'Girls': Tori Amos Goes On a Gender-Bender
By Arion Berger
Special to The Washington Post
Wednesday, September 19, 2001; Page C05
Tori Amos is at it again. Piano-rock's feminist shaman picks up her
skull-topped staff and exorcises the demons of misogyny from a dozen pop
songs written and originally sung by men. And somehow she pulls it off.
Everything that should be bad about this experiment is good: its
self-indulgence, its hoary/tacky precedents (from David Bowie to Duran
Duran), its strident purpose, even the fact that it expands on a previous
Tori trope. With her 1992 cover of Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit,"
Amos seemingly performed an act of cashing in on the nation's No. 1 song
that, in truth, was totally non-expedient. In fact, it seemed demented
that this animated art-muse could turn the unintelligible grunge anthem
into a majestically bleeding piano ballad.
She didn't have a hit with "Teen Spirit" (or with her beautiful cover of
the Rolling Stones' "Angie"), and didn't mean to. She was taking popular
music back underground, turning a hit into a cult artifact. On the new CD,
"Strange Little Girls," Amos swims through the murky waters of men, women
and violence, toying with the masks of aggression and victimization. If
this all sounds very women's studies-ish, it is, but it works as a
disturbing pop experiment, recontextualizing these male fantasies and
fears in sometimes startling ways.
Out of the most harmless, forgotten or canonized pop songs, Amos teases
threads of disgust and paternalism. The title song becomes more of what it
is -- one of the Stranglers' many obnoxiously entertaining lager-lout
paeans to the weaker sex, funny and frightening in Amos's earnest voice.
Depeche Mode's goth-disco hit "Enjoy the Silence" is revealed as naive and
trifling -- a gorgeous melody laid bare against Amos's impressionistic
keyboards, powering glib truisms about intimacy. Her tendency to build
piano-driven mountains out of rock-and-roll molehills serves her
beautifully on a dour, slow-rolling version of Slayer's "Raining Blood."
"Real Men," Joe Jackson's exploration of male sexual roles, becomes a
series of gentle taunts in the mouth of a confident young woman. The
melody is, of course, intact; Amos and Jackson are compositional sisters
under the skin.
On Neil Young's pained Summer of Love ballad "Heart of Gold," Amos
flattens out the melody rather than accentuating it, singing in a fevered
Kate Bush monotone with overlaid guitar feedback that Young himself would
recognize from his deliberately annoying masterpiece "Arc/Weld." It's as
messy as a barrel of snakes and more an anguished cry for love than the
hippie optimism of the original.
Amos succeeds less vividly on the Beatles' "Happiness Is a Warm Gun,"
ironic in its original crooning lilt; here, it's funkified and desultory,
made soggy with spoken clips of news reports and politicians. Another
obvious choice, "I Don't Like Mondays," deservedly the only semi-hit for
new-wave oddities the Boomtown Rats, tinkles along like a lullaby, Amos's
voice starkly up front. Because the song was originally written from a
female point of view, Amos brings little to the conversation beyond simply
taking the frighteningly numb words out of Bob Geldof's mouth.
But the mere act of male-to-female transformation has a far-reaching
effect on Eminem's " '97 Bonnie & Clyde." Stripped of hip-hop aggression
and whispered over darkly bowed strings, the story is anguished and
unfunny -- a dead woman's message to her uncomprehending child. "Strange
Little Girls" isn't easy listening, but it's a powerful argument for the
pop adage that it's the singer, not the song.
Tori Amos is scheduled to perform Oct. 6 and 7 at Constitution Hall.
(c) 2001 The Washington Post Company
