Breaking Through From the Other Side

Little Earthquakes (1992), by Tori Amos

Welcome once again to our Musical Zodiac - a weekly series in which we arbitrarily match up a musical instrument (or instrument family) with an astrological sign, and spend a month talking about our favorite examples. This month is Taurus, which for some reason means Piano!

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I’ve talked before about this. My male peers in high school were not shy about expressing their opinion that “there are no female artists who have done anything as important as what male artists have done.” Intellectually, I knew that was bullshit, and I could point to popular artists (like Madonna and Janet Jackson) as examples, or show that women have always been contributing (like Florence Price).

But even though I could see that the assertion of male superiority was bogus, I had to admit that my favorite artists — who spoke to me most deeply — were all male artists.

That changed in 1992.

Strictly speaking, I didn’t encounter Tori Amos’s debut album until 1994, when the woman who would soon become my wife introduced me to it. The 1992 album that did shatter my all-male pantheon was Ofra Haza’s Kirya. Haza’s album spoke to me on many levels, and helped me outgrow the trend of relating only to artists who resembled me, but you need more than one piece of evidence to build a solid case against a persistent claim.

And for me, Little Earthquakes shook something foundational in my mind.

Why Do We?

I was 22 when I first heard this song, and after spending my first 17 years in an evangelical Christian church, I had already been questioning lifelong assumptions that weren’t holding up to skeptical scrutiny. I was still treating faith like it was …sacred? …and I hadn’t figured out what my growing discomfort with it meant.

But when Tori sang this verse, it unlocked something in my heart:

Got a kick for a dog begging for love
I got to have my suffering so that I can have my cross
I know a cat named Easter, he says, will you ever learn
You're just an empty cage, girl, if you kill the bird

I know that Tori Amos lyrics are hard to parse. These four lines are no more coherent or linear than anything else she recorded for that album, but keep in mind that I had been listening to Jesus Christ Superstar during the preceding year or two, and one of the unresolved deep thoughts I took away from that was the idea that “Judas (or somebody) had to be the bad guy for the plan of salvation to happen.” The sacrifice Jesus made was not his death. (The old atheist joke is that “Jesus had a bad weekend for your sins.”) No—Judas was the sacrifice. Worse, I was pulling away from the faith I was taught to revere, which made me a Judas.

And when Amos pulled out those lines in a rage-filled pop ballad, all of that came together in a flash. So, I’m sorry, Christians, but when you tell me about how beautiful the Easter story is, I don’t see salvation—I see exploitation.

The Funny Lip Shape

“Crucify” wasn’t the first single off of Little Earthquakes. That honor went to “Me and a Gun,” released on 21 Oct 1991. The song is three minutes and 44 seconds of Amos singing acapella about being raped in Los Angeles when she was 21.

It is a terrifying and gut-wrenching work, and the bravery of recording it at all is monumental…let alone putting it out as the first single on a new album.

The hammer blow of “Me and a Gun” was soon softened by the next single, “Silent All These Years,” which opens by asking, “Excuse me, but can I be you for a while?”

So you found a girl
Who thinks really deep thoughts
What's so amazing about really deep thoughts?
Boy, you best pray that I bleed real soon
How's that thought for you?

Yeah, if you are familiar with this album, you probably figured that was a verse that would resonate with a young man out on his own. And yeah, I experienced that really deep thought when I was 19. It made me begin to understand that using guilt and blame to deter young people from experimenting with sex was a loser’s strategy: it doesn’t accomplish the goal, if the goal is to keep people from having unsafe sexual experiences.

But it does a bang-up job of over-emphasizing the importance of sex and putting an out-sized share of the blame on them when things go wrong. And isn’t avoiding blame the real game?

For the Girls

Tori Amos was in the early surge of powerful female artists who somehow broke through in the early 1990s. Alanis Morissette, PJ Harvey, Liz Phair—and if you were really alternative, you at least knew who Ani DiFranco was. Record companies tapped into the marketability of female empowerment and started selling music “for the girls.” Lilith Fair became a phenomenon and grew for a few years.

But despite the wave of marketing that was already blooming, Little Earthquakes didn’t feel like a “girls’ record” in the way that pop records had been sold in the 1980s. The emphasis on piano and vocals, with some orchestral passages, kept this from being metal, but the lyrics and the passion of the performances defied anyone to label this “bubblegum.”

This album showed me a person, an artist, willing to put it all on the record. She didn’t just express things that I had been struggling to express, though that was a large part of the appeal. She also showed me that she had been through more, battled harder, and come out on the other side with compassion and joy. She was something for me to aspire to.

Your mother shows up in a nasty dress
And it's your turn now to stand where I stand
Everybody lookin' at you, here
Take hold of my hand
Yeah, I can hear them

For all of the raw angst that was on the radio in those years, Tori was powerful in a way that the grunge bands and the angry metal bands couldn’t be. She could laugh. She could be airy and spacey, and then bring everything down with a rumbling piano riff. Hell, she even covered “Smells Like Teen Spirit”!

So, while everybody else was wearing flannel and distressed jeans, and wailing to distorted guitars, one of the most powerful albums came from a very angry girl with a piano.

And I never regretted it.