Personally I listened to her a lot in High School too. Music on the internet wasn’t so big so I actually had to buy some of her albums just to be able to hear her music, after having read so much about it. Alyssa, an online friend (I wonder where she is now, we were so close. She's impossible 2 find though as her last name is as common as "Smith") copied the rest for me. Until “To venus & back” which was the latest release @ the time.
Anyways. I enjoyed the article, Birth of the Uncool, & will proceed to share some excerpts.
- Amos defined her music, from the outset of her career, around feelings of social ostracism and the expression of a complex inner self that had trouble finding acceptance (...) But though it could easily have turned into a paean to self-pity and victimization, Little Earthquakes was also full of defiance, as well as assertions that being true to oneself was its own reward. And then there was the implicit message of the music itself: All of this happened, and I’m still here.
- (...) her fans loved the combination of public hurt and defiance. The story of the wounded ugly duckling turned rock-star swan spoke to women. It spoke to social outcasts. It spoke to survivors of sexual violence or abuse. And it spoke to LGBT people, especially young gay men, who had particular reason to connect with Amos’s recurring themes of religious repression and sexual shame, and who still constitute a large part of her fan base.
- (...) Amos appealed to plenty of boys and men who wanted to cast her as their personal Manic Pixie Dream Girl. But as time went on, the deeply gendered narrative of the obsessive, hyper-emotional weirdo took over.
- To go to a Tori Amos concert was to seek catharsis. Her performances were known for being unpredictable and hugely expressive. There were lots of tears, there was lots of screaming, and sometimes both of them were coming from the stage. To some degree, the passion around Amos was disquieting because her performances asked the audience to surrender control, to commit themselves to experiencing huge, sometimes scary emotions, to leave the realm of rational thought behind and make intuitive connections between the words, the noises, and the sheer physicality of the woman on the stage, who might be grinding herself orgasmically against her piano bench or angrily clawing herself. Of course it made people uncomfortable; it was about leaving comfort zones behind, about surrendering inhibitions.
- In the NME article that described her fans as “oddities,” Amos estimated that “one in three women who comes to my shows [has been] raped or sexually abused.” Her numbers didn’t come from a formal study, but formal study apparently supports them: London School of Economics gender studies scholar Deborah Finding, who surveyed more than 2,000 Amos fans for her 2009 PhD thesis, found that the rate of sexual assault in Amos’s fanbase was “enough to support the statistic that one in four women has suffered sexual violence,” and that “98% of the respondents said that they used her music as a means of emotional support.”
- A song in which a little girl talked to an icicle could turn very quickly into a song about masturbation; a song about a miscarriage could contain lyrics about mermaids.
- pro wrestler Mick Foley recalls hugging Amos, writing, “I felt like an innocent child in the arms of an angel.”
- As a society, we encourage girls and women to be emotionally accessible, and in touch with their feelings; we say that it’s an innately feminine trait. We say it, that is, until they have feelings that make us uncomfortable, at which point we recast them as melodramatic harpies, shrieking banshees, and basket cases.
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