by Amos, Tori
In a world where few can agree on the power of the gods, popular culture is where the desire Venus personifies finds a home. Images saturate our consciousness, ceaselessly emanating from movie, television, and computer screens, billboards, and magazines. Beauty, always an asset for artists, is now an unavoidable subject. The challenging task is to take control of one's own beauty, to decide what it can be, rather than just giving in to the whims of the fashion industry and other marketing forces.
Tori Amos has fought to claim her own sense of beauty over the course of her career. A musician first, and always a feminist, she has sought ways to capture desire without becoming its object. What she wears, how she poses for a photograph, the light she emits when she smiles: these gestures are not insignificant. She has come to learn the importance of taking care with even the small details of a public image, as she's spent two decades coming to terms with Venus's whimsical command.
PART I TORI:
[TORI:
First I'd like to say that I believe that every person creates a public image, which I address in the second part of this chapter. Because Ann had a very clear vision about wanting to talk about a performer's public self, I wanted to give her “the floor;” I guess, more accurately, I wanted to give her “the pages” to express her view of a performer's public self. Since she has had to interview the likes of hundreds of my kind and kindred, musician/performers, I felt she has a valid perspective on a performer's public self. After all, she has certainly seen more than I have. The first half of this chapter resulted from the ongoing conversation between us; the second half is my considered response to what we discussed.]
CONVERSATION BETWEEN TORI AND ANN:
Every performer has to create a public image, and if you're a woman, you can't pretend it's a matter of small importance to your career. Try slouching around in your gym clothes and the record label will be after you, the press will consider it either a statement or a mistake, even your fans will think you've lost your touch. I had a few choices when I started to find my way as Tori Amos. I could have done what many artists do now, taking whatever was offered from the fashion industry representatives who put those gowns on the award show runways, and in music videos, and on album covers. Or I could take charge of my image as another aspect of my art. For me, the choice was easy. But the implementation of this has naturally been a challenge.
If you're going to put out art that's sonically fresh, why wouldn't you be open to art that's visually fresh? I do consider the designers who make the clothes I wear to be artists. Still, it takes a lot of time and effort. And money. But everybody shops, whether you're a performer or a student or a secretary. It's just a matter of putting the time aside, the money, and surrounding yourself with visual artists whose sense of style fits you like a good pair of stretch jeans. I work with a team for whom fashion is a full-time thing. My advisers on matters of style—Mark dubbed them “the Glam Squad” a few years ago—know things I could never know. I live the musical life, I'm a musician mom, this is all I do. I write songs every day. Nobody will hear most of them. Nobody will see 90 percent of the things my crew suggests I wear. But it's a flow we create.
We take pictures of every performance and appearance so I'll know where we were that day and how much exposure any given piece has had. I'm only taking so many wardrobe cases with me whenever I travel, so I have to make choices. I let only my own stylist buy things, because she knows what we've done. When she's on another continent she liaises with Chelsea, and after all these years that works well, too.
One thing is a necessity—good shoes. Designers and stylists lend clothes all the time, but I don't like to borrow shoes. Because I'm playing, and I'll wreck them. So I have to buy them, and they are not cheap. I need many different kinds of shoes—a certain kind for playing live, a different kind for television appearances (they can't be too low), and then some for just kicking around. If I've worn a pair on a nationally broadcast show, I can't wear them again for a similar show. It's a big part of playing, the right shoes. I reassure my hands of that all the time.
Sometimes the musician side of me rebels against the fashion side of the pop music world and I just want to wear jeans and sweatshirts, the way I did before I made records, the way many male musicians still do most of the time. When I get into that space, I start buying lots and lots of visual art books. I need an entry point back into the visual side of my work. There was a period, in the late 1990s, when I became really tired of the fashionista phenomenon. Designers, brand makers, and models had been taking over the house like cockroaches. You know when you see a house and it's covered in a kind of tent because it's being fumigated? Around that time, I needed to be fashiongated. I did go back to jeans and a T-shirt—though they were always the right jeans and T-shirt, the ones that made a statement, however quiet. It's very hard to figure out the balance.
If you don't keep pulling in from the visual artists who are making pieces you can wear, then what happens is you stop relating to people in some way. Obviously, for a composer the content has to be at the center, but I don't think you can let either slide. After you've been in it for a while your image can become humdrum. Yet many female musicians develop the opposite tendency, even those who are legitimate composers or virtuosos. Too much energy has been put on the image and not enough on the content. Enough already …
The people who are performers first, like Madonna, have this sussed, and we can learn from them. They're thinking about the look and the video before the content, and their music often originates in direct connection with their image. Madonna's sound was made for the dance floor when she epitomized the New York club kid; it got a bit closer to rock when she started presenting herself that way, connected with R&B when her image became softer again, went New Age techno when she got into spirituality, and so on. Fashion has become a part of the musical exploration and experience. Missy Elliott has done a similar thing; so has Gwen Stefani. Their image is essential and extremely tight. If they get it wrong, critics castigate them for it—they are known for their style.
Sometimes artists get overconfident about their content, and that's their downfall. But musicians can make the opposite mistake. I'm including myself here, too, so let's be clear. They put on an image without thinking of how it relates to their music and forget that live performance is also visual. If they are uncomfortable with this side of things, sometimes they go out there trying to make a joke of it all. Sometimes you wish these guys would just try pushing a “Krusty the Clown” image, because at least that would be funny. You can't run away from visual expression. You can't hide behind the “I'm all about the content” line forever. You may get away with that for one record, if you're hot. But style will choose you if you don't choose it. And it takes even more energy to have a nonstyle, because you have to work very hard to be the paradox of what's in fashion. If you can pull this off—this “all about the content” look—then you could become known as an anti–fashion victim.
ANN: Amos doesn't use the phrase “fashion victim” lightly—she has lived it. During her first stab at stardom, in the band Y Kant Tori Read, Amos convinced herself that she could take on the “rock chick” image popular in 1980s Los Angeles. Gallons of hair spray, a leather bustier, thigh-high boots, and porn-star makeup turned Amos into everybody else's archetype, but she was clearly suffering beneath the glamour. Trying to please the music-biz “experts” who seemed to control her fate at the time, the budding virtuoso and composer was nearly smothered within heavy-metal cliché.
CONVERSATION BETWEEN TORI AND ANN:
If I had grown up wanting to do cock rock, if that were my aspiration, then maybe it would have been different. I would have been happy in fishnets. But you see, I was brought into music with Bartók. I was brought up in a tradition of musicians. I did not think I was a bimbo when I first heard Led Zeppelin at age five. I could see and hear how deep it could be. But clearly I got it very wrong in the 1980s. I think when you chase somebody else's notion of success, you'
re bound to fail.
I thought if I didn't succeed, the consequences would be deadly. How many girls have had a dream of who they really are and been rejected so many times that they can't believe it? If there are not people to catch you at that point, you're lost. I had my father, but he was driven. So was I. I thought, I have to succeed at something here, no matter what it is. You go after what you think the record companies want, and you change the music, you get the dicks hard, you find a way to do it. And you know what? You're sitting there puking in the back. My good friends will tell you—I was the angriest dog on the block back then. Didn't know why. Or wouldn't admit it.
What was most difficult was that some women had been able to keep their integrity while I was sacrificing mine in the name of getting cocks hard. When I was making Y Kant Tori Read, my executive producer was David Kirshenbaum and across town he was producing somebody called Tracy Chapman. He exposed me to her, and I couldn't understand—wait a minute. Wait a minute. How come I'm the cheap hooker and she's the poet? Then I looked at myself in the mirror and I said, “Well, you look like a cheap hooker.”
It all culminated in an incident I've talked about a lot—my accidental epiphany. The record had been reviewed in Billboard, and I had been called a bimbo. [The exact quote was, in fact, “Unfortunately, provocative packaging sends the (inaccurate) message that this is just so much more bimbo music.”] I was at Hugo's restaurant in Hollywood, and I overheard someone I knew slightly talking about me—“Oh, that's that girl over there with a review in Billboard magazine this week where they called her a bimbo.” The humiliation of that. This was the very moment in my private life when I'd started to play piano again, and I'd met some women who were turning me on to all sorts of poetry about sexuality, stuff that captured how people could burn inside, and I was burning, too, I was burning alive. That night I realized that when it comes to sexual expression, unless there's a certain initiation, it's like a woman dancing in a strip club and saying she's liberated. Maybe she feels liberated, but she will also have to be clear that she is an object for most of the onlookers. Not the subject. Now can you hold the duality of being an object for many while being the subject for yourself? If you fool yourself and you are not able to hold the duality—which is extremely difficult to hold—then you will become just another object in their subjugation of women. What I'd been doing with my image was more akin to degrading sex … that's no way to honor the Sacred Prostitute.
ANN: The failure of Y Kant Tori Read's debut album, which sold only about seven thousand copies, revealed to Amos that success was inseparable from self-governance. Still, Amos would have to find the songs that became Little Earthquakes, leave Los Angeles, and meet the inimitable stylist Karen Binns before she could capture a public way of being that felt real.
CONVERSATION BETWEEN TORI AND ANN:
I had to change, but at first I didn't know how. Obviously the music was the easier piece of the puzzle to change—I just reached out for my piano and she was there. My outer appearance, as I remember at the time, became very plain in a way. No makeup, no hair spray no tight Lycra … I got rid of all of it within a few days after that Billboard article. I was doing demos with Eric Rosse for what would become Little Earthquakes. We're talking 1988, when I started writing all this music on the piano— “Silent All These Years,” “Crucify,” etc. Little Earthquakes didn't come out until 1992, so as you can see, I spent a few years just playing the piano and writing these songs.
Yes, this album was written from a deep catharsis, but also there was a reclaiming of the five-year-old little girl I had been at the piano and her view of music. I finally started to figure out that the “public image” issue would have to be addressed when I came to properly record Little Earthquakes in the studio with Davitt Sigerson. He was one of the album's producers; he's real music-industry sage material. He said to me, “People can feel it when an artist is wearing clothing that isn't hers, literally.” It's like claiming a false lineage. He got me back to my lineage. That was his greatness. He reminded me. We would talk and he would ask, “How can somebody with your pedigree as a musician end up where you did?”
By this time I was in London, and I was already in my metamorphosis. Lee Ellen Newman, head of press at East West Records UK, became my first friend, my compadre, and partner in crime on the U.K. side of Atlantic Records. Because of our deep friendship, she was able to talk with me in a way that no one else could, thereby getting through. By the time Elyse Taylor was brought in as head of marketing at East West in 1991, Lee Ellen and I were confident enough in our friendship to open our circle to her, thereby making a triad. With Elyse we created an equilateral triangle: Lee Ellen presented to the world what Elyse and I spent months developing. This was the original creative think tank under the watchful eye of Max Hole. Lee Ellen and Elyse knew that we would need to pull in visually talented people who understood what I was pushing sonically First I would meet Cindy Palmano (a photographer brought in by Elyse), who changed how I saw imagery and she, in turn, turned me on to Karen Binns, with whom I've worked ever since.
We didn't have a lot of money at that time. It was exciting, though, and you're seeing what's out there and trying to figure out what you're doing and who you are. We would pick stuff up from the open-air markets in London. Karen still does that every weekend. It's great, because what you find is one of a kind.
When I met Karen I couldn't understand a word she was saying. She's a professional now. In those early days she was not. She was doing weird art stuff; she'd been involved with the downtown art crowd around Michel Basquiat in New York. Cindy had suggested her, though, and I trusted Cindy. I don't know why, exactly, but I just said okay. And the great thing is, Karen and I developed the look together and then Karen had other clients and her look became influential for them. She'll say to me, “Girrl, you're my muse,” and I'll just laugh. I'll laugh my head off, because everybody else is my muse when I write songs.
KAREN BINNS:
I was living in London, having moved there from Brooklyn, where I grew up. Cindy Palmano contacted me about this new singer. Don't ask me why Cindy called me—maybe because I wasn't at the top of my field at that time, so I would be available for someone new. Cindy said, “This is a girl you can grow with. I know you have something in you that can work with this girl.” I have to give it to Cindy, for her to see that I would connect with Tori was a shock, because nobody else in the fashion field would have imagined us as a pair. I mean, just look at us. Tori's style at the time was different. She was obsessed with Patagonia, that outdoorsy clothing line out of California. I became obsessed with Patagonia too. To the point that I had André Walker design her a glamorous fleece Patagonia-like gown for the 1994 Grammys, which was stunning. Could you believe it? André made fleece look sleek.
Coming to England did change Tori's style. The record company wanted to style her as this English rose type of girl. Tori told me she listened to Led Zeppelin. She wanted to look like Robert Plant. So she got to wear jeans, but with something more exciting, like a vintage swimsuit, on top. I think I started her off with vintage clothes and jeans—with a flare leg, of course. Which was a good place to start in 1992.
ANN: The impact of Little Earthquakes not only allowed Amos to define her own style; it established her as a pop icon. Though the look she explored in partnership with Binns, beautifully recorded in Cindy Palmano's album photographs, was thoroughly modern and bohemian, many still called her a “fairy princess.” The crystal-clear artwork for her second album, Under the Pink, reinforced her dreamlike image, though on a deeper level it reflected the introspection of her art.
KAREN BINNS:
Under the Pink was a record Tori made, metaphorically, inside her room. I had to show the purity of what she was trying to do. The purity of her work, of her music, and where it comes from. White, of course, is the best color to convey that essence, and as you remember she had really natural makeup for Under the Pink. The designers she was wearing at the time were qui
te earthy and ethereal. Which was what was happening at the time.
CONVERSATION BETWEEN TORI AND ANN:
I remember Cindy, Karen, and I having long, long talks about how to represent emotional danger. Cindy came up with a glass world with a lone woman—Tori—having to navigate it with bare feet. Karen came up with the idea of white. I dug it because if the lone woman missteps, then there is nowhere to hide all that blood on such a pretty white dress. I found that expression more in the vein of Artemis, if you're looking for an archetype. Artemis—the lone huntress, who finds other women to help her achieve what must be achieved as she tries to protect those creatures that she cares for.
ANN: Though she remained a musician first, by this time Amos fully recognized the value of approaching her public image as another aspect of her art. Her next album, Boys for Pele, leapt into fiery territory utterly removed from the relative calm of Under the Pink, and Amos and her partners in style devised a new visual approach to match its intensity. The photo session for that album's cover produced the most controversial image of her career: Amos, in southern belle dishabille, apparently suckling a piglet. In another shot, she brandished a rifle and a coolly defiant gaze. Amos has anything but regrets about this session, though many found it utterly distasteful.
