Boys for Pele
It was a relatively warm January in New York City in 1996 when Tori Amos released her third solo album, Boys for Pele, which I bought on CD that week at Tower Records on Broadway. I don’t remember the day, but I do remember the big, lighted poster of the album’s cover displayed in the window of the store: Tori Amos with muddy legs, sitting in a rocking chair on what looks like a farmhouse porch, a hunting rifle in her hands, a dead rooster hanging to her side from the roof. I remember, too, the disorienting, invigorating shock of hearing “Blood Roses”, “Father Lucifer”, and “Professional Widow” for the first time.
The music with which we feel our way through adolescence and early adulthood is often the music that ends up haunting the rest of our lives. My memory glues each of Tori Amos’s first three albums to specific, deeply meaningful moments of life and growth. The other albums for which I have such specific memories — memories of place and event, but even more so memories of sensation — are few, and mostly from the same time as this album: age 14 to 22 or so.
Part of the 33⅓ series of short monographs on individual albums, Amy Gentry’s Boys for Pele explores Amos’s richest, most ambitious, and perhaps most alienating work with the sensitivity of someone who has lived with it for as long as I have. This is necessary, and I didn’t realize quite how necessary until I read Gentry’s chronicle of the album’s reception and continued reputation.
Let’s go back. I first encountered Amos’s music when I was in high school and Little Earthquakes came out, but it wasn’t through that album that I was introduced to her. One of my friends had heard her cover of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” on a Vermont radio station he was able to pick up from his mountainside house in New Hampshire. Nirvana’s Nevermind was not yet a sacred album to us (it would become so); instead, it was an album we were attracted to and repelled by. It’s hard for me to remember this now, but once upon a time I found it difficult to understand any of what Kurt Cobain sang in that most famous song. (Weird Al based his masterful parody “Smells Like Nirvana” on just this problem.) My friend taped Tori Amos’s version off the radio and I remember sitting in my car with him in the parking lot of our school and listening to it — I remember the revelation of hearing those opening lines clearly for the first time: Load up on guns, bring your friends… This is hard to comprehend now simply because both versions of the song are so familiar to me that listening to Cobain sing, he sounds only a little less clear in his enunciation than Amos. Lots of Nirvana fans hated Tori Amos’s version of the song because it seemed to them to reduce its grunge angst to whispery, ethereal softness, but this is something my friend and I loved about it, and to our credit at that terribly judgmental age, we were able to let the two versions increase our appreciation of each other.
And that appreciation increased our curiosity about Amos. On a trip to Boston, I picked up the Crucify EP with “Smells Like Teen Spirit” on it and from that first heard “Winter”, a song I fell in love with. (I liked “Crucify”, but I loved “Winter”.) That sent me to the local record store, where I got a tape of Little Earthquakes, and really never looked back — the effect of first hearing “Silent All These Years”, “Precious Things”, and “Me and a Gun” was seismic, though I could not, at that time, have told you why.
Friends gave me her second album, Under the Pink, as a gift after I directed a play at our school. It was presented at the cast party. I remember feeling excitement and gratitude (it was a CD, something I could rarely afford to buy myself) but more than anything I remember an overwhelming sense of embarrassment and fear. I had rarely felt so publicly queer. “They know,” I remember thinking. “Only someone like me could love a Tori Amos album.” Despite having been introduced to Amos’s work by my straight male friend who liked “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, I knew my passion for her work was suspect. But this was only semi-conscious. It wasn’t until I got to college at NYU and went to a meeting of the Tisch School of the Arts gay club, where one of the guys was wearing a Tori Amos t-shirt and other guys were talking to him about it, comparing Tori concerts they’d been to, that I suddenly understood my inchoate feelings of embarrassment on being given Under the Pink originated from a semi-conscious perception that straight guys, masculine guys, real guys don’t become passionate fans of Tori Amos. (Of course, that’s a generality, and there are some straight guys who are fans, but they are a minority of the fanbase.)
Some of the most perceptive passages in Amy Gentry’s book explore exactly the dynamic that led me to be embarrassed by my queer passion.
With an insight that is so powerful it could stand to be developed more fully, Gentry proposes that the emotion of disgust is at the center of negative reactions to both Boys for Pele and Amos’s persona generally, and that this disgust affects critical response, warps perception, and reveals some pretty deep-seated misogyny, including in female listeners.
Gentry starts with herself. She’s a few years younger than me and was in high school when the album came out. She wrote a review of it for her school paper, a review she says her teenage self felt compelled to write after a single listen. She wrote a deeply negative review, one of those reviews that says far more about the reviewer than the object reviewed. It was as if she needed to push the album away, as if something in it cast a dangerous spell she — a fairly traditional, Christian girl at the time — needed to keep abject. She explores these feelings (which changed over the next few months as the album refused to let her go) with sensitivity, and the evidence provided by her younger self’s text proves useful in exploring other, more professional responses to the album.
Boys for Pele is not an album that lets you feel neutral. Amos wrote it after the breakup of a long relationship, and it is an album filled with fury and hurt. She had been in the music business long enough at that point to have suffered many of its worst qualities, most of them embodied by men. The Pele of the title is the Hawaiian goddess of fire and volcanoes. The songs are full of damaging men and injured women seeking release. It's an album of spirit and history, deeply personal but also reaching broadly outward with complex references to popular culture, global religion, fairy tales, dreams, and every imaginable power relationship. The songs are fragmented, fractured, shattered in their sounds and visions. Even the imagery in the liner notes is among Amos's most caustic and apocalyptic: not just the cover image of her and a gun (and a dead cock), but the images inside of burning pianos and of a piglet suckling at her breast. It's an album that loves men and hates men, and that is what first endeared me to it.
I was among the few who cherished the album right away, at least if the reviews are to believed. (It remains her fastest-selling album, however, flying up the charts quickly, remaining on the Billboard charts for 29 weeks.) The fact is, Boys for Pele got decidedly mixed reviews when it came out, and the reviews are telling: the male reviewers, even sometimes the ones who liked the album, resorted to casual misogyny again and again; the female reviewers were some of the most cutting in their negative remarks, as Gentry chronicles:
“Seriously self-indulgent,” scoffed the LA Times. “Frustratingly opaque,” said the Boston Phoenix. Writing for the San Jose Metro, Gina Arnold called it “too internal and obscure to be meaningful to anyone who isn’t actually Tori Amos” and predicted that most of the listening public would dismiss it as “the rantings of an irrational witchypoo.” These were generous compared to the Louisville Courier reviewer, who compared it to “the unedited diary of a precocious, pretentious teenager,” and the Edmonton Sun reviewer, who called it “a nauseating melange of morose piano noodlings, cryptic lesbian overtones, and unbearable overemoting.” Worst of all, Rolling Stone, which had positively reviewed Little Earthquakes and Under the Pink, gave it two stars; Evelyn McDonnell all but panned the album, calling out Amos’s “mushy-headed New Age feministspeak” and ending one paragraph, “I suggest she immerse herself in Babes in Toyland.”
Gentry notes that female reviewers tended to complain that Amos didn’t rage hard enough, while male reviewers tended to respond like Roger Catlin of the Hartford Courant, who said, “If she wants to truly connect, she needs to calm down, take a drink of water, and make a bit more sense.”
The question of sense and Boys for Pele is an important one, and Gentry is generally good on it, though I don’t think she quite goes far enough in exploring the ways that sense works (and works by not working) in Amos’s songs. What Gentry is devastatingly good at is showing just how lazy were the reviewers who insisted Amos’s lyrics are nothing but nonsense — Gentry doesn’t have to work hard to show that the major songs on the album are at least generally comprehensible. I was also pleased to see her bring up critics’ responses to male lyricists who tend toward the gnomic, starting with her high school self: “I joined the chorus of moral outrage, contempt, and disgust, indignant that Amos thought she could ‘get away with slapping the label of “avant-garde” on low quality gibberish’ — even as I would have fought to the death anyone who used the word ‘gibberish’ to describe, for example, R.E.M. lyrics.” She follows this with an important point about how for some critics, a lyricist’s obscurity can lead to a feminization: “When critics tire of trying to deal intelligently with the difficult music or lyrics of [Elvis] Costello or [Michael] Stipe or [Bob] Dylan, these men may be depicted as effete, pale, limp, impotent — feminized by typically ablist language that equates masculinity with health and vigor — or, in the language of class betrayal, overly intellectual, out of touch.” With women, she notes, it’s a bit different, because their obscurity is not just feminine and pretentious, it’s also stupid. Or, in a word often applied to Amos, flaky. (“Never was a cornflake girl,” she sang on Under the Pink, and hostile critics delighted in disagreeing.)
Gentry analyzes these tendencies well, but she implies something I would have brought more to the foreground of the conversation: the utter laziness these critics displayed when they approached Boys for Pele. Amos’s imagery is based on association and dream-like juxtaposition, and as such it is comfortably part of many of the most interesting artistic movements of the 20th century, from surrealism to Beat poetry. Her lyrics live in a realm similar to that of Stevie Smith and Frank O'Hara. Musically, Amos's songs are no more alien than jazz or psychedelic rock or anything other than the most mainstream love songs on the Billboard Top 40.
One of the things Gentry brings attention to is how much Tori Amos improvises. Such songs as "Marianne", "Not the Red Baron", "Agent Orange", and others were improvised during soundchecks as they recorded. This is a longstanding practice going back to Amos's childhood, when she lost her music scholarship to the Peabody Institute for not sight reading enough and for improvising too much. There's much more to explore with Amos's impressive ability to improvise, because that ability allows her an intuitive way to write songs directly from her subconscious. One of the powers of Boys for Pele is that it often feels like a scream from the Id. Her songs' connection to only partially conscious ideas, images, and language is a real strength, and not something as easily available to more deliberate, calculating artists.
Beyond the basic laziness of the reviewers, Gentry is also good on a particular quality of Amos’s work that really bothers people: its relation to preciousness and cuteness. She writes:
“Precious” is a word that means a lot to Tori Amos fans; not only is “Precious Things” a beloved Little Earthquakes track, but the briefest scan of Amos’s song titles shows a preponderance of related diminutive words (“sweet”, “little”, “pretty”, “sorta”, “twinkle”); small and vulnerable creatures (“frog”, “butterfly”, “firefly”, “dove”); words associated with stereotypical girlishness (“frock”, “fairytale”, “parasol”, “daisy”, “roses”, “petals”); and, of course, the word “girl” itself. The album titles replicate this trend: Little Earthquakes, Under the Pink, From the Choirgirl Hotel, Strange Little Girls, and American Doll Posse all contain diminutive and stereotypically girlish language. And that’s only the titles. The songs are chockablock with ice cream and pigtails, posies and hosies and horsies and all manner of fairy-tale nonsense.
Even Gentry doesn’t quite know what to make of this, bringing in Sianne Ngai’s “The Cuteness of the Avant-Garde” and the riot grrrl use of Hello Kitty. Gentry, though, seems to me to miss something the negative critics of Amos and cuteness more profoundly miss. While I do think Amos has sometimes, on other albums, drifted into realms of twee, generally — and on Boys from Pele especially — the cuteness isn’t actually cute. It’s a cuteness broken, sullied, flayed, fragmented. It is a cuteness of hazy memory, of poisoned nostalgia, of broken-hearted yearning. It’s the cuteness of dead innocence.
Gentry notes that “Blood Roses” is like a horror movie, and you could say the same thing for the whole album in some ways; the cuteness here is the same as in, say, Alice, Sweet Alice.
It is something of a fool’s errand to try to write a short book about Boys from Pele, because the album is bottomless, its implications infinite, depending on the listener’s situation, mood, desires. It’s an exhausting album. It certainly exhausts Gentry. While she is good on the album’s reception and its first few songs, she more or less gives up on the second half. (Oddly, she doesn't even seem to realize that "Not the Red Baron" — a song she dismisses, perplexed — is drawing at least as much on Peanuts as World War I.) The later chapters of the book feel sketchy in comparison to the earlier ones, even defeated. Most disappointingly, a chapter on Amos and race is perfunctory, confused, unsatisfying.
Gentry is a novelist as well as an academic, and it’s unfortunate that she isn’t able to explore Amos as an imaginative artist more fully, which would have helped a lot with discussions of Amos’s attraction to personas and her use of racial imagery. I find Amos’s approach to character, persona, and identification fascinating and powerful. Her approach, including her improvisions, is akin to channelling, making her songs both expressions of her own point of view and of a point of view she conjures from imagination. As Gentry importantly notes regarding "Me and a Gun", Amos's songs are not documentary accounts of her life, not diary entries set to music, but something both deeply personal and deeply imagined. It's the imagining that ought to be better celebrated, though that is a difficult thing in a culture that prefers autofiction to fiction, a world suspicious of both imagination and identification. Because her topics tend to be personal ones, Amos’s imagination is too often underappreciated.
It’s this sense of imaginative identification that leads me to think of Amos’s work as queer. Or, rather, as work that queers. She is a heterosexual, cisgender woman who has made something of a specialty of inhabiting male songs and tropes. Her 2001 album Strange Little Girls sums up an important tendency in her career at that point: she took songs by men and turned them into Tori Amos songs. Like all her covers, these songs are experiments, and so Strange Little Girls is her least consistent album to that point in its quality, but its effect is powerful when the experiments really work, most notably in her quiet, terrifying take on Eminem’s “‘97 Bonnie and Clyde”. Ending the album with Joe Jackson’s “Real Men” was quite telling — not only is it an exploration of the toxicity of masculinity, but it makes the last lyric of the album, “Now and then we wonder who the real men are.”
The queerness of Boys for Pele is present in a few lines which to me in 1996 were among the most important on the album, resonating with such recent favorites of mine from the previous year as R.E.M.’s “Crush with Eyeliner” and David Bowie’s “Hallo Spaceboy” (“Do you like girls or boys? / It's confusing these days”). On “Blood Roses” there’s “You think I’m a queer / I think you’re a queer / said I think you’re a queer / I think you’re a queer” and then on the sublime “Hey Jupiter”: “Hey Jupiter, nothing’s been the same / So are you gay, are you blue? / Thought we both could use a friend to run to / And I thought / you wouldn’t have to keep / with me / hiding”. In her book, Gentry quotes a gay male Amos fan telling the story of hearing that song live: “I cried and I cried and I cried because she was thirty feet away from me and she knew that there was a fifteen year old boy in the audience coming to terms with being gay (and being blue, struggling with depression) and she sang that song directly to me and it was one of the greatest moments in my entire life.”
“Hey Jupiter” is a song that particularly resonates for Amos’s fans, and that resonance raises the question of all that can’t be described in the rational terms of an analytic, critical work like Gentry’s. (This is no slight against her; indeed, her use of anecdotes about her own response and those of other people to the album mitigates it to some extent.) Music at its best is something like magic. We can say all sorts of things about it, but ultimately it escapes description and analysis; its meaning and value live in experience. This is perhaps why I’ve never much worried about whether Amos’s lyrics “make sense”. That seems to be the least important part of music to me. Until I read Gentry’s book, I didn’t know the “meaning” of half these songs I’ve been listening to since 1996, because I had never bothered with even the basic narrative the songs themselves offer. Rather, it was individual lyric lines and moments of melody and dissonance that spoke to me, held me. The feeling of ache and beauty that “Putting the Damage On” never fails to fill me with at the end of the album has nothing to do with the words, and yet also it does, because the music and voice together infuse those words with a meaning that sits galaxies away from a dictionary.
Returning to Boys for Pele now, I see just how directly it has influenced my own writing. The most direct influence is on my story “Blood”. That old story’s been on my mind because I’m going to be talking to a fiction-writing class about it this coming week. People often ask why I chose to tell the story from a young girl’s point of view, and listening to Boys from Pele again now, I remember that I had some of the lyrics from “Caught a Lite Sneeze” in mind as I was considering how to structure the story: “Boys on my left side / boys on my right side / boys in the middle / and you're not here” — it has nothing to do with the story the song tells, but with those words I imagined Jill with her brothers and father all around her, her mother gone. Similarly, I thought of the father in the story as “Father Lucifer”. And the song “Marianne” captures a lot of the mood of the story overall for me in its wistfulness and melancholy. Jill to me was very much the “quickest girl in the frying pan”.
It’s the cover image that most haunts “Blood”, though. I had completely forgotten this, but the image of the father in the story sitting in a chair with a gun was inspired directly by the album cover. My original sense of the story’s movement was that it would be the tale of the father in that chair being replaced by Jill as an adult. The story ended up following a different trajectory (more like “Marianne”), but that was the image from which I began.
Strange, the music that haunts us. Amy Gentry does a good job of showing why Boys for Pele is important, why Tori Amos matters. It’s a short book, though, and there are still worlds left to explore in the album, an album that can’t be reduced to words.
