Wild Flights of Opinionated Babbling

[kritzber@ucsub.Colorado.EDU (Blake Kritzberg)]

'Kay, I don't normally do this. Really. I like to pretend I have
a life.

But I often feel rather dim, having missed Kate's meteoric 
'70s rise and the height of her career in the '80s.
I was disappointed by the quality of _The Red Shoes_ -- particularly
its lack of metaphoric depth, title track excepted.
The Prince track was so pastiche, it gave me the giggles --
the liner notes didn't have to state Kate and Prince never actually
worked together; that much was obvious. Yup, I feel the music
industry's pretty much made mincemeat of Kate, and the fact
she's survived is miraculous. That's no reason for her to 
pump out tracks when she's tired of it all, though.

I never saw Tori Amos as a Kate rip-off or even a true Kate
successor. It's hard to gauge Tori against Kate's searing intelligence,
but more importantly, they subscribe to entirely different aesthetics.
Kate's a romantic and a master of phrasing. Tori's not a romantic,
but a surrealist and an expressionist.  Kate, true to her upbringing, 
is committed to narrative; to story-telling. Tori doesn't care whether
we get her denotative meaning, as long as we share some part of the
emotion inspiring it (a communication made more likely by adding
music to the words). 

To some degree, as a result of their respective aesthetics, 
Kate tells all and Tori hides her cards. I don't think they're
really comparable.

And Happy Rhodes? I bought one CD, having heard steady praise here.
A few listens, and I was hard put to see how she's like Kate, much
less particularly talented. I found her spiritualism overwrought,
her imagery adolescent, her literary grasp anemic, and her
environmentalism painfully conventional. I've heard better about
Jane Siberry, though, and I'd like to explore her music further.

These days, I like to think of Fiona Apple as a Kate legacy.
Similar smouldering intelligence; similar attention to the
art of delivery and phrasing; similar premature maturity.
Fiona is young enough to use big words in slightly improper
ways, but she delivers herself so nakedly and skillfully,
it's impossible to dwell on stylistic nits.
Her confidence in lyrics, which contain a degree of
surrealism, but never obscurantism, and the simple allure
of melodies elegantly orchestrated, make her more minimalist
and slightly more melancholy than Kate. But like all artists,
she's a product of her times.

So, there's my unstructured ramble of the year; don't worry,
I probably won't deliver any more of these for an age and a half.
But I do welcome thoughts on the matter, as most of you probably
enjoy a grasp of popular music dwarfing my puny philosophizing.

Best,
Blake