Most people who know me personally know that I spend a lot of time hanging around a Tori Amos messageboard. (It’s really more like a messageboard for people who met through being fans of Tori Amos, especially if you ask them, but that’s hard to explain.) Many of these folks are kind of not so crazy about Tori’s last few albums. The most recent, American Doll Posse, saw her create and adopt four separate personae–political Isabel, lusty Santa, angry Pip, and earthy-airy Clyde–between whom she alternates from concert to concert, performing certain songs only as particular “Doll” and apparently treating the whole thing like an extensive method-acting project cum David Bowie/Ziggy Stardust routine.
The thing about Tori, though, is that many of her fans, particularly among the ardent ones of the sort who’d meet while following her concert tours around the country, got into her because of how she’s spoken and sung about her own very real experience with rape. She did this most directly and most famously in a song called “Me and a Gun,” a harrowing and uncomfortable a cappella number from her solo debut Little Earthquakes.
Anyway, in news that astonishingly could actually be seen as horror-related, last night she came out as “Pip” and at some point cranked up the band, started singing “Me and a Gun,” and then did this:
At different points during the song, Tori/Pip rubbed herself with the knife, used it to simulate having a penis, held the gun to her head, and pointed it at the audience.
The whole situation has some fans (mostly people who were out of love with her already) in an uproar. They feel the whole thing reeks of schtick, that it’s shock rock, that doing it as a character invalidates the original song and makes a joke out of this interpretation. The fans who were at the show sound generally much more favorable, calling it one of the most intense performances they’ve ever seen.
The thing that sticks out at me is the notion that performing in character adversely affects the emotional or artistic or aesthetic truth of the performance. Even if you put aside the fact that “Tori Amos” is a character created by Myra Ellen Amos, there’s obviously a long and incredibly rich history of artists (of all stripes) adopting pseudonyms, re-christening themselves, even creating whole new identities to inhabit to get their points across. You’ll never convince a David Bowie fan like me that “Moonage Daydream” would have been better or truer or realer live had a young man named David Jones taken the stage rather than an eyebrowless freak called Ziggy Stardust, and just earnestly sung the song rather than dropping to his knees and pretending to blow Mick Ronson.
When Paul Karasik was drawing his contribution to my David Bowie sketchbook (much to his own chagrin), he and Gary Groth asked me what it was I liked about Bowie. I was tongue-tied and my explanation came out garbled, but the gist was that I spent most of high school and college fixated on defining myself. The movies I watched, the clothes I wore, the books I read, the bands I listened to (and almost more importantly, the bands I wouldn’t be caught dead listening to) were all carefully calibrated to add up to The Eternal Sean. That’s not to say that my enjoyment of any of it was a pose, because it wasn’t; the pose came in the constant pressure to adhere to my own standards, which once set could never be broken. Suddenly, along comes Bowie, picking up influences wherever one catches his eye, incorporating or even inhabiting them for as long as they move him, then moving along to the next thing without batting an eye. How enormously liberating! I’ll never be able to overstate that. Change your mind? Like something you didn’t used to, or aren’t supposed to? Who cares!
The Who, now that you mention it, are the reason I wrote this post. I’m watching this documentary about them called Amazing Journey that I TiVo’d off of VH1 Classic, and there’s this part where they talk about how this publicist named Pete Meaden saw the enormous potential of linking the band to the burgeoning Mod culture. As Roger Daltrey puts it, “He said, ‘Right–get out there, cut your hair, go down to Carnaby Street, try on all the clever gear,’ and all of a sudden we were a Mod band.” No handwringing about whether tailored suits and Union Jacks meant Roger Daltrey didn’t have the balls to really be himself, no gnashing of teeth about theatrics and image–just bam, okay, hey, this works! And listen to “I Can’t Explain” and tell me it didn’t.
(Photos found here)