language of class betrayal, overly intellectual, out-of-touch. What these men are rarely accused of, however, is plain dimwittedness. The argument that not understanding something makes it stupid is a projection that seems to apply only to women artists. More likely to be depicted as sinister, secretive, and deceptive (“thinks she can get away with”) than overly intellectual, female artists are often in the very same breath depicted as naïve, flaky, or “irrational,” distractible children. Despite what seems like an obvious internal contradiction, this particularly durable type of critical double-think has been reserved for the most ambitious of our female artists for at least a century, from Gertrude Stein in the early 1900s to Joanna Newsom in the early 2000s. The strain of condescending to something that has just flown over your head tells in the critical language, in the numbered splitting that occurs between “enemy spy” and “really just a flake,” as well as in a contagion of cutesiness in the language itself. It occurs to me, now, that the girl being mourned in “Marianne” may be the one we all have to throw away at some point, all of us ambitious women. We have to kill her over and over again, in order for the women we become to be taken seriously. * * * “Marianne” was composed and recorded in one long improvised exhalation during soundcheck. Amos typically composes without musical notation, building her songs through improvisation and experimentation, teaching her 117

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backing bands without a musical score and encouraging them to develop their accompaniment the same way. This is one reason even her most “composed”-sounding songs always seem to be stretching toward their own horizons, congealing improvisations only to unravel them from verse to verse. Process and product are never far apart in Amos’s music, which is, I suspect, one reason why her answers to questions about what the songs mean can often sound like additional lyrics rather than explanations. For Amos, it seems, to sing and play is to think through a complicated problem out loud, and that thinking is never really finished. Neither is the song; neither, perhaps, is the woman. You don’t have to believe in fairies to relate to that.

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Halfway through the album, Boys for Pele abandons the cloak of metaphor and the support of righteous rage for the cold comfort of the bathroom floor. “It was a very good bathroom. You know, Four Seasons,” Amos quipped in her stage patter for a live version of the song “Hey Jupiter” during a 1998 show in Kansas City. “So anyway, I went in and, um, I went into this bathroom and I curled up on the floor, and I put my head like [folds hands like a pillow] . . . It’s the only time I've ever done it, except when you're, you know, puking your guts out.”1 According to interviews, the first strains of “Hey Jupiter” came to Amos on the bathroom floor of her Phoenix hotel room on the Under the Pink tour. Desperately lonely, she’d been trying to call Rosse, who was her ex-boyfriend by then, but he wasn’t picking up the phone. Turning on the hot water, she steamed up the bathroom and watched as “a ghost” drew a picture for her in the bathroom mirror.2

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Even with the ghost, this is perhaps the most relatable of all Amos’s song explanations. The simple image of rejection and despair, the post-break-up realization that the lover is really, truly gone and you’re really, truly alone, has an undeniable power. It’s also one of the most lyrically and musically accessible songs on the album, a classically structured breakup ballad. This may go some way toward explaining why it’s a fan favorite, something I didn’t realize when I first sat down to write, but have since deduced from the sheer number of times people have asked about it by name when I mention that I’m writing about Boys for Pele. A former grad school colleague recently wrote me that “Hey Jupiter” is the song “that makes [him] feel the most, not just of Tori’s work but of all the songs [he’s] ever heard.”3 There’s something special about “Hey Jupiter” that accounts for its beloved place in Amos’s oeuvre. Abandoning the pyrotechnics of the first half of the album, it neatly bisects Boys for Pele, acting as a turning point for the album’s mood. Fittingly for its place on the album, it’s a song structured like a mirror, with no lyrical bridge, just a binaristic verse-chorus alternation—a structure that’s unusual in Amos’s work as a whole, but especially on Boys for Pele, with its emphasis on improvised and asymmetrical songs. “Hey Jupiter” is a song about the lonely confrontation with the self—“me and me”— that arises in the absence of a lover to mirror oneself back, with all the distortions and validating comforts that entails. If “Blood Roses” channels the abject and “Professional Widow” plays out its revenge and “Marianne” mourns its loss, then “Hey Jupiter,” in one sense the nadir of abjection on the album, is in another sense its undoing. With “Hey 120

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Jupiter,” we are finally beside ourselves (recall that Kristeva’s abject “places the one haunted by it literally beside himself ”); looking in a mirror, we struggle to feel empathy with the stranger we see there. “Hey Jupiter” starts with an open chord that evokes the ringing telephone—not beginning on the last quarter note of the measure, as you might expect, but on the last eighth note, so that it always sounds like it’s coming in just a little bit late, conveying that heartbreaking little eternity between every ring. “No one’s picking up the phone / Guess it’s me and me,” Amos sings. “And this little masochist / she’s ready to confess / all the things that I never thought that she could feel.” The chorus—“Are you gay? / Are you blue? / Thought we both could use a friend to run to”—rewrites the accusations of “Blood Roses” (“You think I’m a queer? / I think you’re a queer”) as tender, searching, introspective puns. In the background of the chorus, the melancholy squish of the harmonium sounds like a cloud of steam. The theme of self-reflection runs throughout, as each iteration of the chorus ends with a memory of ways the singer had to distort herself to meet the needs of the lover: “I thought I wouldn’t have to be / with you, something new”; “I thought I wouldn’t have to be / with you, a magazine.” The verses trace this sense of unfamiliarity with the self further: “Thought I knew myself so well / all the dolls I had . . . .” By the end of the song, a repeated line has shifted from third-person to first-person, signifying an acceptance of the reflected image: “All the things / that I never thought that she could feel” becomes “guess I thought I could never feel the things I feel.” It’s a seemingly 121

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small shift, but huge in terms of the identification with a feeling self that it conveys. There’s one more interesting shift worth noting. Throughout the album, Amos has been invoking powerful male musicians—Robert Plant, Kurt Cobain, Trent Reznor (in “Caught a Lite Sneeze”), and, with the harpsichord, the classical composers she studied at Peabody. “Hey Jupiter” invokes yet another great male rock star, but one whose androgyny, racial identification, and R&B vocal stylings set him in a category apart from the other references. The chord progression in the verses closely follows the chord progression of the great heartbreak anthem “Purple Rain,” and Amos’s keening soprano wail at the end of each chorus is a conscious mimicry of Prince’s falsetto in the song’s extended outro. Why Prince, for a girl trying to figure out who she is at last, and break her music free of the rock hegemony? Prince was perhaps the most iconic male rock star who was also a diva.4 * * * “Diva” is the site where the abject becomes strong by refusing to reject itself, instead insisting on being heard and acknowledged in public. Originally a term for the female opera singers who sang the most challenging and melodramatic arias, “diva” began acquiring its contemporary meanings in 1883, according to an article written by Oxford U.S. dictionary editor Allison Wright in 2012 in the wake of Whitney Houston’s death.5 Wright points out that the word’s modern meanings are strangely multivalent, with 122

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both negative and positive connotations, encompassing at once virtuosity, extreme sensitivity, and temperament. In the twentieth century, the diva was associated with highstrung and demanding women, black women, and gay men, a trifecta of abjection in white, masculinist America. The hallmarks of the diva are emotional fragility, hyperbolic demands for attention, and a larger-than-life image or persona that exceeds her work onstage. In her melodramatic performances of emotion, the diva paradoxically shows her power by projecting her own feelings outward—especially taboo feelings of abjection—allowing listeners to access their own, often repressed, emotions sympathetically. As a singer-songwriter whose career first flourished in the authenticity-obsessed, R&B-allergic ‘90s alt-rock scene, Tori Amos never depicted herself as a diva in the Mariah Carey or Whitney Houston mold. Nevertheless, her “kooky” personality was from the beginning seen by journalists as somehow in excess of her music. By the time of Boys for Pele’s release, profiles seem to delight in pulling aside the curtain of the vulnerable, wounded feminist songwriter to reveal the secret narcissistic diva beneath. It’s hard to imagine a profile of one of Amos’s contemporaries, say Sarah MacLachlan, spending as much time describing her behavior in the Barney’s shoe department as does Gavin Edwards’s “Magical Mystery Tori” in the March 1996 issue of Details. Edwards gets a lot of tongue-clicking mileage out of describing all the Manolo Blahnik heels Amos tries on but doesn’t buy (imagine trying on nine, even ten pairs of shoes!) as well as the fact that the four pairs of flats she does buy cost a total of $1700 (imagine a female performer owning so many pairs of 123

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expensive flats!). “Tori spent too long at Barney’s, trying on every hat in sight,” Edwards writes, completing the depiction of this multiplatinum artist as a hopeless cartoon child. “Now she needs my help packing her bags if she’s going to catch her flight to L.A. to finish mixing the record.” Thank goodness he was there, or From the Choirgirl Hotel might never have seen the light of day! Among the things that mystify Edwards in the article is Amos’s inclusion of Gladys Knight in her song about world religions, “Muhammed, My Friend,” because, as Amos puts it, “She’s a bit of a goddess.” If Amos has no problems seeing divas on a par with religious leaders, it’s because she has built a career on using her own considerable strength to express vulnerability in a way that helps the vulnerable feel stronger. Her story is a diva story, from her framing of her biography as a series of abject failures followed by comebacks to her relationship with her passionately devoted fan base to her fairy-tale wedding in an actual Irish castle. For three decades Amos has persisted in being loud, sexual, hurt, triumphant, talkative, ambitious, girly, and female on the straight male alt-rock stage, despite having been disciplined via sexual assault, hypersexualization, mockery, trolling, and critical refusal to assess her music on its own terms. The diva, writes literary scholar Lauren Berlant, “stages a dramatic coup in a public sphere in which she does not have privilege . . . renarrat[ing] the dominant history as one that the abjected people have once lived sotto voce, but no more; and she challenges her audience to identify with the enormity of the suffering she has narrated and the courage she has had to produce.”6 For Berlant, “Diva Citizenship 124

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does not change the world,” but only marks “unrealized potentials” for political activity. But survival and persistence, sung defiantly in the high notes of the diva, are no small feats in a world that wishes fervently for one’s nonexistence and/ or silent complicity in one’s own exploitation. The narcissistic self-regard implied in the negative definition of the diva is a radical insistence on self-love when no one else loves you, when you are not, according to social norms, worthy of being loved at all, but only of being desired in a way that uses you up or consumes you. To say that diva citizenship cannot change the world is to accept a meaning of “the world” that aligns it only with the privileged. An investigation of the real function of diva citizenship has to start by asking who these acts are for, and whether the very fact of having something for herself can change a person, who might then go on to change the world just by surviving in it for one more day. * * * Anytime a critically despised artist has a fan base made up almost entirely of women and gay men, we should think about why. As Sady Doyle wrote in her 2011 article “Birth of the Uncool: In Defense of the Tori Amos Fan,” “derisive references to Tori Amos fans started to crop up in her press almost as soon as those fans came into existence.”7 Doyle tracks references to Amos’s “rabid” fans in Amos’s press coverage as she gained popularity through her first three records, and points out what most of this coverage doesn’t: the role of Amos’s early use of the Internet—appearing in live chat-room interviews, for example—in propelling her to popularity. This is an oddly under-discussed aspect of Amos’s 125

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career; in 1998 she became the first major-label artist to offer a single only as a digital download, a historic innovation that acknowledged the role of online communities in spreading the word about her music. (By contrast, ten years later Radiohead would be lauded in near-messianic terms for offering a free digital download of the album In Rainbows, an innovation that was supposed to represent the power of digital technology to remake the marketplace, but instead only heralded an era in which listeners feel entitled to free music.) Of course, in 1996, internet users were not yet seen as a dominant or even powerful market force and were instead commonly portrayed as a bunch of losers sitting around in chat rooms. The fact that many of Amos’s “loser” fans were women, gay men, and people with histories of abuse made it all the easier to portray them as unstable, even dangerously so. The climax of this particular strain of fan denigration came in the November 1999 issue of SPIN. The logline reads “How can a goddess show her love without bleeding herself dry?” but the article itself spends much of its time lingering on a suburban Amos fan named Pat Kochie who makes and sells dolls over the internet.8 Kochie modeled some of her dolls after Amos, but far from being a Tori Amos obsessive, she seems to have built a thriving internet-based business making and selling custom dolls of all kinds to a wide range of clients, including celebrities like Gwyneth Paltrow. Maureen Callahan, who wrote the article, doesn’t seem to care whether Kochie is actually making thousands of little Tori clones (or, as the logline puts it, “totems in her image”), or just capitalizing on an art form Amos’s image first inspired her to 126

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try; to Callahan, Kochie is living in some kind of infantilized fantasy world, a “46-year-old mother of two” who “refuses to totally surrender to a life of laundry and car pools.” With similar myopia, Callahan characterizes Marcel Van Limbeek as a “Dutch physicist, nudist, and conspiracy theorist” Amos went to for advice on To Venus and Back—without ever mentioning that he had been her sound engineer since 1994 (and still is). Throughout the article, Callahan evinces a kind of willful naiveté about such professional relationships, even as she portrays both Amos and her fans as hopelessly naïve. This article, which came out in 1999, just as a label dispute and infertility struggles were sapping Amos’s attention and energy, rang in a decade of critical and popular disdain for Amos. Media coverage of Amos’s fan base, especially between 1996 and 1999, was largely characterized by fear and disgust of the vulnerable. As Doyle puts it, “Tori Amos had girls, she had queers, she had various gender nonconformists, and they were all being advised to take their feelings seriously, survive, and stand up for themselves. No wonder this stuff wasn’t hip.” Amos also had survivors of abuse and assault; Doyle cites a 2009 doctoral study by Deborah Finding in which 25 percent of 2,000 Tori Amos fans surveyed had experienced sexual violence.9 Adrienne Trier-Bieniek’s more recent booklength study of Amos’s female fans corroborates this statistic, finding that “the most common experience that women were using Amos’s music to heal from was sexual or domestic violence. This was followed by eating disorders, dysfunctional relationships with their fathers, and experiences miscarrying or having difficulty sustaining a pregnancy.”10 It’s a laundry 127

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list of the unspoken, taboo, and abject in “female problems.” In their interviews, Trier-Bieniek’s respondents talk further about cutting and starving themselves, disorders that elicit a snicker when they appear in mainstream depictions of pop culture, and which are directly linked to young girls’ internalization of misogyny in the culture at large. When I conducted my own small, informal poll on my own Facebook page and in a women’s networking group with around 40,000 members, the responses confirmed TrierBieniek’s results. Female fans spoke of seeing Amos as a role model, a brave big sister who taught them how to own their sexualities and use their voices without shame or fear while validating their suspicions that they were often being treated badly because of their gender. “In a sense her songs were a combo of therapy, womanly guidance, & emotional catharsis that I clung to when my mom died,” one woman in her thirties wrote to me. “Plus I very much identified with being screwed over by boys.” Lacing her account with self-deprecating language, she told me about her adolescent gesture of painting a bookcase black that had been in her room since she was a baby: “Then I drew some very goth and dramatic looking fairy creatures in fiery colors, with ‘sometimes you’re nothing but meat’ scrawled next to it, in Spanish, mind you.” Another woman wrote me that since her mother had been abusive and she was being raised by grandparents, she had a hard time trusting women, and felt vaguely threatened by more aggressive female performers like Courtney Love. For her, Tori Amos was a female role model whose combination of vulnerability and strength helped her to accept her own femininity. Even millennial women who first heard Amos’s 128

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music out of its cultural context related similar feelings to me; one twenty-one-year-old commented that Amos’s music “makes me feel like I can breathe easier.” Trier-Bieniek’s study focuses exclusively on women, but gay men, who comprise a substantial portion of Amos’s fan base, wrote to me, too. The responses of the gay and gender non-conforming people who wrote to me about their experiences listening to Tori Amos differed in some important ways from the women’s responses. They didn’t tend to place Amos in a surrogate role, or describe her as a big sister, best friend, or mom, but the moment of identification and self-recognition was still there. One wrote: I saw her first twenty years ago this Monday in Omaha, Nebraska at the Orpheum theatre during the Dew Drop Inn tour, where she brought out an ancient pump organ to play “Hey Jupiter,” and I cried and I cried and I cried because she was thirty feet away from me and she knew that there was a fifteen year old boy in the audience coming to terms with being gay (and being blue, struggling with depression) and she sang that song directly to me and it was one of the greatest moments of my entire life. This feeling of self-recognition was a factor even for respondents who didn’t connect at all to Amos’s lyrics. One respondent, a classically trained musician who first heard Amos when he was coming to terms with his homosexuality in a deeply religious community, reported feeling a jolt of recognition at her piano-playing style: “It’s hard to describe how I felt listening to it without sounding grandiose. I just remember laying awake at night, sleeping on the floor. . . . 129

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While I listened on my walkman, I remember thinking, ‘My god, she sounds like me.’” * * * The question of whether those who don’t already identify with marginalized communities can learn to hear and empathize with “the enormity of suffering” narrated by a diva is stickier. Only one straight man responded to my request for stories about Tori Amos’s fandom, saying her music “grounded” him as an “indecisive art school undergrad” and comparing it to therapy. Also a fan of the prog-rock band Rush, he wrote, “They sang dreams to me. Tori Amos talked to me.” When I asked him specifically about why he felt able to listen when so many straight men didn’t, he speculated that having already faced and overcome challenges to his masculinity as a boy in the arts, he was relatively impervious to that kind of thing. Still, I wanted to find a single moment of a straight, white man overcoming an initial disgust reaction in order to identify, even for a moment, with the triumphant abjection represented by the diva. To find it, I turned once again to Let’s Talk About Love, a book about one straight white man’s attempt to engage with the ultimate diva, Céline Dion. The limits of Wilson’s imaginative empathy are clear throughout the book, and not always flattering. Though dexterous with Kant and his ilk, Wilson seems stymied when faced with the reality of humans who enjoy Dion’s music. Yet toward the end of the book, Wilson describes two moments when he finally “got” Dion, when her songs of devotion “began to probe at the open sore of my own recent marital separation, 130

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and even coaxed a few tears.”11 Crucially, both moments rely on a visual experience that provides kind of meta-story to Dion’s music, authorizing an emotional outpouring. The first moment occurs during a live show in Vegas, but Wilson has trouble replicating his tears when listening to the album later. The second moment is more interesting. Wilson is watching an episode of Gilmore Girls in which an instrumental cover of “My Heart Will Go On” is played at a funeral for the character Michel’s dog, unexpectedly moving the show’s main character, Lorelai Gilmore, to cry for the first time over her own disintegrating marriage. Wilson is overcome: Something has shifted. I’m no longer watching a show about a teenage girl, whether mother or daughter. It’s become one about an adult, my age, admitting that to forge a decent happiness you can’t keep trying to bend the rules; you aren’t exempt from the laws of motion that make the world turn. . . . In fact, when one of those weepy widescreen ballads lands just so, it can wise you up that you’re just one more dumb dog that has to do its best to make things right until one day it dies. And that’s sad. Sad enough to make you cry.12 In the Gilmore Girls moment, the funeral of a dog belonging to the black and gay-coded character Michel, attended by a crying white woman—for a straight white man, something like the pinnacle of the not-universal and not-me—becomes startlingly personal. Something about that moment forces Wilson to accept the moment’s universality, alongside his own limitations: “You can’t keep trying to bend the rules; 131

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you aren’t exempt from the laws of motion that make the world turn.” To have had that realization for the first time after watching six seasons of a television show that is precisely about not being exempt from the rules is perhaps understandable, because it’s a show that traffics in small and large compensations for those limitations. This kind of wallowing is precisely what the abject, with its reminders of ordinariness and unspecialness, animality and death— “you’re just one more dumb dog . . . until one day it dies”— allows us to experience, if only for a moment. It takes much prep work and many layers of mediation for Wilson to empathize with a girl-woman who’s in her feelings. Yet empathize he does. This gives me a great deal of hope. * * * The human face is one of the most powerful tools of empathy there is. Every time we observe another human’s face in an expression of pain, mirror neurons fire in our brains, producing sympathetic emotional reactions that can trigger a cathartic outpouring of our own repressed pain. This is why, when Drew Barrymore cries, I cry, no matter how bad (or “bad”) the movie is. It’s also why the trope of looking at oneself in the mirror, frequently cited as a sentimental cliché or evidence of feminine narcissism, is extremely important for depicting moments of self-empathy and self-acceptance. Why do we want to see our favorite artists perform live? And why does seeing Céline in Vegas or Tori in Austin have the power to move us beyond the albums themselves? Is it the spontaneity of the live performance, the possibility of new variations on old beloved songs, the ineffable something 132

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we call “presence”? All of these things, perhaps, but there’s also the sub-par sound system to endure, the long lines, the revolting expensiveness of the evening, the chance that the singer might be having an off-night and skip our favorite song, or worse yet, appear surly or put-upon, like the cranky mouse diva in the Kafka story.13 Could it be that we just need to see them? Literally see them? Divas are particularly suspect in the world of rock authenticity because, among other violations, they threaten to violate the purity of sound in favor of image. There is an implicit condemnation of “image” in much writing about pop music, in which the seduction of the visual is always threatening to preempt the more transitory pleasures of music itself (as if video could literally kill the radio song). Perhaps we are primed to miss the visual component of emotional transference in music due to anxiety over the ways it might affect our (white, straight men’s) Kantian disinterest. Looking at women’s bodies has always been portrayed as a potentially dangerous distraction—recall Edmund Burke’s difficulties in keeping pure aesthetic value thoroughly apart from the dirty question of women’s sexual attractiveness. But if we are to understand the role of divas, we have to become comfortable with the role image plays in the transmission of emotions, and thus comfortable with our own cravings to see artists, whether in magazines or live in concert, a compensation for the loss of what Walter Benjamin calls “aura” in the age of art’s infinite mechanical (and now digital) reproducibility. Mirror neurons only work when you look. When Tori Amos says, as she has in several interviews, “songwriters are the mirrors,” she is being literal.14 133

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Even more than most other female singer-songwriters of her era, Amos has celebrated and reveled in her own image. Early shots in which she stares directly at the camera, portrait-style, look like studies in the pre-history of the selfie (the cover of the “Crucify” EP, on which Amos wears a necklace of flower bulbs or onions, is a perfect example). The late, great makeup artist Kevyn Aucoin was one of Amos’s dearest friends, and her stylist Karen Binns, who first helped her reinvent her image in the Little Earthquakes days, has stayed a crucial part of her inner circle over the years, as has photographer Cindy Palmano. These adjuncts to Amos’s image understand its importance, not just for her, but for her fans, who need to see her face. Clothes, costumes, and makeup are important aspects of this search for the self, which is perhaps why Amos isn’t as prone to dismiss Pat Kochie’s doll empire as a music journalist would be. In fact, dolls frequently appear in Amos’s own work as figures for self-knowledge and selfexploration—“thought I knew myself so well / All the dolls I had.” This trope culminated in the 2007 double-album “American Doll Posse,” which Amos recorded as multiple personae or “dolls” carefully photographed in costumes and wigs, Cindy Sherman-style, for the album art. If Amos’s taste for the art of dress-up seems to sit uneasily with the claim often made about her solo career as one of soul-baring confessionalism and transparency, I refer you to her pirate outfit from the Y Kant Tori Read days, along with the lyrics of “Tear in Your Hand”: “There are pieces of me you’ve never seen / Maybe she’s just pieces of me you’ve never seen.” 134

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The album imagery for Boys for Pele, shot by Palmano, includes some of the most abject images of Amos that she has ever put out into the world. One shot of her on all fours on a puke-stained mattress, one shoe gone, white outfit irredeemably dirtied, evokes sexual subjugation even as it equates Amos with the barnyard animals in the background. Elsewhere she suckles a baby pig, another image that forcefully aligns women’s reproductive selves with animals often seen as natural resources, “nothing but meat.” The images are tender, lovely, ugly, defiant, and above all abject. It’s hard not to see Amos inviting us to join her in taking a long look at our worst selves—or, at any rate, the selves we are told are our worst, most embarrassing, most disgusting— the selves that make us feel, in Wilson’s words, like “one more dumb dog.” If we can love ourselves after that, we have come one step closer to un-silencing ourselves as a community, and perhaps lifting up the most vulnerable among us. * * * A 20/20 television special from 1999, the same year as the “Doll Lady” SPIN article, painted a very different picture of Tori Amos fans.15 “Chasing the Darkness,” which is about Tori Amos’s co-founding of the Rape, Incest, and Abuse National Network (RAINN) with help from her label five years earlier, features interviews with several survivors of sexual assault who later became Tori Amos fans. One survivor described the dissociation she experienced after her assault precisely as the inability to recognize herself in the mirror: “And as I laid there, half-naked, bleeding, I remember catching a glimpse of someone in the mirror, and it was me. But I didn’t recognize 135

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myself.”16 The fans interviewed found themselves reliving their traumatic assaults while listening to “Me and a Gun” for the first time—what is now commonly called triggering—and were eventually able, through repeat listenings of the song, to begin integrating these experiences.17 A college student named Shannon described lying on the floor with the door locked, playing “Me and a Gun” over and over again: “It was just so amazing to suddenly feel like, ‘I’m not all alone, and this is normal to be feeling this way’. . . I won’t say that she saved my life, because I don’t think she’d like that. But she definitely helped me to find the strength to save myself.”18 Tori Amos is not a therapist or a shaman, though she has been portrayed as both at times during her career. What she is, however, is aware of the responsibilities of a diva. In her early days, Amos gave her fans an unusual amount of access after shows, hugging them, accepting their letters and gifts, listening to outpourings of the emotions her music triggered in them, and recommending books that had helped her overcome her own feelings of shame. At some point in 1994, talking backstage to a young fan who was afraid to go home to an abusive stepfather, Amos came to the realization that she owed her fans more than post-show hugs and lyrics about rape, and owed herself strong boundaries to avoid being triggered over and over again. RAINN was the first, and remains the most comprehensive, nationwide advocacy group providing 24-hour assistance for survivors of sexual violence, supplementing and supporting the patchwork of local programs that often struggle to provide services. I have seen firsthand how real and concrete the effects of such organizations can be, both as a volunteer for one and a friend 136

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of male and female victims of domestic and sexual violence. I can think of nothing more universal, more human, and more compatible with the highest ideals of art and culture than the creation of safe harbors, both for one’s self and for the most vulnerable members of society. That, my friends, is diva citizenship.

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After “Hey Jupiter,” the second half of Boys for Pele—what was once, in cassette tape terminology, Side 2—reverses the inward trajectory of the first half and looks outward, toward social problems and suffering beyond Amos’s own experience. It’s as if, having looked in the mirror and accepted herself at last, she feels free to project her image outward onto the world. As she told B-Side Magazine, “As soon as [the singer] knows that [the relationship is over], then you do the whole way down thing. Go further into the place of the South, the place of the hidden. . . .”1 Amos uses this language of the “hidden” South in multiple interviews for Boys for Pele, including the promotional video mailer. For Amos, Ireland and the South are intimately connected through folk traditions, rural economy, and histories of racial subjugation that haunt both. They are also connected to yet another “hidden” group, with which Amos herself identifies: the Native population in America. Tori Amos was raised in Baltimore, whose racial tensions have become familiar to audiences outside the South

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through both fictionalization (the TV show The Wire) and, more recently, through Black Lives Matter protests following the death of twenty-five-year-old black American Freddie Gray in police custody, which was ruled as a homicide but led to no convictions of the officers involved. If Amos was aware of some of these racial tensions as a child, her method of engaging with them in songs can be problematic, and often seems to involve romanticization. Boys for Pele is no exception; in “Way Down,” the fragment immediately after “Hey Jupiter” that segues into “Little Amsterdam,” a gospel choir starts up midway through the song, seeming to signal a scenery change as the car in the song drives further into the South. The lyrics of the song are fairly hard to decipher; there’s some of the “starfucker” imagery from “Professional Widow” in the lyrics “Maybe I’m the afterglow / ‘cause I’m with the band you know” and “Gonna meet a great big star / gonna drive his great big car.” But the travelers also seem associated with a whiteness that grows increasingly sinister. The lyric, “I can hear the laughter on the way down,” when paired with the gospel music, evokes frequent descriptions of happy slaves in the antebellum South; “Yes I am the anchorman / dining here with Son-of-Sam” aligns a TV star with a ‘70s serial killer. Amos’s solo voice ends after the lyric “gonna have it all here on the way down,” at which point the gospel choir takes over. Should Amos get to “have it all”— meaning, does she have access to the black experience just because she was raised in the American South, and what is her subject position in singing about it? Generally speaking, the outward-looking songs on the second half of Boys for Pele are not among my favorites; 140

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songs like “Agent Orange” and “Not the Red Baron,” though often fascinating, lose something in their distance from Amos’s personal experience. She is on firmer footing with “In the Springtime of His Voodoo” and “Putting the Damage On,” which bring the album back around to breakup territory. Among this suite of more imaginative or character-based songs, however, “Little Amsterdam” stands out as particularly successful and haunting, partly because it gives the best explanation of what Amos might be talking about when she calls the South “the place of the hidden.” A narrative song about racialized violence and sexual coercion in a southern town, it stages the fundamental tension of the white woman’s position: that of having to choose between sympathizing with a white male authority figure and aligning with the abjectified other. “Little Amsterdam” can be read as a song about Amos’s own troubled role in dialogues about the racialized other, particularly black Americans, the track’s ambivalence reflecting the paradoxes of Native identification in a white-appearing woman. It’s a song whose message can be summed up in the line repeated at the end of every chorus, “Girl, you have to know these days / which side you’re on.” Amos grew with two distinct “sides” to her family. Her maternal grandparents, “Nanny and Poppa,” were on the tribal rolls of two different Eastern Cherokee tribes; in her memoir, Amos says, “That’s one reason Nanny and Poppa joined forces. They were both called half-breeds.”2 Her grandfather told her Native American legends of the Corn Mother and stories of their ancestors who died in the Trail of Tears. Amos seems to have identified with the Native side of her family as a 141

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young girl—perhaps as a tool for resisting her strict Christian missionary grandparents on her father’s side—and, at age fifteen, performed by invitation at the University of North Dakota Indian Association’s Wacipi Festival with others of Native descent. Among her B-sides from Little Earthquakes is a rage-fueled, heavily sarcastic performance of “Home on the Range (Cherokee Edition),” which alternates the chorus of the classic Western song with verses lambasting Andrew Jackson, “a thief down to his heels.” As Amos identifies with grief-stricken wives of slaughtered Cherokee braves, there is little doubt how personal this genocide feels for her. Yet for Natives, especially those who appear white, there is nothing about Native identity in America that can be taken for granted. The Native experience in America is defined by “blood quantum,” a U.S. government-imposed system by which the percentage of Native blood is tracked for the purposes of determining tribal membership. The first blood quantum laws were introduced in 1705 in the same spirit as one-drop laws for black Americans: to restrict civil rights and protections for Natives. Over the course of the nineteenth century, however, blood quantum was increasingly used by the federal government for the purposes of allocating the benefits and payments outlined in land treaties. In 1934, when the Indian Reorganization Act promised limited self-governance to certain tribes, blood quantum became federal law. In some ways, modern blood quantum operates as the inverse of the one-drop rule, which classified any person with black ancestry, no matter how remote, as black. If the goal of one-drop rules was to increase the numbers of a marginalized population that, for most of American history, 142

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could be legally discriminated against on the basis of race, the goal of blood quantum was to decrease the numbers of a population that had begun receiving state benefits on the basis of race. The combined effects of blood quantum, resettlement, forced assimilation, child removal, and other U.S. policies has been to dilute and diminish the legal status of Natives almost to the point of invisibility. For Natives and people of Native ancestry, to identify themselves as such is to refuse that erasure. In practice, however, such identifications are rarely taken seriously in the broader American culture. White Americans who first encounter blood quantum the way I did in high school—as a distinction by which some white-looking students could claim scholarship money—may participate in Native erasure by downplaying or deriding Native identity. Moreover, Native culture and religion are often associated with New Age spirituality and appropriated without regard for specificity. As of this writing, Gwyneth Paltrow’s “wellness” website for women, goop, is hawking an $85 “medicine bag” filled with “magically charged stones . . . inspired by the Shaman’s medicine bag from various indigenous traditions.”3 Given how common this type of appropriation of Native culture is, it can be difficult for someone with no Native background to sort out appropriation from an embrace of Native identity. Yet women, always susceptible to accusations of duplicity, attention-seeking behavior, and “flakiness,” are especially vulnerable to the various forms of Native erasure, particularly if they appear white. In other words, a whitelooking woman with Amos’s background—two out of four of her grandparents so-called “half-breeds” from different 143

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tribes (blood quantum is tribe-specific)—is going to get taken much more seriously if she plays down her Native identity than if she talks about it. Amos, over the course of her career, has talked about it more or less constantly. Moreover, from her earliest days as a professional musician, she has drawn comparisons between the plight of Natives and that of other racially marginalized groups. Even before Little Earthquakes, the Y Kant Tori Read song “Trail of Tears,” which appeared on a demo tape and was never recorded for the label, explicitly paired South African apartheid with Native American genocide. The song is clunky, with lines like “Cherokee, Africa / Hey, why can’t we ever learn / Hear the cry in Africa.” But the similarity the song points out between resettlements in the U.S. and South Africa is used, not to flatten the distinction between oppressions, but to call attention to the hypocrisy of the recently adopted (at the time) U.S. trade sanctions against South Africa. The lines “All men are free, free,” “Safely sheltered in the States,” and “Home of the brave” call attention to the irony of a country that has endeavored to erase its own indigenous population standing up for the indigenous population of another country. When it comes to American anti-black racism, however, Amos has been more muddled. One of Little Earthquakes B-sides, “Upside Down,” shows her fantasy of white-girl rebellion against the patriarchy taking the shape of interracial dating: “I dreamed, I dreamed, I dreamed / I loved a black boy / my daddy would scream.” This scene from Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner displaces the danger historically faced by black men in proximity to white women onto the 144

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white woman herself, and downgrades the penalty from death by lynch mob (historically “justified” by the sexual threat black men supposedly posed to white women) to an adolescent reprimand. Amos’s cover of the Abel Meeropol song “Strange Fruit,” a song about black southern lynchings made famous by Billie Holiday, is even more difficult to parse. For many critics, any white singer covering the song presents a host of problems; for others, the song itself, written by a white Jewish man, is already compromised by its lurid imagery, which some find exploitative. Writing in response to tone-deaf comments about “Strange Fruit” by white artists who had covered it— particularly Annie Lennox, whose comment that it was about “one person attacking another person” seemed to generalize the act of lynching to make it about everybody’s pain—Noah Berlatsky suggests that white artists covering “Strange Fruit” must find a way to dramatize their own position of safety and privilege. Amos, in a 1994 interview with Joe Jackson, does not seem to have adopted such a position: “Strange Fruit” is there [on the “Cornflake Girl” Limited Edition CD] because that is the South, where I was born and raised, and here I directly experienced that kind of racism myself. As a white woman in the South I experienced many forms of racial hatred, deeply, and my grandfather did, because of his Cherokee background. I understand the energy of those racial tensions so well and that’s what I tapped into for “Strange Fruit,” which I recorded at 5:30AM, having been called out of bed by forces to do so.4 145

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Amos’s subject position in this quote is confused, to say the least. She first claims to have “directly experienced” the kind of racism in the song; but in her next sentence about being a “white woman in the South,” the word “experienced” seems to mean something more along the lines of “directly witnessed.” Amos explicitly calls herself white, and says her grandfather has “Cherokee background” rather than calling him Native or Cherokee; finally, she retreats to understanding the “energy” of racial tensions, and minimizes her role in recording the song, saying she was “called out of bed by forces” to sing it. If it’s not quite as offensive as calling a lynching just “one person attacking another person,” its very specificity makes it almost more cringeworthy. Amos lists off various kinds of specific experiences—white, Southern, female, Cherokee—but she only barely manages to imply that the black experience is even present among them, much less the most important. Nonetheless, the cover itself is a powerful one, precisely because of its muddled subject position. Berlatsky faults Amos’s rendition for its indebtedness to Holiday’s, calling it a “crass imitation” (he argues that the most acceptable cover by a white artist is Robert Wyatt’s “eerily uninvolved” version),5 but I don’t hear the similarity. Holiday singing the song is a granite pillar of disdain and outrage, eyebrows communicating sarcasm and weariness while she holds the audience and her piano accompanist captive to her moral authority, stretching notes and commanding silence and darkness for the performance. By contrast, Amos, who was aware of the iconic performance—she was able to recall the first time she saw Holiday perform it on television— dramatizes the anxiety of a constantly fluctuating subject 146

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position, trapped somewhere between Holiday’s raw anguish and the detached observer Berlatsky favors. Her vocals are all over the place, quaking audibly between sarcasm (“of the gallant south”), sadness (“the twisted mouth”), eroticism (“scent of magnolia”), terror (“for the crows to pluck”), and a kind of manic self-condemnation (“for the wind to suck”). Unlike Holiday, who lets loose on the song’s final word “crop” in a howl of rage and condemnation, Amos backs so far off of the final note of the song that she barely croaks the last word out in a whisper, even falling a half-note flat. As Amos’s own voice falters and fails, her piano, like the submerged voice of the other within her, speaks with moral authority, never faltering or wavering, even delivering the sarcastic minor-key coda that Amos cannot. This is the de-voiced voice of the not-quite-white, a category invented in the onedrop American South, and yet simultaneously erased by blood quantum. * * * “Little Amsterdam,” with its slide guitar and thumping rhythm over low, mumbling blues chords on the Bösendorfer piano, begins on the note “Way Down” ends on, in the same key. Amos keeps her vocals quiet, low, and intense, and squeals of radio interference in the sound mix emphasize the unintelligible and unheard. The song tells the story of a white woman in love with a “brown man” in a segregated southern town. To protect her lover from racial violence, she sleeps with the white sheriff, who is then murdered under mysterious circumstances. The woman’s daughter implores her mother to “keep your 147

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head down” (rather than telling what she knows): “I won’t say that he shouldn’t have paid, but Momma, it wasn’t my bullet.” Heavily mediated through the storytelling construct as well as the daughter’s point-of-view, through which she tells the story, Amos uses the singer’s persona to distance herself from the drama itself, even as she hints at a larger role. The hook itself seems to express some of this confusion over just how deeply Amos, or the singer, is involved in the events that unfold in the song: “I won’t say that he shouldn’t have paid / But Momma it wasn’t my bullet.” What is clear is the line repeated at the end of every chorus, a line that arrests the music every time it is delivered: “Girl, you have to know these days / which side you’re on.” As the example of “Professional Widow” shows, Amos’s character songs can be the hardest to unpack, despite their relative lyrical coherency. The more “story” there is to a song, the harder it is to understand what, if any, relationship it bears to the artist herself. This is especially true with Amos, who never seems to absent herself completely from a song even when it’s in the narrative vein, like “Little Amsterdam.” As a point of comparison, think of Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights,” which simply adopts the perspective of Cathy wholesale from the Emily Brontë novel, or “There Goes a Tenner,” sung entirely in character as the driver in a bank robbery. Although Bush’s stamp and point of view are strong in these songs, they don’t draw on her own life or opinions (though other songs in her oeuvre are more personal); the line between the singer and the speaker of the song is clearly drawn. By contrast, Amos’s character songs never seem entirely disconnected from her personal associations, even 148

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when she’s singing about World War I fighter pilots in “Not the Red Baron.” Improvisation often, quite naturally, brings out these personal connections, and particularly during improvisational sections, it feels as if Amos herself pushes through to the forefront, then, when they are over, backs away and lets the character take over once more. In “Little Amsterdam,” the partially improvised bridge seems to step out of the storyline temporarily, with lyrics like “Father only you can save my soul / playing that organ must count for something,” seemingly alluding to Amos’s personal history of playing music in her father’s church. The confusion over just how much of Amos’s experience is in the song, like the confusion over how much of her experience is in “Strange Fruit,” risks appropriating the pain of others; but it also, like the actual performance of “Strange Fruit,” dramatizes the pain of being a disinherited and invisible stranger, not at home in the homeland. That Amos uses the romanticized narrative of a forbidden interracial love as a setting for working this out is a bit unsettling, particularly in light of the fact that this erotic fantasy has been played out in Amos’s lyrics before. But Amos’s revision of this fantasy in “Little Amsterdam,” like her more nuanced use of Alice Walker’s Possessing the Secret of Joy in “Blood Roses” as compared to “Cornflake Girl,” reflects a developing intersectional awareness. In “Little Amsterdam,” it’s not the white woman’s punishment that’s emphasized, but her position of continually having to choose between aligning with a white male authority figure and the racial other: “Girl you’ve got to know these days which side you’re on.” Linked explicitly to feminine abjection (“Momma 149

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got shit / she loved a brown man”), the browning effect of crossing racial boundaries is internalized in the potential that the singer herself is the biracial product of miscegenation, carrying the invisible trace of the racial other within. The singer’s mother has had affairs with both a “brown man” and a white sheriff, leaving open the possibility that either man is the singer’s father. When the singer repeatedly begs, “Don’t take me back to the range,” the song echoes the anxieties of “Home on the Range (Cherokee Edition).” When she sings, on the bridge, “Father only you can save my soul,” she’s simultaneously referring to the patriarchal Father God of the Christian church, to Edison Amos, and to the singer’s (potentially brown) father. This continual wavering between subject positions, like different frequencies on a radio, dramatizes the ambivalence of Amos’s own identity. In 2002, Amos’s seventh album Scarlet’s Walk would explore these themes of Native American racial, religious, and geographical crossings at length, grounding her exploration in her own heritage; her most recent album at the time of this writing, Native Invader, emphatically returns to this theme. However, “Little Amsterdam” was the first explicit story about race to appear on one of her albums, and the first specifically to tease out Amos’s own racial identifications with both oppressor and oppressed. As such, it remains one of the more powerful tracks on Boys for Pele reckoning with Amos’s own sense of otherness, giving ballast to her project of finding and embracing the abject other within the self, even and especially when it is hidden.

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Conclusion Twinkle and Spark

Tori Amos had her first miscarriage in December 1996, while she was touring for Boys for Pele. I had my first miscarriage in July 2016, while I was gearing up to write this book, and promoting my last one. It was a few weeks before the publication of my first novel, a domestic thriller about sexual violence and trauma. I had been waiting for my first book release for almost three decades, since I decided to be a writer at nine years old. On the eve of my D&C, which I underwent eight days before my novel hit bookstores and twelve days after intuiting that my almost-baby was dead—well, it had never been viable, so maybe it was undead?—I had an interview and a promotional photo shoot. I drove to the shoot that day, as dressed up as I could manage to get myself with an undead almost-baby inside me, and looked around at the cars and wondered how many undead almost-babies were riding around inside almost-mothers who felt undead, too. The world seemed full of them that day. Miscarriage is almost as common as

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vaginal birth in this country. It’s a normal part of female reproductive life. Nobody wants to tell you this. When I thought the baby had died inside me, I called my doctor, but couldn’t get an earlier appointment. Various doctors and nurses didn’t believe the baby had died. I had to whisper the word “miscarriage” because they wouldn’t. The Ultrasound tech, when the appointment finally rolled around, ignored my husband’s and my white faces and chirped along at us until finally the blood drained out of her face, too. She dropped her phone on the way out, scrambled to pick it up, desperate to get away from me and my abject secret, the death inside me. When I look at the picture of myself on the cover of the Austin Chronicle, taken by Devaki Knowles that day, I first thank God, as Tori Amos surely has had occasion to do many times in her life, for humane and talented photographers. It is a luminous outdoor shot of me sitting under a tree. My eyes are cast upward, so that I look extremely young and extremely hopeful. Only I can see the tiny little ghost in the frame. The abject marks the limits of our carefully buttressed identities. It’s a journey to the end of the self. When the journey is happening inside you, you have to find some way to accept it, let it change you. There is a very real danger that if you reject it, you are in danger of rejecting what is most human about yourself. If Kant had been a woman, we might have had an aesthetics of abjection for precisely these moments. But he wasn’t, so we don’t. We have Tori Amos. * * * 152

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Boys for Pele was a triumph of artistic autonomy, but the feeling didn’t last. Amos and Mark Hawley, whom she married on February 22, 1998, struggled with fertility issues for two years after the release of Boys for Pele. Between 1996 and 1999 she suffered three miscarriages and a substantial amount of physical pain, all while working as hard as ever, touring and promoting for Pele and writing and recording her fourth album, From the Choirgirl Hotel. The experience must have been grueling, especially since her personal life and the state of her body were, as always, fair game. Rumors circulated among journalists that Amos had a drug addiction. In her memoir, she describes her disbelief when a journalist asked her about drugs: “He said, ‘Well, everybody is saying that the mood swings and the depression could only mean one thing,’ and I said, ‘Didn’t you think about what a miscarriage could do to a woman, not just one, but three? Did you think that I was pregnant when I did that tour with Alanis—did you think that maybe I could be?’”1 Another journalist asked her around the same time, “How do you feel about marketing your pain?” He couldn’t possibly have known that she was bleeding out her second miscarriage even as they spoke; still, Amos observes, “That was a cruel moment.”2 The label knew, but weren’t much more sympathetic. As often happens in the music industry due to uniquely long, ironclad contracts, the Atlantic executives who’d brought her to the label and worked with her in the past had all moved on by the time of Choirgirl Hotel’s release. Although she still owed the label three more records, Amos had fallen out of favor with the new executives, who refused to put resources 153

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into promoting Choirgirl Hotel, trading off blocks of Amos’s concert tickets to promote younger, hotter talent. “I think they want to bury you,” Amos recalls being told over coffee by her label liaison.3 Despite the machinations of her music attorney John Branca, Atlantic refused to sell her contract to a label that would put more resources into promoting her. Calculating that it would take her at least four years to fulfill her contractual obligation, Amos stood to emerge from the Atlantic contract a forty-year-old woman in an industry that notoriously fetishizes female youth and beauty, with a diminished audience and critical profile due to the label’s failure to promote her albums. Her source at the label told her that was precisely the goal. And that is more or less what happened—though if you know anything about Amos’s career by now, you know that she doesn’t stay down for long. With considerable ingenuity, Amos fulfilled her contractual obligations without having to write more new songs for the label than she could possibly get away with, releasing To Venus and Back as a live doublealbum to knock out two of her three records owed at once, and finishing out with Strange Little Girls, a cover album of songs written by men. (Although it contains a few truly remarkable tracks, including her cover of Eminem’s “97 Bonnie and Clyde” and Tom Waits’s “Time,” it always sounds, to my ears, like a sour and heavy album.) When at last Amos moved to Epic Records and recorded 2002’s Scarlet’s Walk, her relief at her freedom came through in the spaciousness of the album, its road-trip thematics, and its soaring American sounds. Moreover, surprising everyone, the album contained her first genuine radio hit, “A Sorta Fairytale,” which reached 154

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#1 on Billboard’s adult album alternative chart. The diva story is one of constant comebacks; after a detour through classical music, standards, and the stage musical The Light Princess, Amos’s 2014 pop/rock album, Unrepentant Geraldines, was hailed as yet another. Scarlet’s Walk was the last Tori Amos album that I memorized, the soundtrack to my relationship with a man (a Tori Amos fan, interestingly enough) whose particular brand of Christianity struck me as distinctly patriarchal. We wanted to get married, but fought when I told him I didn’t want to change my last name, because I wanted to be a writer, and my identity and my voice had to be my own. I listened to Amos’s lyrics about a woman falling in love with, and eventually submitting to, a dominant belief system that wasn’t hers, and drew pictures of wedding dresses, but I did not marry him. Instead I went to grad school, where I had to develop a whole new set of survival strategies. One of them was going over to the apartment of my gay poet friend, who’d make southern fried chicken for us to eat in front of the television, and then we’d get drunk on red wine together and I would play Tori Amos songs on the piano while we sang. We both survived. Still, writing about Tori Amos has brought me face to face with parts of myself I have never wanted to acknowledge, including my own internalized misogyny, both as a critic and as a writer. Since my novel came out in the “women’s genre” of domestic suspense earlier this year, I have seen these insecurities, which I have battled my whole life, play out in yet another arena where artistic merit is regularly confused with status, and status is circumscribed in strange 155

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ways by gender and genre. In pointing the way toward a new reckoning with the meanings of art, criticism, and taste, in insisting that the abject has a role to play in aesthetics that must not be ignored, Tori Amos is thus saving me once again, kicking my own diva story into high gear, and asking me to show my strength by empathizing with vulnerability. She is asking me to do what I can with my voice. I am trying.

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Acknowledgments

This book would never have happened without my husband Curtis Luciani, who turned me on to the 33 1/3 series, encouraged me to pitch, and endured my subsequent whining about how hard it was to finish. The supreme goddess Evie Nagy gave me invaluable guidance along the way; in a better world she would be a sceptered queen. Thanks, too, go to Mary Helen Specht, who read and commented on an early draft; Michelle Chen, my editor at Bloomsbury, for pushing for precision and corralling my excesses; and series editor Leah Babb-Rosenfeld for her patience as I shaped this project during the busiest year and a half of my life. Alissa Zachary, a lifelong writing partner and fellow Tori girl, gave muchneeded encouragement along the way, as did Dan Solomon, Linden Kueck, Victoria Rossi, Paul Stinson, Jen Biundo, and Daniel Rugg Webb. Thanks to the Tori fans who answered my informal survey about her impact on your lives. Your candor and vulnerability inspired me to try harder and write deeper. I owe much of my thinking about taste to Sandra Macpherson and her excellent graduate seminar “On Beauty and Being Just.” Thanks to the University of Chicago, moreover, for providing what I think of as the Y Kant Tori

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Read phase of my writing career. Would that I had dressed the part. Thanks to John Witherspoon, and to all of Tori’s people, who have been incredibly kind. I feel painfully inadequate to thank the amazing Tori Amos herself, but since, aside from the fourth-grade teacher who taught me how to write poetry, there’s no one I’ve thanked more often in my dreams, I will take the opportunity to do it here: Thank you, Tori. Your music has meant more to me than these words I’ve written can possibly convey. Less exalted but no less influential is the crone I met at a women’s breakfast in Buda, Texas, in 2009, whose answer to my question, “What do you do?” was “Whatever the hell I want.” I have tried to run my writing career by her example.

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Notes

Introduction 1 Carl Wilson, Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste (New York: Continuum, 2007), 1. 2 Wilson, 4. 3 Ibid, 19. 4 Ibid, 109. 5 Ibid, 3. 6 Much of the following argument is paraphrased from Daniel Kelly, Yuck: The Nature and Moral Significance of Disgust (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011). 7 Martha Nussbaum, Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 88. 8 Kate Manne, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 257. The study paraphrased is Yoel Inbar and David Pizarro, “Pathogens and Politics: Current Research and New Questions,” Social and Personality Psychology Compass 10.6, 365–74. 9 Nussbaum, Chapters 1–2.

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10 Manne, 52n. 11 Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl (New York: Broadway Books, 2012), 222–23. 12 Alexander Hurst, “Donald Trump and the Politics of Disgust,” The New Republic, December 31, 2015. https://newrepublic. com/article/126837/donald-trump-politics-disgust 13 “Anuses with Feet: Tori Anus Haters’ Journal.” http://torianus. livejournal.com/

Chapter 1 1 Tori Amos and Ann Powers, Tori Amos: Piece by Piece (New York: Broadway Books, 2005). Biographical information is largely drawn from the Powers book and Kalen Rogers, Tori Amos, All These Years: The Authorized Biography (London: Omnibus Press, 1994, 1996). For contemporary periodical sources, the websites The Dent, Toriphoria, and Tori’s Maze have been invaluable, often archiving articles in their original form as PDFs. Where articles have been retyped or reproduced on fan sites, I have, where possible, traced to the original source in order to confirm the quotes. 2 Rogers, 33. 3 Many of the production details that follow were drawn from Jake Brown’s invaluable book, Tori Amos: In the Studio (Toronto: ECW Press, 2011). 4 I’m indebted to my husband Curtis Luciani for the Prince observation, which helped me make sense of YKTR tracks like “Fayth.”

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5 “Y Kant Tori Read,” Billboard, June 11, 1988. Accessed via Toriphoria. http://www.yessaid.com/1988ykanttoriread.html 6 Rogers, 41. 7 Rogers, 39. 8 Derek Oliver, “Y Kant Tori Read,” Kerrang, May 27, 1989. Accessed via Toriphoria. http://www.yessaid. com/1988ykanttoriread.html 9 Rogers, 41. 10 David Stubbs, “Tori Amos,” Melody Maker, October 12, 1991, 29. Accessed via Precious Things Digest. http://www.smoe. org/lists/precious-things/v06/v06.n141 11 Brown, Chapter 3. 12 Brown, Chapter 4. 13 Adrian Deevoy, “Hips. Lips. Tits. Power: PJ Harvey, Bjork, Tori Amos,” Q Magazine, May 1994. Accessed via Toriphoria. http://www.yessaid.com/int/1994-05_Q.html 14 Charles Aaron, “Sex, God, and Rock’n’Roll,” SPIN Magazine, October 1994, 130. 15 Greg Kot, “Playing with Pain,” Chicago Tribune, January 18, 1996. http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1996-01-18/features/ 9601180427_1_blood-roses-songs-teen-spirit 16 Delgany Community Council, “Christ Church.” http://www. delganyheritagevillage.com/chirst-church.html 17 “Tori Amos Boys for Pele EPK.” Viewed on YouTube, https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hmpdh6Iy4C8. Full transcript at Toriphoria. http://www.yessaid.com/pr_1995_pele-epk.html 18 Jean Rosenbluth, “Tori Amos: ‘Boys for Pele,’” LA Times January 21, 1996, 76. Accessed via newspapers.com.

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19 Richard C. Walls, “Tori Amos’s New Album Fails to Communicate,” Boston Phoenix, January 18–25, 1996. http://www.bostonphoenix.com/alt1/archive/music/ reviews/01-18-96/TORI_AMOS.html 20 Gina Arnold, “Famous Amos,” Metro, February 15–21, 1996. http://www.metroactive.com/papers/metro/02.15.96/amos9607.html 21 Jeffrey Lee Puckett, “Boys for Pele,” Louisville Courier-Journal, February 3, 1996, 4. Accessed via newspapers.com. 22 Mike Ross, “Boys for Pele,” Edmonton Sun. Date unknown. Accessed via The Dent. http://thedent.com/edmonton.html 23 Evelyn McDonnell, “Tori Amos: Boys for Pele,” Rolling Stone, February 8, 1996. http://www.rollingstone.com/music/ albumreviews/boys-for-pele-19960208 24 Roger Catlin, “Tori Amos Flaky,” Hartford Courant, January 25, 1996. http://articles.courant.com/1996-01-25/entertainment/ 9601250059_1_tori-amos-amos-voice-atlantic-records 25 Erik Davis, “Tori Amos: Boys for Pele,” Spin 11, no. 12 (March 1996), 109. 26 There are multiple sources for this Under the Pink-era Sven the Viking quote: Kim France, “Sexual Healing,” Us, February 1994, accessed via Toriphoria (http://www.yessaid.com/int/199402_Us.html), and William Ferguson, “She Creature of the Hollywood Hills,” Spin 9, no. 12 (March 1994), 48. 27 Mark Edwards, “Devil Woman,” The Face, October 1994. Accessed via Toriphoria. http://www.yessaid.com/int/199410_The_Face.html 28 Douglas Reece, “International Fan Base Propelling Amos’ Atlantic Set,” Billboard, February 17, 1996, 1, and “Ladies’ Night,” Billboard, October 6, 2001, 77.

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Chapter 2 1 William Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty, ed. Ronald Paulson (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 33. 2 Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty, 34. 3 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. with an introduction by James T. Boulton (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968), 115. 4 Ibid., 123. 5 Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), First Part, Sec 48, 190. 6 Immanuel Kant, Kant’s Critique of Judgment, trans. J. H. Bernard (London: Macmillan and Co., 1914), Sec. 48, 195. 7 Kant, Critique of Judgment (Bernard translation), 195. 8 This is the translation Wilson uses (10). 9 See Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984) and The Field of Cultural Production, ed. with intro. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). 10 Bourdieu, Distinction, 49. 11 Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment (Guyer translation), Sec. 17, 119. 12 Maynard, Mary, “Beyond the ‘Big Three:’ The Development of Feminist Theory into the 1990s,” Women’s History Review 4, no. 3 (1995), 272.

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13 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 1. 14 Audra Schroeder, “This Overwhelming Twitter Timeline of Sexism in the Music Industry is Required Reading,” Daily Dot, August 27, 2015. http://www.dailydot.com/upstream/ jessica-hopper-twitter-sexism-music-industry/. Initial tweet and thread available at https://twitter.com/jesshopp/ status/635863142917107712 15 Kembrew McLeod, “One and a Half Stars: A Critique of North American Rock Criticism,” Popular Music 20, no. 1 (2001), 48. 16 Kristeva, 1.

Chapter 3 1 Greg Rule, “Tori! Tori! Tori!” Keyboard Magazine, September 1992. Accessed via toriamos.com. http://www.thetoristore. com/go/galleries/view/386/1/385/press/index.html 2 Justine Picardie, “Kooky or What?” Independent, January 15, 1994. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/ kooky-or-what-tori-amos-rock-babe-at-her-piano-was-anovernight-sensation-cute-talented-and-a-little-1407335.html 3 Gavin Edwards, “Magical Mystery Tori,” Details Magazine, March 1996. Accessed via Edwards’s website. http:// rulefortytwo.com/articles-essays/music/magical-mystery-tori/ 4 “I sound like the Little Mermaid on Drugs,” Brigitte Magazine, trans. Winfried Schmack, The Dent, July 24, 1996. Author unknown. Accessed via The Dent, http://thedent.com/brigitte. html

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5 Ben Edmonds, “Sex and the Single Pianist,” Creem, March 1994. Accessed via Toriphoria. http://www.yessaid.com/ int/1994-03_Creem.html 6 Ari Bendersky, “Tori Am . . . oh . . . oh . . . YES!” Metromix, April 13, 2005. http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2005-04-13/ news/0504140017_1_tori-amos-pretzel-twist 7 Ann Powers, “Three Women and their Journeys in Song: A Poet with a Piano, and a Lot of Bravado,” New York Times, January 14, 1996. http://www.nytimes.com/1996/01/14/arts/ pop-music-three-women-their-journeys-song-poet-withpiano-lot-bravado.html 8 Roland Barthes, “The Grain of the Voice,” Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 179–89. 9 Barthes, 188, 183. 10 Steven Daly, “Tori Amos’ Secret Garden,” Rolling Stone, June 25, 1998. http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/tori-amossecret-garden-19980625 11 Barthes, 181. 12 Paul Hegarty, Noise/Music: A History (New York: Continuum Books, 2007), 7. 13 Brown, 84.

Chapter 4 1 Noah Adams, “All Things Considered,” July 5, 1994. Transcript accessed via Toriphoria. http://www.yessaid.com/int/1994-0705_NPR.html

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2 Jen Fleissner, “Deep Space Tori,” Village Voice, February 13, 1996. Accessed via The Dent. http://thedent.com/voice. html 3 Kira L. Billik, “Reclaiming Her Womanhood,” Chicago Daily Herald, January 20, 1996, 31. 4 J. D. Considine, “The Feminine Musique,” Baltimore Sun, January 21, 1996, 1H. 5 Robert L. Doerschuk, “Voices in the Air: Spirit Tripping with Tori Amos,” Musician Magazine, May 1996. Accessed via Toriphoria. http://www.yessaid.com/int/1996-05_Musician. html 6 Many thanks to Daniel Rugg Webb for calling my attention to Amos’s use of “Tubular Bells.” 7 Amos and Powers, 90. 8 Joe Jackson, “Tori Amos, Sex, and Destiny,” Hot Press 18:3, February 24, 1994, 32. 9 Alice Walker, Possessing the Secret of Joy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 75.

Chapter 5 1 Several reviewers, including J. D. Considine of the Baltimore Sun, noted the Led Zeppelin reference. 2 For an excellent gloss on the way Love’s career was shaped by these accusations, see Anwen Crawford’s 33 1/3 book, Live Through This (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015). 3 Sylvia Patterson, “Tense Tori Love Songs,” New Musical Express, January 27, 1996. Accessed via Toriphoria. http://www.yessaid. com/int/1996-01-27_New_Musical_Express.html

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4 Caron Keating, “Summer Scene,” BBC One, July 8, 1992. Accessed via YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=EZC2nhi9Z4k 5 Cathy Dillon, “Bigger Earthquakes,” Hot Press, February 1996. Accessed via Toriphoria. http://www.yessaid.com/int/199602_Hot_Press.html 6 Charles Bermant, “Ellen Amos: Piano Bars – Springboards to Success,” Washington Times, September 2, 1983. Accessed via Toriphoria. http://www.yessaid.com/int/1983-09-02_The_ Washington_Times.html 7 Roger Piantadosi, “Ellen Amos: The Marbury Woman,” Washington Post, May 11, 1984. https://www.washingtonpost. com/archive/lifestyle/1984/05/11/ellen-amos-the-marburywoman/73e028a6-a4b6-4d34-bc23-9ee190b0245f/ 8 Bermant, n.p. 9 David Fricke, “Kurt Cobain, the Rolling Stone Interview: Success Doesn’t Suck,” January 27, 1994. http://www. rollingstone.com/music/news/kurt-cobain-the-rolling-stoneinterview-19940127 10 Gina Arnold, Exile in Guyville (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014). 11 Kevin Hopper, “Tori Explores Her Strengths, Weaknesses,” Albuquerque Journal, November 8, 1996, 66.

Chapter 6 1 Beck Laxton, “Flaky Pastry,” Keyboard Review, April 1996. Accessed via Toriphoria. http://www.yessaid.com/int/199604_Keyboard_Review.html

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2 Jeffrey Lee Puckett, “Boys for Pele,” Louisville Courier-Journal, February 3, 1996, 4. 3 Jamie Laughlin, “Quiz: Tori Amos Lyric or Dallas Bathroom Poetry?,” Dallas Observer, July 29, 2014. http://www. dallasobserver.com/music/quiz-tori-amos-lyric-or-dallasbathroom-poetry-7068745 4 Dorothy Parker, “Far from Well,” New Yorker, October 20, 1928, reprinted in The Portable Dorothy Parker (New York: Penguin, 1973), 518. 5 Sianne Ngai, “The Cuteness of the Avant-Garde,” Critical Inquiry 31 (Summer 2005), 816. See also Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 2012) and Daniel Harris, Cute, Quaint, Hungry, and Romantic: The Aesthetics of Consumerism (Boston, MA: Da Capo, 2000). 6 Shaunacy Ferro, “Why Do We Want to Squeeze Cute Things?” Popular Science, January 24, 2013. https://www.popsci.com/ science/article/2013-01/science-says-adorable-animals-turnus-aggressive. Dyer has since published a follow-up study on this topic (Oriana R. Aragon, Margaret S. Clark, Rebecca L. Dyer, John A. Bargh, “Dimorphous Expressions of Positive Emotion: Displays of both Care and Aggression in Response to Cute Stimuli,” Psychological Science 26, no. 3 (January 17, 2015): 259–73). 7 Ngai, “Cuteness of the Avant-Garde,” 827. 8 Jacques Derrida, “Economimesis,” Diacritics 11 (June 1981), 25. 9 There isn’t time for a deep dive into the latter-day adoption of the word “snowflake” by the Trumpist alt-right, but needless to say, its hostility toward vulnerability and determined stance that the vulnerable person must be faking it in some way seem strongly related.

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10 Taylor R. Dalton, “Q & A with the Hon. Jean P. Rosenbluth,” Orange County Association of Business Trial Lawyers Report, Vol. XIV, 3 (Summer 2012), 4. http://www.abtl.org/report/oc/ abtlocvol14no3.pdf 11 Melissa Rawlins, with additional reporting by Cheryl McCall, Joanna Powell, and Jean Rosenbluth, “Sexual Harassment: Music,” Entertainment Weekly, December 6, 1991. http://www. ew.com/article/1991/12/06/sexual-harassment-music

Chapter 7 1 “North American Plugged ’98 Tour, Kansas City, MO, August 28, 1998,” The Dent. http://thedent.com/north30. html 2 “Yahoo Live Online Chat, April 13, 1998,” Toriphoria. http:// www.yessaid.com/int/1998-04-13_Yahoo.html 3 The anonymous quotes in this chapter were used with permission from their sources. 4 Thanks to Dan Piepenbring, who worked on the late Prince’s memoir, for the suggestion. 5 Allison Wright, “Words in the News: Diva,” Oxford Dictionaries blog, February 20, 2012. http://blog. oxforddictionaries.com/2012/02/word-in-the-news-diva/ 6 Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 223. 7 Sady Doyle, “Birth of the Uncool: In Defense of the Tori Amos Fan,” Bitch Magazine, February 14, 2011. https://bitchmedia. org/article/birth-of-the-uncool

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8 Maureen Callahan, “Tori Amos: The Enchanted Forest,” Spin, November 1999, 108. 9 This is, according to some statistics, not wildly divergent from the percentage of sexual assault survivors one would find in any random sample of women. 10 Adrienne Trier-Bieniek, Sing Us a Song, Pianowoman: Female Fans and the Music of Tori Amos (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2013), 66. 11 Wilson, 119. 12 Ibid., 147. 13 Franz Kafka, “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk,” in Franz Kafka: The Complete Stories (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), 360–76. 14 Bill DeMain, “The Inner World of Tori Amos,” Performing Songwriter, March/April 1994. Accessed via Toriphoria. http:// www.yessaid.com/int/1994-03_Performing_Songwriter.html 15 “Tori Amos on 20/20,” viewed on YouTube, https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=UXKK2JeC_tY, https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=oBO9LTeBW-k. Transcript via Healthy Place, “Tori Amos on Being a Rape Survivor: 20/20 Interview. https://www.healthyplace.com/abuse/articles/tori-amos-onbeing-a-rape-survivor/ 16 Kellie Greene, qtd. in “Tori Amos on Being a Rape Survivor: 20/20 Interview.” 17 I recounted my own experience of being triggered by “Me and a Gun” in “From Clarissa to Gone Girl: Rape, the Novel, and Me,” Electric Literature, August 2, 2016. https:// electricliterature.com/from-clarissa-to-gone-girl-rape-thenovel-and-me-6b6b0371910b 18 Shannon, qtd. in “Tori Amos on Being a Rape Survivor: 20/20 Interview.” 170

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Chapter 8 1 Sandra A. Garcia, “A Bottle of Red: Tori Amos, Tea, and Sympathy,” B-Side, May-June 1996. Accessed via Toriphoria. http://www.yessaid.com/int/1996-05_B-Side.html 2 Amos and Powers, 31. 3 “Goop Medicine Bag.” https://shop.goop.com/shop/products/ the-goop-medicine-bag 4 Joe Jackson, “The Hurt Inside,” Hot Press, February 9, 1994. http://www.hotpress.com/music/interviews/The-HurtInside/479922.html 5 Noah Berlatsky, “White People and ‘Strange Fruit,’” Splice Today, November 5, 2014. http://www.splicetoday.com/music/ white-people-and-strange-fruit

Conclusion 1 Amos and Powers, 156. 2 Ibid., 167. 3 Ibid., 317.

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Also available in the series

Dusty Springfield’s Dusty in Memphis by Warren Zanes 2. Love’s Forever Changes by Andrew Hultkrans 3. Neil Young’s Harvest by Sam Inglis 4. The Kinks’ The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society by Andy Miller 5. The Smiths’ Meat Is Murder by Joe Pernice 6. Pink Floyd’s The Piper at the Gates of Dawn by John Cavanagh 7. ABBA’s ABBA Gold: Greatest Hits by Elisabeth Vincentelli 8. The Jimi Hendrix Experience’s Electric Ladyland by John Perry 9. Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures by Chris Ott 10. Prince’s Sign “☮” the Times by Michaelangelo Matos 11. The Velvet Underground’s The Velvet Underground & Nico by Joe Harvard 1.

12. The Beatles’ Let It Be by Steve Matteo 13. James Brown’s Live at the Apollo by Douglas Wolk 14. Jethro Tull’s Aqualung by Allan Moore 15. Radiohead’s OK Computer by Dai Griffiths 16. The Replacements’ Let It Be by Colin Meloy 17. Led Zeppelin’s Led Zeppelin IV by Erik Davis 18. The Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main St. by Bill Janovitz 19. The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds by Jim Fusilli 20. Ramones’ Ramones by Nicholas Rombes 21. Elvis Costello’s Armed Forces by Franklin Bruno 22. R.E.M.’s Murmur by J. Niimi 23. Jeff Buckley’s Grace by Daphne Brooks 24. DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing… by Eliot Wilder

ALSO AVAIL ABLE IN THE SERIES

25. MC5’s Kick Out the Jams by Don McLeese 26. David Bowie’s Low by Hugo Wilcken 27. Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. by Geoffrey Himes 28. The Band’s Music from Big Pink by John Niven 29. Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane over the Sea by Kim Cooper 30. Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique by Dan Le Roy 31. Pixies’ Doolittle by Ben Sisario 32. Sly and the Family Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On by Miles Marshall Lewis 33. The Stone Roses’ The Stone Roses by Alex Green 34. Nirvana’s In Utero by Gillian G. Gaar 35. Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited by Mark Polizzotti 36. My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless by Mike McGonigal 37. The Who’s The Who Sell Out by John Dougan 38. Guided by Voices’ Bee Thousand by Marc Woodworth 39. Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation by Matthew Stearns 40. Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark by Sean Nelson 41. Guns N’ Roses’ Use Your Illusion I and II by Eric Weisbard

42. Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life by Zeth Lundy 43. The Byrds’ The Notorious Byrd Brothers by Ric Menck 44. Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica by Kevin Courrier 45. Minutemen’s Double Nickels on the Dime by Michael T. Fournier 46. Steely Dan’s Aja by Don Breithaupt 47. A Tribe Called Quest’s People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm by Shawn Taylor 48. PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me by Kate Schatz 49. U2’s Achtung Baby by Stephen Catanzarite 50. Belle & Sebastian’s If You’re Feeling Sinister by Scott Plagenhoef 51. Nick Drake’s Pink Moon by Amanda Petrusich 52. Celine Dion’s Let’s Talk About Love by Carl Wilson 53. Tom Waits’ Swordfishtrombones by David Smay 54. Throbbing Gristle’s 20 Jazz Funk Greats by Drew Daniel 55. Patti Smith’s Horses by Philip Shaw 56. Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality by John Darnielle 57. Slayer’s Reign in Blood by D. X. Ferris

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ALSO AVAIL ABLE IN THE SERIES

58. Richard and Linda Thompson’s Shoot Out the Lights by Hayden Childs 59. The Afghan Whigs’ Gentlemen by Bob Gendron 60. The Pogues’ Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash by Jeffery T. Roesgen 61. The Flying Burrito Brothers’ The Gilded Palace of Sin by Bob Proehl 62. Wire’s Pink Flag by Wilson Neate 63. Elliott Smith’s XO by Mathew Lemay 64. Nas’ Illmatic by Matthew Gasteier 65. Big Star’s Radio City by Bruce Eaton 66. Madness’ One Step Beyond… by Terry Edwards 67. Brian Eno’s Another Green World by Geeta Dayal 68. The Flaming Lips’ Zaireeka by Mark Richardson 69. The Magnetic Fields’ 69 Love Songs by LD Beghtol 70. Israel Kamakawiwo’ole’s Facing Future by Dan Kois 71. Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back by Christopher R. Weingarten 72. Pavement’s Wowee Zowee by Bryan Charles

73. AC/DC’s Highway to Hell by Joe Bonomo 74. Van Dyke Parks’s Song Cycle by Richard Henderson 75. Slint’s Spiderland by Scott Tennent 76. Radiohead’s Kid A by Marvin Lin 77. Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk by Rob Trucks 78. Nine Inch Nails’ Pretty Hate Machine by Daphne Carr 79. Ween’s Chocolate and Cheese by Hank Shteamer 80. Johnny Cash’s American Recordings by Tony Tost 81. The Rolling Stones’ Some Girls by Cyrus Patell 82. Dinosaur Jr.’s You’re Living All Over Me by Nick Attfield 83. Television’s Marquee Moon by Bryan Waterman 84. Aretha Franklin’s Amazing Grace by Aaron Cohen 85. Portishead’s Dummy by RJ Wheaton 86. Talking Heads’ Fear of Music by Jonathan Lethem 87. Serge Gainsbourg’s Histoire de Melody Nelson by Darran Anderson 88. They Might Be Giants’ Flood by S. Alexander Reed and Philip Sandifer

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ALSO AVAIL ABLE IN THE SERIES

89. Andrew W.K.’s I Get Wet by Phillip Crandall 90. Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II by Marc Weidenbaum 91. Gang of Four’s Entertainment by Kevin J. H. Dettmar 92. Richard Hell and the Voidoids’ Blank Generation by Pete Astor 93. J Dilla’s Donuts by Jordan Ferguson 94. The Beach Boys’ Smile by Luis Sanchez 95. Oasis’ Definitely Maybe by Alex Niven 96. Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville by Gina Arnold 97. Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy by Kirk Walker Graves 98. Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album by Charles Fairchild 99. Sigur Rós’s () by Ethan Hayden 100. Michael Jackson’s Dangerous by Susan Fast 101. Can’s Tago Mago by Alan Warner 102. Bobbie Gentry’s Ode to Billie Joe by Tara Murtha 103. Hole’s Live Through This by Anwen Crawford 104. Devo’s Freedom of Choice by Evie Nagy

105. Dead Kennedys’ Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables by Michael Stewart Foley 106. Koji Kondo’s Super Mario Bros. by Andrew Schartmann 107. Beat Happening’s Beat Happening by Bryan C. Parker 108. Metallica’s Metallica by David Masciotra 109. Phish’s A Live One by Walter Holland 110. Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew by George Grella Jr. 111. Blondie’s Parallel Lines by Kembrew McLeod 112. Grateful Dead’s Workingman’s Dead by Buzz Poole 113. New Kids On The Block’s Hangin’ Tough by Rebecca Wallwork 114. The Geto Boys’ The Geto Boys by Rolf Potts 115. Sleater-Kinney’s Dig Me Out by Jovana Babovic 116. LCD Soundsystem’s Sound of Silver by Ryan Leas 117. Donny Hathaway’s Donny Hathaway Live by Emily J. Lordi 118. The Jesus and Mary Chain’s Psychocandy by Paula Mejia

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ALSO AVAIL ABLE IN THE SERIES

119. The Modern Lovers’ The Modern Lovers by Sean L. Maloney 120. Angelo Badalamenti’s Soundtrack from Twin Peaks by Clare Nina Norelli 121. Young Marble Giants’ Colossal Youth by Michael Blair and Joe Bucciero 122. The Pharcyde’s Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde by Andrew Barker 123. Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs by Eric Eidelstein 124. Bob Mould’s Workbook by Walter Biggins and Daniel Couch 125. Camp Lo’s Uptown Saturday Night by Patrick Rivers and Will Fulton

126. The Raincoats’ The Raincoats by Jenn Pelly 127. Björk’s Homogenic by Emily Mackay 128. Merle Haggard’s Okie from Muskogee by Rachel Lee Rubin 129. Fugazi’s In on the Kill Taker by Joe Gross 130. Jawbreaker’s 24 Hour Revenge Therapy by Ronen Givony 131. Lou Reed’s Transformer by Ezra Furman 132. Siouxsie and the Banshees’ Peepshow by Samantha Bennett 133. Drive-By Truckers’ Southern Rock Opera by Rien Fertel

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