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tori amos: strange little girls
BY ANA NERSESSIAN
No one can accuse Tori Amos of playing it safe. Wielding a Bosendorfer instead of a guitar, she quietly exploded onto the alternative scene with Little Earthquakes, a deeply personal work that managed to namecheck everyone from Buddha to Charles Manson. Even that first album, by far her most accessible, challenged listeners with its raw subject matter. From the crazed harpsichords of Boys for Pele to the baroque darkness of From the Choirgirl Hotel to the double album excess of To Venus and Back, each successive work has only tiptoed further into the stratosphere. With her latest release, Amos takes on a new frontier: the cover album. Strange Little Girls is comprised of songs penned exclusively by male writers—Lou Reed, Tom Waits, even a certain Marshall Mathers II—and begs the question: is Amos attempting a feminist critique of sorts, a women's studies of rock, or is she using art to transcend gender and all its implications?
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Take "97 Bonnie and Clyde," Slim Shady's tale of tossing his wife's body into a lake. While Amos puts her own stamp on the song, transforming Eminem's vitriolic rant into a southern gothic lament, she also delivers his painfully misogynistic lyrics totally without comment. There is not a trace of either irony or rage in her voice, even when she sings "Mama's too sleepy to hear you screaming in her ear." As a feminist, Amos is no slouch—yet rather than reinterpret "male" lyrics to convey her own message, she recognizes that artistic equality is arrived at by the eradication, instead of the polarization, of gender differences.
But sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and Strange Little Girls is a pretty decent smoke. In choosing her songs, Amos has chosen songs with lyrics as puzzling and provocative as her own. Such risk-taking does result in the occasional misfire: somewhere, Neil Young is coughing up a hairball for her art-rock take on "Heart of Gold." But, as always with Amos, her strengths kick the collective ass of her weaknesses. The title track lets her rock out like we haven't heard since "Professional Widow," while a little waltzing music-box action turns the Boomtown Rats' "I Don't Like Mondays" into "Me and a Gun: Part Deux." And if you thought Madonna got a little bit country, check out "Rattlesnakes," where Amos makes like Roseanne Cash on acid and we all come out better for the experience. Where is this strange little girl going? Wherever she wants, damn it. (Warner) —Ana Nersessian
All materials © 2001 The Yale Herald, Inc., and its staff.
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