CONCEPT
WARNING: These comments came out something more stream-of-consciousness than I’d intended.
Tori Amos is one of my very very favorite musicians, so I’m already going to have oodles of bias in her favor. It has been interesting to consider her career and its reception as a barometer for the role of a genre of music within the establishment. Not that I know this field thoroughly, but I’ve seen the same thing happen to the Smashing Pumpkins, Nine Inch Nails, R.E.M., and others. The initial albums, some of which were not initially well-received by critics (Rolling Stone soundly panned Boys for Pele) have all been ensconsed as the very essence of the nineties. More recent work, much of which has been positively received, is soon forgotten (until the next review, which dismissively brushes off the entire latter-day catalog), because this music is not well situated for massive mainstream play. The interesting thing is the sort of critical amnesia that this process involves, with each Spin or Rolling Stone review touting the artists’ ultimate “rearrival.”
In the case of Tori Amos, the split happens soon after Tales from the Choirgirl Hotel, and certainly afflicts all of her work from Strange Little Girls on. I don’t expect American Doll Posse to make many waves beyond its currently modest ripples. Which is unfortunate, because it is a fine album, and it is, actually, her best in the last eight years.
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Let’s look at the concept here, because Tori has taken an increasinly structured, almost schematic approach to her last several albums. Strange Little Girls was a collection of covers of songs written by men about women. Scarlet’s Walk followed a protagonist, a la Forrest Gump, meandering about the United States. The Beekeeper resembled a set of six EPs, each corresponding to a different kind of garden, mixed and thrown together. Each of these albums has been longer than the last, and American Doll Posse is just shy of eighty minutes long.
Here’s how it works:
The album is “not composed by Tori” but by five characters sporting wigs that Hedwig would envy (you can see them on the album cover, or the picture above). These characters each have a dizzying assortment of names. They have first names: Pip, Isabel, Santa, Clyde, and Tori (who is not Tori Amos so much as a self-conscious caracature of Tori Amos). They have punning faux-Greek allegorical names: Expiratorial, Historical, Sanatorium, Clitorides, and Terratories (note the subtle presence of “Tori” in each of these names). And, they are all correlated to Greek goddesses: Athena, Artemis, Aphrodite, Persephone, and Demeter/Dionysis. Each character has her own wig, writes her own blog, performs her own songs, receives her own song credits (I wonder if they each receive their own royalties). This does seem to be a bit of overkill; I can forgive it if she moves forward to stimulate her own creative impulse, to saturate herself in her own work.
That said, it’s of limited use to an audience. My objection is the same objection that can be made to Pessoa’s characters: the very pragmatic issue that creating convincing personalities takes a lot of time and energy. Tori does not seem to have sufficiently differentiated the voices or ideas of her characters in non-superficial ways. Unlike Rolling Stone, I don’t object to the blogs per se. I think it’s an interesting/fun idea at worst, and it’s refreshing that intermedial art via the internet has become common enough that it isn’t some obscure backalley route for fans to get an extra fix. But these characters read the same as each other. They have similar physical stances and facial expressions. Perhaps most alarmingly for Tori’s project, I can’t tell the characters apart by their music. Fortunately, the lyric book is color-coded for easy decoding of identity, but I could not have done it on my own.
So far, everything I’ve said is negative: the conceit, it seems, fails.
And yet: Here is a successful, catchy, surprisingly tight eighty-minute album. What I wonder is whether the process of integrating so many different characters in combination, against each other, apart from each other, and situating them politically, personally, and religiously, produced an huge amount of material. If this was the case, then Tori had the Prince option. She could cut and edit down to “essentials” and still be left with plenty of material to work with. Giving her even a bit more credit, though, just because I can’t always distinguish or parse the five characters, they do have a palpable presence. The meaty feedback and sonorous rhythm of Smoky Joe is almost completely alien to the playful preschool piano dance runs of Mr. Bad Man. Bouncing off Clouds and Big Wheel are both danceable; it’s just that one belongs at a discotheque and the other in a honky tonk. Best of all, these songs are almost all catchy; they’re genuinely different sounds without feeling like they’re just paying lip service to musical diversity. They’re also (unlike Strange Little Girls) firmly in Tori territory, playing the part of violence or vulnerability, and often straddling the line.
I haven’t really talked about what the album means. It’s densely lyrical, as usual, but this time the references are mostly political. Given the concept, of course, dialogue is of paramount importance. But that probably belongs in another post…
END OF POST.