In an extract from her new book in the 33 1/3 series, Amy Gentry explains why its rejection of the ideals of feminine and musical beauty are crucial to an understanding of Amoss 1996 album Women and girls have a particularly complicated relationship with disgust. We learn at an early age to be grossed out
Tori Amos This article is more than 5 years old
This article is more than 5 years old
In an extract from her new book in the 33 1/3 series, Amy Gentry explains why its rejection of the ideals of feminine and musical beauty are crucial to an understanding of Amos’s 1996 album
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 colour pink, Tori Amos.
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 17-year-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 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 (1992) 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 (1994) pictured a miniature Amos, etherised 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 colour 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 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.
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?
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