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 Keep It Simple
Van Morrison
Roger McGuinn @ the Huntington IMAC, Long Island, NY - April 4, 2008
Emily Saxe @ the Allen Room/Jazz at Lincoln Center - April 5, 2008
Another Country
Tift Merritt
Be Your Own Pet
Get Awkward
Paul McCartney – The McCartney Years (DVD)
Juno – Music from the Motion Picture
Various Artists
Yes - Their Definitive Story
Day and Night Driving
Seven Mary Three
InterMedia Arts Center 2/2/08
Huntington, NY
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Tori Amos
If you are already a fan of Tori Amos, then I advise you to stop here, because I’m pretty sure you won’t want to hear what I have to say. Any fan of Tori Amos obviously has different criteria from my own when determining whether or not a song is listenable. After watching “Fade to Red”, it’s not a song or two that concerns me; it’s the entire Tori Amos catalog. Up until now, I considered Amos to be ‘Kate Bush Jr’, an unconventionally sexy female performer with a liberal idea of what constitutes a memorable song, and an even more liberal sense of melody, except while Bush occasionally writes something stunningly beautiful, Amos only leaves me confused or frustrated. “Fade to Red” not only reinforces my impression, it takes it to a whole other level.
First of all, why is this collection spread out over two disks? There is a total of 21 videos, with a running length of less than 90 minutes, so I see no reason why the package couldn’t have been condensed. In a way, though, it was a blessing, since it provided some relief from her constant barrage of weirdness.
The music itself is convoluted and difficult, but the videos are just plain strange. For example, “A Sorta Fairytale” co-stars Amos and actor Adrian Brody as a couple of calves (meaning half a leg…) with a head. The song is palatable enough, but the visual accompaniment is disconcerting, if not disturbing. For me, it is too easy to find myself lost in her self-obsessed drama, especially when paired with dramatic, warped imagery. I don’t think I have ever witnessed such a self-obsessed musician before. She is virtually the only female figure in any of her videos, and many of them feature Amos performing exclusively to herself – which is actually a fairly accurate depiction of what her music sounds like, anyway.
…and I didn’t even get to the worst of it yet. I always thought that Tori Amos was a bit tedious and self-indulgent, but I suspended my preconceptions before playing this collection, hoping that these videos would make some sense of it all. Instead, they took tedium to extreme levels, and self-indulgence to the level of onanism. I have never before witnessed such unabashed self-indulgence and egotism run amok. I mean, she actually has a special audio track where she narrates her own videos! And, I STILL don’t understand a damned thing. Her cosmic double-speak might be the most pretentiously pointless thing I have ever heard in my entire life, and her commentary is so full of pregnant pauses that it takes her five minutes to finish a single thought…and calling it a thought is a compliment. If she sat next to me at a dinner party, I would slit my wrists. Hearing …………………… her…………. um …………narrate ………….the meaning ………….of her………………videos………….. is like………….jabbing…….. a stick………in my eye………………………………………………..in ………… slow …………………motion.
To summarize, Tori Amos is a hippie-queen onanist who sings about her convoluted self-obsessions, creates videos that exacerbate their weirdness, and then deigns us with her humorless, unrevealing narration. Its only salvation is her raw talent as a vocalist and pianist. Beyond that, could I dislike it any more than I do? I…………….don’t ……………think………… so.
DVD Grade: D-
Tom Ryan
 
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