The Reluctant Receptionist

those of you who know me (or those of you who don’t know me and read this blog, the two’s of two’s of you left) know about my, shall we say, affinity for tori amos. i’m not one of these kooks that stand outside venues for six and seven hours, hoping to snap a shaky disposable kodak photograph from behind three rows of people, but i have, at certain times in my life, been very, very into her music. like, scary into it. like, dissecting boys for pele and forcing my friends to sit through my thesis of how it was actually in three distinct sections, each one broken up by the mysterious, odd mini-songs that populate it. thank you, amanda, bri, and cory for humoring me. if any of you care to hear about that brilliant rant, email me. like it or not, boys for pele is one of the best albums of the 90s, thorny and difficult, whispered, yelped, subversive in its sexuality and masochism, all 80 harpsichord-y, harmonium-y minutes of it.

all of this is a long way of saying what i’ve been avoiding saying since i saw her live at radio city last week: that tori, the one whose music i obsessed over, is dead. what we have in her place seems to be a hip-grinding, super-skinny, plastic-surgeried, self-described MILF. what’s bothered me so much about her last two albums ( american doll posse and abnormally attracted to sin) wasn’t just their length—though at something like 23 tracks that’s a major issue, too—or their uninteresting, obvious lyrics, or tori’s rapidly aging voice, or the fact that marcel and mark feel the need to record her in what sounds like a kotex box. my major problem has been thematic. she’s turned herself into this, dare i say it, cougar (and i don’t mean that in the bad, women-a-certain-age-can’t-have-sex way, i mean it in the prowling, aging, over-reaching woman way). her songs nowadays are all about two things: completely sleep-inducing reveries about existence (including gem lyrics such as “what does it look like/this orbital ball/from the fringes of the milky way?”); and proclamations that she herself can save you/haunt you/sex you. we get it, tori, you’re empowered. there is an earth mother and we all breathe her power, and you’re breathing her power and that’s giving you the energy to screw your cute british husband every night of the week. you’ve reclaimed sensuality (or, if you’re talking about the beekeeper “sinsuality”) and you’re spreading the word.

the problem is that, as a friend of mine pointed out a moment ago, her best work was done when she was in turmoil. this is true of many artists—ani, trent reznor, corin tucker—but it’s an extreme for tori. her rape gave birth to little earthquakes, her fight with god under the pink, her breakup with eric rosse boys for pele and her miscarriage from the choirgirl hotel. then she met mark, got married, had a baby, and all her problems are suddenly the everyday problems that we all face, but not the interesting ones. so she sits in cornwall and wonders, “what does it look like, this orbital ball, from the fringes of the milky way?”

all of this diatribe is to say that, when i saw her show at radio city on thursday, i was literally asleep for part of it. the setlist, which is always make or break for tori shows, leaned heavily on her last three albums, which in my opinion are her weakest. by the time she launched into “marys of the sea” and scott sent me a text saying something along the lines of “what the fuck is this shizz?” i was nodding off. she’d wake me up with a few stellar numbers—“little earthquakes,” “space dog”—and i’d snap back, flooded with memories of my gold honda and just how good she sounded yelping at me through those speakers. i’d think of my mom and how i would try to hide the cover art of boys for pele from her. i’d think about how dirty the lyric “i shaved every place where you been, boy” used to seem.

and i realized, during my walk down memory lane, that maybe that’s what tori is good for these days. sure, she still has it in her to make another great record. but maybe she’s now a nostalgia act for me.

when i was talking to alyson about it this morning, we both admitted to each other that this made us more than a little sad. tori actually brought alyson and i together 11 years ago this month, and i have a hard time imagining that any other singer i’m into right now would have the same power. i wouldn’t bond with anyone over, say, la roux or florence and the machine. my tastes have become just that, a taste for a certain kind of music; any hint of obsession or excitement like i had for tori amos is gone, left behind on the used car lot in bethany, oklahoma with my gold honda accord. i wonder: will anything ever excite me like that again, or was it specific to the time, to my growth, my still-recent discovery of the inner world, of the prickliness of human interaction? i hope so. i hope that i just haven’t found it yet.