[MUSIC] Tori Amos, "New Age"
Oct. 11th, 2005 09:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldTori Amos' 2001 album Strange Little Girls is a mixed collection at best. The idea behind the album--that Tori Amos would take songs written from the male point of view and cover them on the pattern of her own inimitable feminism--is good. The different personas adopted by Amos, one for each of the twelve songs, made up by the late Kevyn Aucoin and with a ficlet by Neil Gaiman (images and ficlets available here) are provocative. The only thing is that the execution is lacking, I fear, whether because the covers aren't that good ("I Don't Like Mondays," "Raining Blood"), or because, as with 10cc's "I'm Not in Love," she doesn't recognize that the song already came drenched in self-reflexive irony. Some tracks, though, still work. Take the opening one, "New Age."
The song's opening image--a languid narrator, almost entirely naked and with a lover's lipstick--is startling enough, with its decadent eroticism. What makes it the more startling is the fact that, as Chrissie Hynde noted in her review of the Velvet Underground's Live 1969, this song was written by Lou Reed. Here, he once again evidencing his characteristic bisexual/transgender fluidity in song. Arguably, he also deploys an objectifying male gaze, creating the perfect submissive female: unrestrained, attractive, desperate.
The Frank and Nancy in question seem to have been Sinatra père and fille, the last products of the Untied States' old centralized modernist star system. That little bit of Lou Reed humour's interesting, but it's lost a bit of its meaning as the Sinatra era recedes from us. The core of Reed's jibe remains, a yearning for something radically new, a scenario redeemed from pornography by the narrator's sense of humour and by the subsequent lines "over the bridge we go/lookin' for love/over the bridge we go/lookin' for love," and made more complicated by the following verses, stuttering with passion.
Reed's song describes the narrator's transition into a new sort of experimentalism, a new sense of personal innovation away from the conventional world of the bourgeois, all measured and proper, to something more radical. I've not heard the Velvet Underground's version; in fact, I've not heard anything by the Velvet Underground. (This has to change.) Amos' cover is marked by her playfulness, with understated electronics and grinding guitars like some of her songs on 1999's To Venus and Back, and with her own inimitable drawling voice, energetic and sexy. Amos inhabits this song, reclaiming it if it needed to get reclaimed.
The final verse is delivered in a crescendo of guitars, manically and almost out of control.
Something has definitely begun.
waiting for the phone to ring
diamond necklace on my shoulder
waiting for the phone to ring
lipstick on my neck and shoulder
The song's opening image--a languid narrator, almost entirely naked and with a lover's lipstick--is startling enough, with its decadent eroticism. What makes it the more startling is the fact that, as Chrissie Hynde noted in her review of the Velvet Underground's Live 1969, this song was written by Lou Reed. Here, he once again evidencing his characteristic bisexual/transgender fluidity in song. Arguably, he also deploys an objectifying male gaze, creating the perfect submissive female: unrestrained, attractive, desperate.
it seems to be my fancy
to make it with frank and nancy, well
The Frank and Nancy in question seem to have been Sinatra père and fille, the last products of the Untied States' old centralized modernist star system. That little bit of Lou Reed humour's interesting, but it's lost a bit of its meaning as the Sinatra era recedes from us. The core of Reed's jibe remains, a yearning for something radically new, a scenario redeemed from pornography by the narrator's sense of humour and by the subsequent lines "over the bridge we go/lookin' for love/over the bridge we go/lookin' for love," and made more complicated by the following verses, stuttering with passion.
i'll come running to you
oh baby, if you want me
i,i,i...i'll come running to you now
baby, if you want me
i,i,i,i...
looking at my hands today
look to me that they're made of ivory
had a funny call today
someone died and someone's married
Reed's song describes the narrator's transition into a new sort of experimentalism, a new sense of personal innovation away from the conventional world of the bourgeois, all measured and proper, to something more radical. I've not heard the Velvet Underground's version; in fact, I've not heard anything by the Velvet Underground. (This has to change.) Amos' cover is marked by her playfulness, with understated electronics and grinding guitars like some of her songs on 1999's To Venus and Back, and with her own inimitable drawling voice, energetic and sexy. Amos inhabits this song, reclaiming it if it needed to get reclaimed.
The final verse is delivered in a crescendo of guitars, manically and almost out of control.
and something's got a hold on me
it's the beginning of the new age
ohhhhh, it was...
it's the beginning of the new age
can't you save time for yourself
yes, it's the beginning of the new age
oh, you little sick little fucks
yes
it's the beginning of the new age.
Something has definitely begun.
