Re: Monologue from Hello Earth

[Alan Stonebridge <Alan.Stonebridge@durham.ac.uk>]

On Tue, 7 May 1996, Norman Buchwald wrote:

> There are times they seem to be on a similar wavelength, but Kate's
> more Western Canon oriented (though she plays around with it) while
> Tori's more personal oriented.  Her most recent album, Boys For Pele,
> takes the personal and a juxtapositional nature (brought in I think
> art form in "Silent All These Years") to an almost very personal,
> enigmatic feat that in some ways may end up only being "admirable
> failures" (but I find it more intriguing than "Under The Pink")

> ...Kate Bush
> probably has succeeded in terms of album creation and very good,
> provacative songs with The Dreaming and Hounds of Love.  Tori Amos
> still hasn't improved (for me) Little Earthquakes, whose benefit came
> from exposing herself clearly through often juxtapositional but more
> clearly coherent lyrics.
> 

Basically, my opinion of BfP is that Tori did far too many tracks. Had 
she cut it down to the best ones (obviously in my own opinion, including 
"Marianne", "Father Lucifer", "Horses", "Doughnut Song", "In the 
Springtime of his Voodoo") and spent the rest of the time she wrote the 
other songs on the album perfecting those songs and making maybe 4 or 5 
others the album as a whole would have benefitted. After all, look at 
Kate's albums - none of them have been particularly long, either in 
number of tracks or overall length, and perhaps that's part of their 
appeal, in that they don't try and grab your attention simply by having 
an impressively long track listing. No, they do it by being more subtle, 
and the music is so well put together that the cost of the album in 
comparison with the quantity of tracks doesn't matter - it's the 
perfection of the music, rather than having to think, "Right, this song 
is from this section, which means it must be about <whatever>"...

The indentation of the tracks on the sleeve to divide the album into distinct 
sections makes it a mess. Possibly this is because it makes me try and see the
similarity between these songs... I think Kate has done this so much better,
partly because she doesn't try and state that certain sections of her 
albums are about distinct things, apart from TNW. In TNW, however, the 
principle is different. After all, she was going to make a film of it, 
which is a pretty good justification to put the songs together as a 
single unit and to give them a chronological order.

This may all sound like s**t, but I just don't like the way Tori is portrayed
in the press nowadays... SATY was special when I first heard it, and so was LE
and UtP, but the amount of coverage (especially articles in magazines) simply 
because she has released another album bores me. After all, look at what 
Kate did.... (I may just be being bitter here) "The Dreaming" was 
fantastic, yet largely ignored, EMI's publicity campaign (what 
little there was) may have been to blame for that. Then HoL... RUTH was 
an incredibly popular song, as we all know, and they had to jump on the 
success of this by releasing TWS the year after. I think they should have 
let Kate continue her own 'agenda' for her music, and let her do the film 
of TNW, instead of trying to generate more interest in her older stuff. 
After all, that was the past (although it is a very interesting one), and 
surely the driving force behind TD and HoL was creativity, and it isn't 
very creative to dwell on the past. Then, the public (after HoL and TWS) 
seems to have ignored Kate a lot. Even now, despite the first singles 
from TSW and TRS, plus "Rocket Man" having done very well in the charts, 
she is still largely ignored. I mean, it's like the media says, "Oh look, 
here's that woman who did a couple of songs AGES ago, and she's done 
another album, and we think it's good but we really don't care because 
we're too busy sucking up to the indie mob". However, I wouldn't like the 
media to portray Kate in the same way that they portray Tori Amos... 
after all, I feel another part of Kate's music is the importance of 
listening to it at your own pace, rather than having it spoon-fed by the 
media, saying "Eat up little babies. Without it your life will never be 
complete." (Remember the Apple adverts which hit back at the big 
business?) Well, I'm fed up. I'm sick of the pathetic charts we have 
today, full of dance and indie trash, and boring trends that come and go 
so fast that you can't keep up with them. I'm quite happy listening to 
music made by a woman who made (and still makes) fantastic music, even if 
some of it is over a decade old. I'd rather do that that listen to 
somebody who is supposedly interesting. Don't get me wrong. I love some 
of Tori Amos' stuff, but I feel the media interest in her is spoiling 
her, and unless she can break free of them and make an album as genuinely 
interesting as TD, i.e. not just an album full of strange music, but 
something with a good feeling to it, she'll just keep going down the 
hill, until the media manage to dump her for the next 'interesting' 
singer that comes along.

Again, apologies if this sounds like rubbish, and also for the length of 
it.

Alan.