You might wonder why an URB editor returns from Bonnaroo hailing Tori Amos and Kris Kristofferson and The Melvins as some of his favorite shows, but URB is about more than you’d guess, and Bonnaroo is a moveable feast where you might find yourself totally moved — given the moment’s energy — by a Feminist, Pop heroine, a 74 year-old country singer, or a bunch of guys dressed up in moo-moos….I couldn’t resist adding a surreal effect at the end of this, when she wails “A denial, a denial, a denial…”
Watching Tori Amos, it occurs to me that not since I reviewed Lars Von Trier’s film, Anti-Christ have I thought about Sigmund Freud so much — specifically, his alleged abandonment of research into paternal abuse of daughters, which was his earliest work — work for which he could not find funding, and which he thus abandoned…I wonder what the 20th century might be like if, instead of becoming a cokehead dream-warrior, he would’ve shined a light on such a dark topic…and I don’t mean to reduce Amos’s music to “Victim Art”, but there’s no doubt that she’s been a powerful voice — both in her personal identity, her creative work and her activist drive — for speaking up against rape, abuse and incest, founding the important non-profit national network RAINN
I think my nearly inexplicable appreciation of her stems from being haunted by the video for “Silent All These Years”, which is a brilliant bit of minimal, Conceptual Art, reminiscent of Tears For Fears’ album art work for The Hurting…
I looked her up on wikipedia and some of her fan sites and learned a few fun facts:
* “The Beekeeper was her fifth album to debut in the Top 10, which places her among an exclusive club of female artists that includes Mary J. Blige, Mariah Carey, Celine Dion, Janet Jackson, Madonna, LeAnn Rimes, Britney Spears and Barbra Streisand.”
* “Her maternal grandparents were of mixed European and Eastern Cherokee ancestry; of particular importance to her as a child was her grandfather, Calvin Clinton Copeland, who was a great source of inspiration and guidance to her as a young child, offering a more pantheistic spiritual alternative to her father and paternal grandmother’s traditional Christianity.”
I’m curious about the pantheism of her Grandfather, as the Dutch philosopher Spinoza was a big influence on my younger self; he was excommunicated by the Catholic Church (tho’ he was a Jew) for his pantheistic beliefs which, to put it simply, are not unlike, say, the views of the Na’vi in Avatar, for whom all life was a sacred manifestation of God. Apparently, The Catholic Church criticized Avatar for the same reasons…whatever
When she launched into “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, something made me focus on the still beach ball onstage, with Tori just hidden…it’s a hard song to hear, even with thousands of new friends, and it’s even more painful in a stripped-down version, and I regret that I was so caught up that I didn’t turn around to film the crowd, whose silence was as palpable as their cheers….
At the excellent website site yessaid.com I also learned that in January 1985:
* Tori returns to Los Angeles. While working as a bar entertainer, playing piano and singing as usual, a guy asks Tori for a ride home and rapes her.
“I’ll never talk about it at this level again but let me ask you. Why have I survived that kind of night, when other women didn’t? How am I alive to tell you this tale when he was ready to slice me up? In the song I say it was ‘Me and a Gun’ but it wasn’t a gun. It was a knife he had. And the idea was to take me to his friends and cut me up, and he kept telling me that, for hours. And if he hadn’t needed more drugs I would have been just one more news report, where you see the parents grieving for their daughter… And I was singing hymns, as I say in the song, because he told me to. I sang to stay alive. Yet I survived that torture, which left me urinating all over myself and left me paralysed for years. That’s what that night was all about, mutilation, more than violation through sex.” [Hot Press - February 23, 1994]
“The biggest mistake I made [after being raped] was not seeking help from people who understood… But then nobody was there for me on the night it happened. I had to call the East Coast and wake people up to talk. I called 20 people. I talked about it for roughly seven days and then just cut off the experience, not knowing that in doing that, I was letting it take control of me inside.” [Hot Press - 1992]
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