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WE’RE talking with Tori Amos about Lorena Bobbitt. Lorena Bobbitt, the woman who hacked off her
husband’s dick and chucked it into a field, walked free from a Virginian
courthouse last week. Apparently, she wasn’t guilty of maliciously
wounding her husband, John Wayne. Had she been jailed one particularly batty
bond of radical feminists had threatened to cut the penises off 10 American men
for every year of her prison term. Emasculation terrorism. Now Bobbitt begins a new and highly lucrative
career as a screenwriter and icon of the feminist fightback. Things are pretty
bad out there. TORI Amos, presently in the Top Five with her
single, “Cornflake Girl”, has been following the Bobbitt trial on TV, reading
every gory feature and high-minded overview. She says she’s thrilled by the
verdict. She looks less than thrilled, more grimly satisfied. “You see,” says
Tori, “I’m coming from a different place to you.
I’m coming from . . . I’m mad, mad at myself to this day that I didn’t kill the
man who raped me that night.” Tori was raped in her early twenties. The song,
“Me And A Gun”, on her 1992 debut solo LP, “Little Earthquakes”, describes the
incident in fractured, surrealist detail (“I sang ‘holy holy’ as he buttoned
down his pants/Me and a gun and a man on my back/But I haven’t seen BARBADOS so
I must get out of this”). Other songs allude to that night still more
confront the issue of men’s violence against women and do so without the
spitting peroxide dramatics that have, in the minds of most, come to
characterise fem-rock. Tori Amos, like Cohen, Joplin and Bush before her,
manages to be both chilling and sublime. A YEAR ago, when Oliver Stone was pre-producing
his forthcoming movie, the Quentin Tarantino-penned “Natural Born Killers”, the
tale of a female revenge killer who dispatches no less than 47 men, he heard
Tori’s Little Earthquakes and decided he wanted to use three songs,
including “Me And A Gun”, on the soundtrack. They met for dinner and Stone
explained the plot. Tori, a long-time fan of the director, was keen to be
involved, particularly when she heard that her heroine, Patti Smith, was to
make an appearance in the movie, eventually to turn him down. “He said the song was supposed to represent Peace in
the movie,” recalls Tori. “I said, ‘Well, if I represent Peace then I’m not doing a
hell of a good job am I? Because this woman kills 47 men.’ See, it’s always
been difficult for me to sing ‘Me And A Gun’. And when I sing, ‘I must get
out of this’, I don’t mean go kill 47 people. “Like, you know, the Bobbitt thing, the wanting
revenge,” she continues. “I can understand all of that, the way the experience of rape
is so totally life-changing, totally incapacitating, the way you want to show
them what it’s like. But the answer isn’t go kill. Eventually I couldn’t have
any of my songs associated with the movie. There are layers to my songs. I
didn’t know if there were any layers to his film.” FOR some time after the rape, Tori says she took
solace in the status of victim. (“It simplifies
the world, makes you superior, reduces everyone else’s problems to a big
nothing. Like, what do you know?”)
Being a victim was something she was not entirely unfamiliar with. Tori had
seen aspirations thwarted and ambitions mocked since she was old enough to walk. Things began well, all too well. Born in North
Carolina, the daughter of a strict Methodist preacher, she was playing piano by
the age of two and composing musical scores by the age of four. From five to
11, she was trained at the prestigious Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore.
Teachers, parents and friends queued up to take credit for her achievements. Then she f***ed up, let them down. She got
expelled from the conservatory for playing by ear, discovered rock’n’roll,
discovered boys. She spent most of her teens playing bars and hotels from
Washington to Los Angeles, convinced that fate had robbed her of a better
future. After the rape, she hit rock bottom and joined an
LA rock band called Y Kant Tori Read. (“I was a
real sleazy, big hair rock chick. Real distant, look-but-don’t-touch. I wore my
war medals with pride, but none of the songs were about me.”) The image and the bond were another reassuring
failure, except failure didn’t feel that good anymore. She returned to her
piano in the hope of confronting what she had become and what had been forced
upon her. She wrote Little Earthquakes. Ironically, although the album
was a ferocious indictment of men, it was around this time that Tori started,
slowly, to trust them again. She met Eric Rosse. “For a long time, I had real difficulty having an
intimate relationship with anyone,” she tells
us. “Every time I saw someone who looked like
that guy I relived that night, every time I read about rape I relived that
night. Whenever I was being intimate with somebody, it was like these veils
came down. I couldn’t see that men’s physicality and strength could tender. I
had to pretend I was a whore in my mind, thinking I was gonna get paid so that
I could be detached and stay in control. I had so many schemes going on, and I
kept ‘em going for a while.” “But now, with Eric, my boyfriend, it’s changing.
He’s relentless in making me present. Now I’m lucky I can’t pretend
anymore, he doesn’t allow me to pretend. He makes me say his name, we keep the
lights on and really have to take responsibility for what we’re doing there.
He’ll ask me what he’s doing, he’ll say, What am I doing? I’m f***ing
you. Say it. And I love you. Say it’. We go through this and it’s
healing, it takes away the idea that you can’t have passion without violence
and that love is only about being held. Before, all my passion was put into my
piano, and you can’t live like that.” TORI Amos’ new album, Under The Pink, an
eerie, exquisite, eccentric and often deeply unsettling piece of work, deals
perhaps even more controversially, with women’s violence towards women, albeit
from a highly personal point of view. Its release is especially timely given
the publicity generated by Naomi Wolf’s “Fire With fire”, [sic] an attack on
victim feminism, and Kate Roiphe’s “The Morning After”, a gutsy rejoinder to
accepted American feminist wisdom on rape. “For a while,” says
Tori, “to survive the whole rape thing, I looked
at women as incapable of that kind of viciousness. I put them on a pedestal,
they could do no wrong. I had this idyllic view of the Sisterhood. In my mind I
needed to create a safety group, a camaraderie group, a place where everything
was OK. I thought that women could never be as cruel as men. But they can, it’s
just that women’s viciousness is a little different. For the most part, women
get at each other in a totally emotional way.” Tori came to this conclusion after parting company
with several close friends who spent their time complacently bitching about one
another, their men and their lot. And doing nothing about it. “I kinda realised,”
says Tori, “that the whole thing’s not just
about sex, it’s about individuals. Through some friends, I came into contact
with the Native American Pueblos [Tori herself
is part-Cherokee] and their matriarchs believe
that women will only resolve their problems with men once they’ve taken action
to resolve their problems with themselves and one another. You need to love
life, you know? You need to love men, and you need to love women. And I think
I’m getting there . . .” Under The
Pink is out now on east west www.yessaid.com |