Tori Amos, Strange Little Girls

Something seemed very wrong a few months ago, when I heard about the new Tori Amos album. An album of covers of songs men sing about women. And not just any men. Tom Waits and Eminem.

Well, curiosity killed my cat and darn near killed me, too, so I went out and bought it the other day before any other felines decided to expire. I shopped around, trying to find one with the best cover--I went with the ‘Satin Worship’ one--and then ran home to put it on.

The first listen, which isn’t really ever the one to go by, wasn’t very promising. It all seemed very.... interesting, but not at all.... likable. The cover of the Velvet Underground’s “The New Age” didn’t sit well; “Happiness Is A Warm Gun” went on about eight minutes longer than it should have; Tom Waits’s “Time” wasn’t bad, exactly, but it didn’t seem to have any life in it, either....

Well, like I said, the first listen isn’t anything to go by, and I was sort of putting it under more pressure than it probably deserved. It’s a record, after all, and I was so busy trying to figure it out that by the end I wasn’t actually LISTENING to it.

The album is called Strange Little Girls, and Tori’s not the first strange little girl to try to do something like this. Annie Lennox, who back in the 80’s used to dress like a man and then flash people onstage, did an album of covers about six years ago, although at the time it didn’t even occur to me that Al Green, Bob Marley, Paul Simon and the Clash were all men. kd lang, who used to cover “Johnny Get Angry” just for kicks, did her own album of other people’s material. It was all songs about cigarettes, and while I guess that some euphemism for oral sex can be drawn from smoking, it didn’t really register that (I think) ten of that album’s twelve songs were originally done by men. And last year’s best album, The Covers Record by the unstable Cat Power, featured songs by Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, Phil Phillips, Smog, and Moby Grape. Like the kd lang record, only one song sung by a woman snuck in.

So it isn’t all that remarkable, I guess, that Tori Amos chose to sing songs by men. She’s done a lot of covers before, and very capably: “Lovesong”, “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, even "Ring My Bell" and “Somewhere Over The Rainbow”. But those mostly old Tori, you could say, just her and her piano. But what made those songs work was that she made them sound like her own songs. That’s why the Annie Lennox and kd lang albums worked, and it’s probably why Cat Power had to chop up and rearrange the songs she covered in order to make them work.

But there’s something about the concept of Strange Little Girls that doesn’t lend itself to that. These are songs by men, who, as everybody knows, don’t look at women the same way women look at themselves. So she has to change their meaning in order to make the songs hers, and it only works about half the time.

Now I only knew five of the twelve songs she’s covering here, and had heard one other one a couple of times, so I’m not a good judge of what the Velvet Underground or Eminem or Slayer were actually getting at in their originals. So for now I’ll just stick to the ones I know.

“Enjoy The Silence” is a song I never really thought about very deeply. When I was at school last year one of the girls down the hall and I used to sing it all the time, because her voice was so high and mine’s so low and it sounded sort of spooky that way, but I never really thought about the words. I understand them; that is, I know what the male character is saying. He wants to be left alone, more or less. He wants to do what he wants, and he wants to stop fighting. I guess the girl’s all up in his shit all the time, to be colloquial, and he’s asking her to stop. Okay, fine. I don’t really get exactly why it’s on the album. The song itself is fine, if not exceptional--just Tori and her piano, like things used to be. The song even has a happy ending, I think. It’s one of the more easily listenable songs on the album, but as a gender thing I guess I’m missing the point.

“I’m Not In Love,” in my humble estimation, is about three kazillion times better. A band called Olive (who, for the record, I don’t much like at all) covered it a few years ago, and by then it had turned into one of those songs you hear and can sing all the words to without ever once thinking about what the hell you’re singing. Sort of like I was with “Enjoy the Silence,” only far more consciously. It’s the same thing that happened to, say, “Born In The USA”. You hear it so much you’re sure there can’t be any value to it. It turns into the “Rockafeller Skank,” just more fun to sing to and less fun to dance to. Well, Tori fixed that up in a jiffy. I’ve noticed this is the song the reviewers are singling out, even more than the Eminem song, and it’s obvious why. The way she sings about the picture that’s on the wall, but only just to hide a nasty stain, makes the whole song sound so pathetically deluded it’s no wonder she got all dressed up as a goth for the picture on the sleeve. Of course, there are two ways to read the song, and I’m not quite sure which one she’s going for. Is it a woman singing the song? Or is it a woman singing the man’s thoughts? There’s a world of difference between the two, of course. If it’s a woman singing the song, like a man sang the original, then it’s brilliant, I think. But if it’s a woman making fun of her man because he’s in denial--well, I can see how she’d be upset about it, but the whole song would take on a veil of insincerity that I’m not sure I could swallow. So we’ll just go with Option A.

Tom Waits’s Rain Dogs album is one of my favourites ever, and so it was with some trepidation that I listened to Tori’s version of “Time”. And I don’t really buy it. What made Annie Lennox’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale” great, what made kd lang’s “Theme From The Valley of the Dolls” great, what made Cat Power’s “Schizophrenia” great, and what made Tori’s own “Smells Like Teen Spirit” great is that for a moment you forgot about Procol Harem, Dionne Warwick, Sonic Youth and Nirvana, and you only thought about what you were hearing. And “Time” doesn’t do that. It’s a Tom Waits song, and no amount of weepy singing and tinkly piano can make it anything else. (For better examples of girls singing Tom Waits songs, try Sarah McLachlan's "Ol' 55" or Shawn Colvin's "Looking For The Heart Of Saturday Night".)

If she had done to “Time” what she did to “I Don’t Like Mondays,” maybe she would have been on to something. Some people seem to think she missed the boat on this one, but I don’t. The original was a true story about a girl who went to school and opened fire, about twenty-five years before Columbine mind you, and her only reason for doing it was that she didn’t like Mondays.

The song is complicated, with narration and viewpoint bouncing around, even in the chorus. In the original it’s a mob that demands, “Tell me why!” with Bob Geldof offering “I don’t like Mondays” as an excuse, and one that maybe he doesn’t even believe himself. In the new version, that all changes. Tori personifies the girl, and in a voice pleading for attention and self-understanding she implores someone to tell her why she doesn’t like Mondays. She knows the reason why she did what she did, and now she wants go deeper and find out what led to that reasoning. The fact that the song itself sounds like something from an Afterschool Special only makes it more poignant.

“Happiness Is A Warm Gun”, on the other hand, is a complete failure. It goes on for ten minutes, with sound bites of George Bush (both of them) talking about the Second Amendment and Tori adding a lot of “Mama”s and taking out the “bang bang shoot shoot”s of the original. Of course, “Happiness Is A Warm Gun” is one of my least favourite Beatles songs, anyway, and honestly I think a song like “Girl” (or even “Eleanor Rigby”) would have been a lot more interesting, not to mention more fun to listen to. But instead we get a behemoth song about not much at all. I read a review that said it’s supposed to be sung by Mark David Chapman’s whore, but I can’t really be bothered to care.

As for the other songs on the album, “New Age” gets better with repeated listens, although it’s still nothing special. The Stranglers’ “Strange Little Girl” and Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold” are the only two songs I’d want to hear on the radio. Both songs, which sound completely natural coming from men, sound degrading in the album’s context, but not so much that the male narrators are criminals. Lloyd Cole’s “Rattlesnakes” is the same; coming from a man it would sound like a completely sincere melancholy love song, but sung by a woman it scolds the man, but doesn’t condemn him. This is good, I think; I don’t think she was trying to castrate anybody with this record, and she hasn’t. With the exception of Eminem’s “’97 Bonnie and Clyde”, she’s mostly chosen songs where the problem lies not in man’s condescension towards women, but rather in a simple misunderstanding of them. I guess that’s true even with the Eminem song, only with the man deciding to stop wallowing in misery like Depeche Mode and kill the woman instead. Different strokes for different folks, I guess.

I guess I’ll talk about the Eminem song now. It’s the most interesting one on the album, if not the one I’d want to hear very often. She’s thankfully taken out any trace of Dr Dre’s irritating production and replaced it with a very good imitation of a Bernard Hermann score. She also prefaces the song (I don’t know if it’s in the original) with a “Mama loves you” speech that gives the song its perspective. She let the guy kill her in order to save her daughter, I think. Because somewhere deep down you feel like the kid might be okay in the end; the guy’s a psycho, but he seems to like the kid. When Tori slips into the ba-ba night-night goo-goo part of the song it’s enough to send shivers up my spine, but on the whole you understand why it happened.

I think Eminem is sickening, frankly, and my sincerest hope is that one day people will just forget about him and he’ll just slip back into his trailer park and leave the rest of the world alone. So I don’t know if this cover is a blessing, because somebody had to put him in his place sooner or later, or a curse, because now people will probably talk about him more, but it’s something that had to happen. And it happened pretty well, I think.

On the whole, the album’s a bit of a puzzle. The sleeve is adorned with pictures of Tori in all sorts of costumes, one for every song. She’s the drugged-out looking mom in the “’97 Bonnie and Clyde” picture, with a caption that says “She wonders what her daughter will do.” For the “Rattlesnakes” picture she’s fearless (contrary to what the song says), wearing a KISS jacket; “She rides rollercoasters but never screams.” For “I’m Not In Love”, “She forgets him utterly and forever.” More puzzling are the pictures for “I Don’t Like Mondays” (she’s dressed like a state trooper with a “Babe” necklace on) and “Enjoy the Silence” (“Thirty-five years a showgirl.”) I guess it just goes to show that, while a good enough idea, the whole thing is uneven. Buy it, I say. Just know that like a lot of conceptual things, some of it is a lot better in theory than execution.

B