‘I-Rock’: Tori Amos marked for death

‘I-Rock’: Tori Amos marked for death

Matter of a fact, if I ever get down to Carolina I’m gonna try
to figure out a way to off James Taylor. Hate to come off like a
Nazi, but if I hear one more
Jesus-walking-the-boys-and-girls-down-a-Carolina-path-while-the-dilemma-of-existence-crashes-like-a-slab-of-hod-on-J.T.’s-shoulders
song, I will drop everything … and hop the first Greyhound to
Carolina for the signal satisfaction of breaking off a bottle of
Ripple … and twisting it into James Taylor’s guts until he
expires in a spasm of adenoidal poesy."

-Lester Bangs

The early ’70s saw the rise of a new kind of pop star:
singer-songwriters. They claimed to be the bearers of a new breed
of folk music, but from listening to their flimsy, innocuous,
radio-friendly songs, you could tell their idea of folk wasn’t
Woody Guthrie, or even early Bob Dylan, both of whom, unlike their
inferior ’70s imitators, sang about topics other than themselves
(and had a good beat and a vibrant sound to boot). Instead, this
new breed more closely resembled the two dimensional pop-scholck of
Paul Simon, specifically the shallow self-pity of "I Am a
Rock."

The most visible practitioners of this musical style ­
Stephen Stills, Jackson Browne, James Taylor ­ sprang from the
bowels of the Woodstock generation with acoustic guitars, swollen
egos and the certainty that their megalomanic self-absorption would
earn them an audience as interested in their "suffering" as they.
And they were right.

The best rock critics of the time greeted this movement with
trepidation. Lester Bangs, citing its "involuted (egocentricity),"
dubbed the new music "I-Rock," and fantasized about killing James
Taylor for the good of rock ‘n’ roll.

Four years later, Greil Marcus explored the rise of this music
­ and the reason for its popularity ­ in more depth:

"Rock ‘n’ roll is suffering from that old progressive school
fallacy that says if what you write is about your own feelings, no
one can criticize it. Truth telling is beginning to settle into a
slough where it is nothing more than a pedestrian autobiography set
to placid music framed by a sad smile on the cover …"

Like many, Marcus missed the days when imaginative songwriters
like Chuck Berry and Bob Dylan would adopt personas rather than
simply tear pages from their diaries. "A good part of the
audience," he lamented, "has lost its taste for songs that are
about something out there in the world that the singer is trying to
make real … (Replacing) such songs are tunes that deny the world
by affirming the joys of solipsism."

OK, fine, you may say. But that was 20 years ago ­ music
has changed; our generation’s different, right?

Flash forward to a few months ago. I’m talking to a acquaintance
of mine ­ raving, actually ­ about Public Enemy. I’ve
finished my testament to the greatness of this seminal group, and
I’m asking her what she thinks of them. Her answer?

"I just can’t relate to them."

Does anybody else besides me find the implication to her reply a
mite unsettling? That for music ­ and by extension, art ­
to have validity, it has to connect with whom you are? That your
immediate perspective carries more importance than anyone
else’s?

Generation X chooses to distance itself from the Woodstock
generation, mainly because they are our parents, and, well, kids
will be kids. We smugly hint our counterculture to be more
significant than theirs, but when it comes right down to it, the
majority of us are just as self-absorbed, narcissistic and wrapped
up in ourselves as our parents were ­ in fact, probably
more.

Increasingly, this is beginning to reflect in popular music. For
every band like Green Day that rails against "melodramatic fools"
who revel in their own insularity and romanticize their own
invented anguishes, there are others who play that role with a
straight face, without realizing how pathetic they really are.

You can hear that role being played out by Adam Duritz in the
Counting Crows’ "Mr. Jones," when Duritz whines, "I wish I was
beautiful …" You can hear it when Billy Corgan of the Smashing
Pumpkins sings in his strangulated warble, "I used to be a little
boy." You can hear it in Eddie Vedder’s 202nd
I-was-abused-as-a-child-and-that’s-why-I-feel-so-alone song.

Most of all, you can hear it in Tori Amos, who singularly
represents everything that stinks about the worst of modern popular
music. It’s bad enough that her smooth, piano-based music has more
to do with Billy Joel than rock ‘n’ roll. But her humorless,
self-pitying lyrics are not my idea of a good time ­ does a
song whose hook line is "Why do we crucify ourselves?" sound like
the kind of song that, like the best rock, will set you free?

I know that song asks why women often perpetuate their own
self-generated misery ­ a worthy topic. But Amos’
hypersensitive lyrics, combined with her weight-of-the-world vocal
delivery, make it sound like she’s teaching women another way to be
melodramatic. I mean, which behavior sounds more likely to you: a)
listening to this song, escaping from your metaphorical prison and
leaving behind self-defeating attitudes or b) replaying this song
ad nauseum on Friday night, feeling sorry for yourself while better
looking people than you are having fun?

Amos’ alienation from rock, not to mention the rest of Western
civilization, is best epitomized in her cover of Nirvana’s "Smells
Like Teen Spirit." We all know that the mission of Nirvana’s
original was to crush apathy and insularity, but Tori must have
lost her Cliff’s Notes on the way to the recording studio. She
sings it with the same patented, calculated bathos that typifies
all of her recordings, as if she’s chastising the cruel,
insensitive, popular people who ignored her in high school ­
just the thing to make isolation of the bedroom you’ve been holing
up in that more miserable.

Boo-hoo! This crap, from a 30-year-old, a grown woman! Kind of
makes you think Amos knows her target audience well.

Marry this tendency in modern music with the hackneyed "Catcher
In The Rye"-derived angst of many of today’s young people, and
you’ve got serious problems. You get the girl who wrote to the L.A.
Times to tell them that she lives in an "insane asylum," and that
Trent Reznor "wrote my life." You get Morrissey fans too lame to
realize that half of the time, the Moz is playing the Lonely Boy
persona for laughs. Come on folks, he’s British! You know, the Land
of Irony?

Personally, I’d much rather hear performers with a sense of
humor, a fistful of attitude, a love of sex and fun and experiences
and insights that go beyond their front door. I want rock ‘n’ roll
back. And I want it now.

Tatum would like to inform his readers that the revolution will
be tomorrow. His column appears every Wednesday.