Abnormally Attracted to Sin
by Tori Amos
Universal Republic Records
IN A STUNNING REVISION, appended to his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality in 1915, Sigmund Freud asserts that “all human beings are capable of making a homosexual object-choice, and have in fact made one in their unconscious.” Freud even identified in the constitution of human sexuality what he termed an inherent “freedom to range.” On Abnormally Attracted to Sin, Tori Amos’s tenth studio album, the artist ponders this queerish sort of freedom by taking us into the consciousness of gay and straight men and women. “So you heard I crossed over the line?” she asks at the start, “Do I have regrets? Well not yet.”
No American female songwriter at work today possesses both the musical range and the enduring interest in matters relating to sexuality and gender like Amos. Her new album follows closely on the (high) heels of “American Doll Posse” (2007), in which she let her multiple personalities, known as Pip, Isabel, Clyde, and Santa—which her fans call her “alterna-Toris”—run wild. These dramatis personae exist for the exposition of Amos’ mental states, and signify a vision of selfhood that is protean and diffuse.
This is the singer who, in 1996, banged on a harpsichord in a song called “Blood Roses” while gasping “You think I’m a queer/ I think you’re a queer,” and in the album’s cover art, posed with a piglet suckling her left breast. Five years later, on a cover of Joe Jackson’s “Real Men,” she sang about boys “dancing in pairs,” played on the slippage between “guys” and “gays” before cautioning: “Don’t call me a faggot unless you’re a friend.” Her own tribute to the celebrated stylist and costumer, Kevyn Aucoin (dead at forty), followed on the sprawling “Scarlet’s Walk” (2002). Behind the speaker’s adoration of her gay male confidante—“We all want to cry as you’re moving in”—lurks the rough beast of homophobia. “Just another dead fag to you,” she sings, addressing some intolerant outsider, but then overrides this elegiacally with “I’m glad you’re on my side.”
Now 46, married, and a mother, Tori Amos may be on the other side in her personal life, but still she continues to court and attract a sizable gay fan-base. Born in North Carolina to a minister father, she was a virtuoso pianist by the age of five. She later fled the conservatory and played in piano bars before eventually migrating to Los Angeles, where she gained public acclaim in 1992 with her debut, “Little Earthquakes.” Her taboo topics ranged from the joys of leather to the horrors of rape. Amos went on to defy the low expectations of executives at Atlantic Records (who were dubious about the commercial viability of her “girl at the piano” act) and build a cultish fan base throughout the 1990’s with her psychedelic stage shows, only to become, by the second Bush era, the iconic Mother Superior of the alternative music scene. “Love or hate her,” writes Kurt B. Reighley for The Advocate, “she possesses a strength of character bordering on bulletproof.” One follower, at the start of a recent concert documentary, boasts of having seen Amos live at least 95 times.
With its robust eighteen tracks, Abnormally Attracted to Sin is similarly attentive to the battle of the sexes and, by extension, embattled sexualities. “Fire to Your Plain” builds a house of mirrors with a female speaker “watching you watching her play this game” of sexual attraction. The punkish “Strong Black Vines” is the ideological equivalent of a battering ram directed at the parish door; it excoriates churchly “submission,” “evil faith,” and all those who bear arms and “rape Earth.” In “That Guy,” temptation takes shape in the form of a narcissist with some inexplicable power over his lovers: “Will we make up? Will we break up? Will I wake up with that guy?” “Mary Jane” is a comic ode to cannabis in which a boy whose “puberty was somewhat strange” finds relief through the titular girl who comes bearing “odd brownies.” The title track, meanwhile, contains a melody that will come to haunt you after multiple listenings. “Pussy willow calls there by the church,” croons the temptress, “don’t go in if you’re abnormally attracted to sin.”
Amos’s live show, which completes the circuit about once every two years, is called the “Sinful Attraction Tour” and will travel the U.S. before concluding in Paris this fall.
