Tori Amos closed
her world tour in Los Angeles on Sunday night. Arts and
entertainment editor Corey Scholibo was there to witness her
evolution -- and in the process learn a little
bit about his own.
The first CD I ever got as a present was Tori Amos’s
Little Earthquakes. I had seen the video for
“Silent All These Years” on MTV and had put it
on my Christmas wish list only to have my 70-year-old
great-aunt deliver it -- all wrapped up in one of
those long cardboard CD boxes. I was 12 years old.
In the early ‘90s, when my generation was wallowing
in Claire Danes's self-esteem issues on My
So-called Life, other young girls
and gay boys like me found Tori Amos and immediately
knew we had found our voice. While some found
their identity in Nirvana and the passing of Kurt
Cobain, for me it was and always will be Tori.
I was lucky enough to be seated in the fourth row at the
Nokia Theater in Los Angeles on Sunday night, the last
night of her national tour. I had read
that Amos was taking turns performing as the various
doll characters that make up her conceptual new album
American Doll Posse. The idea: different songs
for different kinds of women, who presumably each represent
some aspect of her personality. Or, all women are made
up of similar archetypes like the rocker, the
vamp, etc. It doesn’t really matter,
though, because the songs speak for themselves, and the
dolls serve as chapter headings.
She opened the show as the blond Isabel, vamping in a cloud
of smoke and puffing big clouds while slowly turning
and pulling the smoke over her head like she was
burning sage to clear the air. The first song up was
“Yo George,” a not-so-thinly veiled message
to George W. Bush, then she
launched straight into “In the Springtime of His
Voodoo” from her controversial album Boys
for Pele. When she began to make stiff,
angular gestures with her arms -- at one point even
pausing to do the robot -- it took me a minute to realize
that she was pretending to be a doll. The first few
songs, as Isabel, were all performed as if she were in
a trance. For her performance of
“Scarlet’s Walk” -- from the album of
the same name -- she even swung an antique
lamp back and forth methodically, trying to
hypnotize us.
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Scholibo is The Advocate's arts &
entertainment editor