Cruel

“I played the percussion of Cruel in the shower on my excess fat. It sounded really good—it made me feel good when I’d have that next bag of potato chips. I’d say ‘Look, Cruel sounds great in the shower. You eat those chips, girl!’” [Wall of Sound - April 1998]

“When you start talking to people who have that kind of loss [miscarriage], somebody piping up, going, ‘Well, the angels were there for us during this time,’ well that’s beautiful. But people have to understand that they’re not there for everybody all the time. They get lost on the way. That’s why in Cruel when I say, ‘I don’t know why,’ I really don’t know why I can be cruel. I don’t know why the angels aren’t there for everybody, but they’re not.” [Alternative Press - July 1998]

“There exists such a thing as boasting about misery. One sentence in ‘Cruel’ deals with that: ‘Dance with the Sufis celebrate your top ten in the charts of pain’. When I had a miscarriage, there were people who said: ‘Yes, but you only lost an unborn child. Our son was murdered!’ For some people things aren’t bad enough as it is. And some hang on to the fact that The Most Terrible Thing happened to them: they entered at #1 in the charts of pain. And then others are secretly jealous because they’re only at #6.”

Was the reference to celebrating your “Top Ten in the charts of pain” an ironic sideswipe at the “Professional Widow” remix?
“No, it’s about when you hear people listing their griefs, it can be become a bit like a Billboard chart. ‘Hey, only your uncle abused you? I had 17 sailors and then my uncle!’ That’s what that was about.. I get a lot of letters from girls who don’t talk about what happened to them because they feel they have no right to speak up. So they become victims anonymous.” [Vox - June 1998]

Tori describes Cruel as “very much a dark angel- very primitive, pig-Latin ghetto feminism.” [San Francisco Chronicle - May 4, 1998]