Lori: Tori Amos is amazing artist. She's someone whose work Kat captured perfectly in her review of The Beekeeper. Reading NYT's slam of that album and Tori's new book Piece by Piece that she wrote with Ann Powers, it's obvious that "you just don't get it." I feel like it's 1992 all over again which, with a Bush in the White House, may not be all that surprising.
Tori was part of the alternative scene but in all the recent remembering grunge articles, it's funny how so few mention her. They'll go out of their way to mention a group that maybe had one hit album if they were lucky (all male members) but we only get, if we're lucky, one woman tossed into the discussion - Courtney Love.
We're seeing history rewritten before our eyes and often by people too young to actually have witnessed the events. (A point I believe Kat made in her review of the Nirvana boxed set.) And we're witnessing a very brutal and crushing period for our country period.
As the Bully Boy stuffs his package and tries to act macho, the press follows suit and we get attacks on people who won't play butch.
Tori's attacked for being true to her own voice. How that makes sense to anyone is beyond me.
But she's attacked repeatedly in the pages of NYT. And I'm pretty much sick of it.
Her songs speak to me, they don't confuse me. They may make me think (and usually do make me think) but they don't confuse me.
But I'm not looking for writers who communicate on only one level and see things in dualistic terms only. Tori's open-ended and that bothers confused boys and girls who are scared of life in the adult world. They're also bothered by the fact that Tori won't write the songs everyone else does.
As a rape victim myself, I was drawn to "Me and a Gun" originally and she's always had more than enough to say to keep me coming back. But apparently it's now open season on any woman who won't act like a man. Such are the times we're in. And such is the reason that I don't feel I have a government that's representing me.
But Tori and her concerns for the enviornment, friendship, relationships and justice does represent me just fine, thank you very much. And at times like this, when the government disengages from reality and everyone tries to prove whose cock is bigger, I'm quite happy to have Tori Amos's latest CD to help me find some solace in the world from a voice who doesn't first check with the State Department to figure out where we stand today and then quickly fall in line "one foot behind the other" as Tori sings in "Mother."
[Note: This e-mail came in on Wednesday. The entry was typed up then and saved to draft so that it could be posted this weekend. Site e-mail address is common_ills@yahoo.com.]
