Author: Amy Gentry

Title: Tori Amos’ Boys for Pele (33⅓ Series)

Year of publication: 2018

Page count: 144

Rating: ★★★★

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33⅓ is an on-going series of non-fiction books with each volume centered around a single music album. If you’ve been in the Tori Amos fandom long enough, you’ll know that a book on her third album, Boys For Pele, has been a long-time coming; over a decade, in fact. After postponements, missed deadlines, and the album being back up for grabs, Amy Gentry’s proposal landed her the project.

Gentry knows how to reel a reader in; the book starts with the sentence “the first time I heard a Tori Amos song, I was disgusted“. While providing just enough anecdotes to drive the point home and keep the reader engaged with a personal touch, she proceeds to analyze the record through scholarly ideas such as Kant’s philosophy on taste and Kristeva’s concept of the abject. Both of these were necessary for the approach to Pele the author went with, but the expositions could’ve been trimmed down some, and I also could’ve done without the parallels she kept drawing to another volume in the series, concerning Céline Dion, whom I could not care less about. If you go into this book hoping for a track-by-track break-down of the album, you’ll probably be disappointed: The first third of the book wonderfully recounts Tori’s projects leading up to Boys For Pele, all necessary to understand her journey of (re)claiming womanhood which led to the album’s genesis.

My first reaction to Boys For Pele was similar to the author’s; after falling head over heels in love with Little Earthquakes, Boys For Pele was a complete departure, and felt impenetrable to my sixteen year old ears. It was dense and cryptic in a way I couldn’t even begin to unpack (“gibberish” would be the less kind description), wrathful and intense in a way I hadn’t been exposed to (I could deal with the fierce, male-energy anger of bands like Hole, but this was very different), and just plain inaccessible with its dissonant melodies and often out-of-control vocals. It was unnerving; a new kind of raw, and I dismissed it as inaccessible for years—it sounded like she was undergoing an exorcism, which, in a way, is exactly what the record is about (“it was that feeling of ripping open your vein…”, Tori said). Gentry summed it up beautifully in this passage:

“Softness was all but missing from Boys For Pele; at once alien and archaic, the harpsichord is not capable of softness. The transitions were too abrupt, the stripped-down songs too stripped-down—“Twinkle” was a one-finger lullaby, “Beauty Queen” a single note plunked over and over—and the whole thing sounded as if submerged, not in musical white space, but in something like black space. The more complicated songs, “Blood Roses” and “Professional Widow” and “In the Springtime of His Voodoo”, were exhausting, the thread of their bizarre lyrics and multiple bridges and breakdowns and deliberately contorted vocals impossible to follow. Melodies were stretched like taffy and then suddenly interrupted to make way for abrasive, spitting lyrics: You think I’m a queer, I think you’re a queer! Chickens get a taste of your meat! Stag shit! Starfucker! It better be big, boy! Fragments of prettiness would reenter the scene, skewed and nonsensical, band-aids of grace just soft enough to hurt when ripped away.”

It took years to click, but when I most needed it, the album was there, waiting for me. Nowadays I like to joke that you can’t possibly “get” this record until you’ve listened to it at 2AM while curled up sobbing in the bathtub, choking on the shower spray, but it’s really less of a joke and more what literally had to happen for Tori to take my hand and lead me to the edge of the volcano. It almost crosses into progressive rock territory by defying common song structures and playing with unconventional time signatures, and now easily ranks as my third favorite record of hers. I don’t think From the Choirgirl Hotel and Scarlet’s Walk, which share/swap around for the number one spot, will ever be dislodged, but if I were asked to single out the most important or essential album in her long career, it would be my pick, hands down.

A pianist herself, I really enjoyed reading the author’s descriptions of the songs; she even managed to draw my attention to little details I’d never caught on to before, which is quite the feat. Her prose was so beautiful and involved when writing about the song girls that some of the passages truly and honestly knocked my breath out, and I dare say even the most seasoned Tori fan will likely gain a new layer of understanding in one respect or other. I loved the feminist approach she adopted to write about this record (is there really any other way to tackle it though?), while also, and most importantly, daring to ask the sort of questions that get silenced as soon as they are uttered in this fandom: For instance, whether Tori has the right to appropriate the pain of Native and Southern Black Americans in the way she’s been known to do throughout her career.

Of the eighteen tracks on Boys For Pele, Gentry goes into stunning in-depth analysis of Blood Roses, Professional Widow, Marianne, Caught a Lite Sneeze, Hey Jupiter, Way Down, and Little Amsterdam, lightly touches on some others, while largely ignoring a good portion of the album, especially the latter half, which, the author admits, doesn’t hold many favorites. Muhammad My Friend and Doughnut Song are never even mentioned, and Father Lucifer’s, Talula‘s and Twinkle‘s passing name-drops are of no account, either. Not having read any of the other books in the 33⅓ series, I don’t know if it’s common practice to pick and choose songs to focus on rather than delve into the whole album, but the choice baffled me: Boys For Pele, like no other Tori album except for Scarlet’s Walk, is a journey—those are the only two of hers that I cannot listen to on shuffle; if I put them on, I have to listen in order, and all the way through. In Pele‘s case, the journey is the climb out of the belly of the beast, and because of that narrative it should be taken in and considered as a whole. Tori herself said “there is to me, more like novel form on this, chapter to chapter. It is a story. She does descend, she goes to visit Lucifer, she finds the Black Widow, she finds Mr. Zebra and some of the other characters that she takes along with her. It’s very Alice In Wonderland, in a sense“.

I can’t help but feel a little affronted at how Twinkle, especially, was completely ignored. I wouldn’t single it out as a favorite song of mine, but in the context of the album, it’s crucial: It signifies the hopeful redemption at the end of the narrative, and allows for the final healing and moving on; after all the blood-letting, Pele’s raging fire has burnt down and cooled to a distant, twinkling star. I’ve always loved that imagery, and since I feel that it’s a criminally underrated and largely overlooked song, I wish it had gotten the spot-light it deserved.

Despite her impressive and meticulous research work (lots of credits go to Jason Elijah at yessaid, who is about to release his own self-published tome on Tori), there were some inaccuracies that jumped out to me; most notably, American Doll Posse is not a double album, and Caught a Lite Sneeze was the first ever single to be offered as a free digital download at the end of 1995, and not an unnamed song in 1998, as Gentry writes—this was an uncorrected proof though, so perhaps these errors have been caught in editing and will be rectified in the final version.

Overall, when the book got it right, it was incredible, but I can’t give it a full five stars because it meandered a little in the early chapters, while the latter half, when Gentry finally started digging into the individual songs, didn’t end up giving me the full deconstruction of the album I craved—it just left me wanting more, and if she were to publish an expanded version on the full album, I’d be first in line to buy it. Still, even as it is, I’d go as far as calling it an essential read for any Tori Amos fan, and I look forward to having a physical copy on my shelf. Spoon is thanked in the acknowledgements, so I really hope Tori gets to read this; I can say without the shadow of a doubt that she would love it, and that’s really the highest compliment you could wish for.

Note: I received an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.