omophagia's Full Review: The Beekeeper by Tori Amos
I've always told you the songs are separate from me. Yes, I write them; I gather the elements. But I do so by going around and listening to other people's stories. I watch the audience. I study how people react to what I've already created, and that also goes into new songs. It's like being a chronicler, instead of just somebody who invents. I research and put what I discover together in a form-- which is what every artist really does. In every songwriter's suitcase there is a kind of musical paint box that we take with us everywhere we go." -- Tori Amos, as quoted in the advertising insert for Tori Amos: Piece by Piece, included in The Beekeeper.
Embedded deep within the zeitgeist is the idea that artists, of both the high culture and the pop culture varieties, must be somehow flawed, tortured individuals. That only through profound suffering can great, lasting art be created. The sheer volume of canonical authors whose literature was produced during manic episodes of Bipolar Disorder or the occasional comma of sobriety punctuating life-long alcohol or drug addictions does give this construct a certain weight. And it extends to pop artists, as well. The undeniable influence of psychotropic drugs has resulted in some of rock music's most compelling works, and the impact of generations of social injustice is evident in much of classic soul music. But the notion that suffering is a prerequisite for relevance or insight is nonetheless questionable, and it establishes a certain set of expectations that might not be "fair" to the evaluation of every artistic statement.
Complicating matters, then, is the work of a performer who has made a career out of turning difficult personal experiences into deeply affecting art. Such is the case of Tori Amos, who has mined such impossibly loaded sufferings as sexual assault (on her debut, Little Earthquakes) and a miscarriage (on her last great album, From the Choirgirl Hotel) to revelatory, often astonishing albums. Amos' technical gifts are obvious-- her virtuosity with any keyboard instrument, her powerful and evocative soprano-- but her greatest asset as a recording artist has always been her ability to take her personal misfortunes and weave them into songs that her fans, no matter their station in life, could frequently adopt as their own. It's the reason that Amos, moreso than any other singer-songwriter of the past decade, inspires such fierce devotion in her fanbase. Her music affects her audience to a degree that few of her contemporaries can consistently match.
On her first four albums-- Little Earthquakes, Under the Pink, Songs for Pele, and From the Choirgirl Hotel-- Amos' music not only inspired a generation of loyal fans but also ranked among the most artistically relevant, progressive rock music. She's mentioned in the same breath as PJ Harvey, Bjork, and Liz Phair as the most vital women in rock music in the 1990s for precisely that reason, and the sheer scope and technical prowess of her songcraft allowed Amos to get away with a certain degree of self-indulgence-- knowing her fans' tendency to inscribe intensely personal meanings to even her most cloying wordplays, she issued the occasional "dare" to her audience to find depth in lines like "Caught a lite sneeze / Caught a lite breeze / Caught a lightweight lightningseed," and emerged no worse for wear for having done so.
But on To Venus and Back, Amos' self-indulgent streak finally caught up with her, and that album was characterized by both a technical and an artistic laziness that suggested that she was beginning to take her fans' devotion for granted. That tendency continued unabated through a frankly awful album of cover songs, Strange Little Girls, onto her last proper release, 2002's bloated, deadly-dull Scarlet's Walk, ostensibly a concept album about her fictional, titular protagonist's journey across a post-9/11 America. And, if Scarlet Walk wasn't entirely successful in pulling off its stated mission statement, its real crime was that it was marred by a dreary, monotonous production job that actively downplayed the technical gifts that, if nothing else, always managed to keep Amos' lesser efforts interesting. It was no mere coincidence that "A Sorta Fairytale" and "Taxi Ride" garnered substantial airplay on Adult Top 40 radio alongside Norah Jones and Three Doors Down-- though lovely (and easily the high points of Scarlet's Walk), they ranked among the least challenging work of Amos' career, sonically, and she sounded as though she were reaching for the relevance, either personal or pop-cultural, that had formerly come so easy to her. Scarlet's Walk had a larger thematic "point," but it was Amos' least interesting work to date because it was so impersonal, presented from outside of her own experiences.
For 2005's The Beekeeper, it might seem promising, then, that Amos makes an effort to return to her post-modern, confessional songwriting mode. What's shocking about the album is not the extent to which it takes her fans for granted-- again, that's something at which she's hinted for a while now-- but that Amos seems finally to have run out of things to say. Or, if she has a larger point, she's entirely forgotten how to communicate it with any efficacy.
Looking to that quote from the promotional insert, it's clear that Amos understands her demographic-- particularly the ones who set up online fan sites that include some godawful poetry and artwork that Amos' songs have inspired-- and their continued willingness, despite the obvious reasons to stop doing so, to purchase anything that might give those rare glimpses into her creation mythology. A creation mythology that, at this point, has become as convoluted as that late-run The X Files nonsense. The question raised by that quote, however, is what she's drawn from her audience's reactions to her recent output, and how those reactions have infused the songs on The Beekeeper. She claims to be carrying a "musical paint box" around in her "suitcase," but the only brush she's carrying is a 12" roller capable of painting only the broadest, base-covering strokes.
Consider "Witness," on which Amos chants a chorus of "Thought I had a witness to this crime / C'mon, c'mon, c'mon," repeatedly for what plays like the longest track in her catalogue. The crime in question? "I know now That it's over / Had a life before you left me / Burnin' in Your petrol emotion". The title track opens with a line sure to please any college student who's ever taken an introductory poetry writing seminar, "Flaxen hair blowing in the breeze / It's time for the geese to head south". Rather than heading south, the song heads to, I swear to God, "The Dance of The Infinity of The Hive". Elsewhere, lead single "Sleeps With Butterflies" is a rip-off of, of all things, "Somewhere Out There" from An American Tail, and "Original Sinsuality" and "Barons of Suburbia" compete for the ranking as Amos' worst-ever song title.
The refrain to the flat-out embarrassing "Ireland" is, "Drivin' in my SAAB on my way to Ireland," which Amos mistakes as a point of entry into the song for the listener, in case said listener is turned off by the stultifying prose of the song's conclusion. "Then an encounter with a voice that caressed me / When it wasn't you who held off a surrender / To one spoiled nun who taught you the names of the mountains on the moon / and then a Jesuit proceeded to arrange your soul / while I prayed on my knees". Congratulations, Tori. You've written what would be a remarkable run-on sentence if it bothered to have an actual subject - predicate combination. As is, it's Amos' twee lyrical wordplays taken to what is, hopefully, their logical end.
Amos drops the pretense precisely once on The Beekeeper, on the lone track to boast both a coherent narrative and a peek into the personal factors that went into the album's genesis. On "Ribbons Undone," Amos writes a candid portrait of her relationship with her daughter. "Comes in for a landing / Pure flash of lightning / Past alice blue blossoms you follow her laughter / And then she'll surprise you / Arms filled with lavendar / Yes my little pony is growing up fast / She corrects me and says / "You mean a thoroughbred" / A look in her eye says the battle's beginning". Lyrically, it's the best song Amos has written since From the Choirgirl Hotel. It's a shame, then, that her production job on the album actively undermines it.
No one should be surprised, following Scarlet's Walk, that Amos' sound might further evolve into "Adult Contemporary." But, while her compositions on Scarlet's Walk were pretty but slight, the melodies she's written for The Beekeeper never once get off the ground. From the woman who has written such aggressively unconventional melodies as those found in songs like "Cornflake Girl," "Liquid Diamonds," or any of the songs from Little Earthquakes, that the tracks on The Beekeeper are built upon melodies of fewer than eight notes is stunning. Musically, these are songs are uninspired and, ultimately, complacent.
And it's "Ribbons Undone" that suggests the source of this complacency. For perhaps the first time since she appeared on the cultural radar, Amos is content in her personal life, with a stable, productive marriage and a toddler to look after. The Beekeeper's overall tone, then, suggests that "settling down" is simply a euphemism for "settling," because Amos has never sounded so bored or irrelevant. The album takes her fans' great expectations for granted-- and why not, if she has a happy family to keep her fulfilled?
It makes judging The Beekeeper an action accompanied by a definite feeling of guilt. Amos has exorcised her personal demons so publicly before. Knowing what she's been through, how can anyone-- particularly one of her long-term fans!-- fault her for her happiness? The important distinction to make, then, is that Amos, like everyone else in the world, fully deserves to be happy, and good for her for finally finding it. But if that happiness means that she's going to neglect the artistic gifts that have meant so much to so many people, that doesn't mean anyone will want to listen to what she does-- or, in the case of The Beekeeper, doesn't-- have to say. It's the same problem that accounts for the relative indifference with which Sarah McLachlan's Afterglow was met-- she's recorded some exceptional music earlier in her career, but there's no way to get around the fact that motherhood has made her music, well, dull.
Amos, in the album's liner notes, has never looked more beautiful or more peaceful. But The Beekeeper makes AOR staple Dido sound like Joan Jett by comparison. It's lifeless work that manages the unusual accomplishment of being both self-indulgent and not the least bit interesting, which positions The Beekeeper as the antithesis to Bjork's Medulla.
The album includes nineteen (19!) tracks, only one of which justifies either its over-4:00 running time or its inclusion on the album at all, and another one that tarnishes the reputation of Irish singer-songwriter Damien Rice, whose album (O) was certainly among 2003's strongest, her duet partner on the if-only-she-were-kidding "The Power of Orange Knickers." Inside, Amos groups the songs non-sequentially into six categories, detailed below, ostensibly to reinforce the album's (non-existent) larger thematic thrust. It's the kind of stunt that works if one's songs have a coherent point-- the "movements" on Green Day's American Idiot, for instance, or the "Neighborhood" suite from The Arcade Fire's Funeral-- but, listening to the songs in their groups is a task only Amos' few remaining die-hards might find rewarding. And, even then, the results they might find raise questions of how deeply biased they've become by their devotion. The Greenhouse perhaps fares worst, with the Rice duet following "Ireland" in the most head-slappingly obvious feature of an album full of them.
Perhaps I'm missing something deeper in The Beekeeper, but I don't think so, and the music doesn't give me much reason to care either way. It 's a bland album that, despite one admittedly excellent lyric, doesn't demand scrutiny and which leaves little to no impression whatsoever. Sure, it's accessible-- the people who were terrified by the likes of "Precious Things" or "Professional Widow" earlier in Amos' career might find a lot to like about The Beekeeper-- but at the expense of Amos' artistic mettle. This is the last album of hers I will purchase without having heard it beforehand.
Given the quality of her 90s output-- of her contemporaries, the survivors of "alternative," only Bjork and Beck have dropped four sequential albums that match Amos' opening quartet-- it's impossible to write Amos off entirely. She's just too gifted. But her last four albums have squandered those gifts and have toyed too callously with her fanbase for an album like The Beekeeper to be taken the least bit seriously. And, returning again to that quote about her approach to songwriting, the idea that it is reactions to the songs from The Beekeeper that will dictate her artistic direction from here troubles for its implications. How, exactly, will Amos react to the complete indifference that a comatose album like The Beekeeper inspires?
Album Specs: The Beekeeper, Tori Amos.
Sony Records. CBS 92800.
02/22/2005.
America s queen of avant-garde adult pop follows up 2003 s Tales Of A Librarian best-of collection with this, her seventh studio album. On this self-p...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
America s queen of avant-garde adult pop follows up 2003 s Tales Of A Librarian best-of collection with this, her seventh studio album. On this self-p...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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