Episode 12: Strange Little Girls || Mommy Makeovers

Messing with the Master: Tori Amos

With Strange Little Girls, Tori Amos approached the covers album as concept album, offering reinterpretations of 12 diverse male-authored tracks from the perspectives of an assortment of female characters. The project was inspired originally by by the homophobic and misogynistic messages which Amos believed to be prevalent in popular song at the beginning of the 21st century.

“People were talking to me about how popular music was getting more violent,” she recalled in Piece by Piece. “Male songwriters were saying these really malicious things … and I really felt … that a generalized image of the antiwoman, antigay heterosexual man had hijacked Western male heterosexuality and brought it to the mediocrity of the moment.”

The innovation of Strange Little Girls is to extend this debate into the realm of rock, and to recognise mainstream music as one of the primary cultural spheres in which gender roles get played out and patriarchal ideology disseminated. Supplemented by superb Cindy Sherman-inspired photography, the album is a rewarding and subversive work that boldly challenges the listener to reassess their relationship not only to each of these songs, but also to the wider cultural attitudes that they embody and endorse.

“I wanted to complement the significance and scope of what she was doing. I felt like we were really in tune together, with what we were searching for,” recalled Adrian Belew, the project’s guitarist. “It was very comfortable working with her. I was surprised at the whole of the record [when I first heard it]. The songs I was unfamiliar with, in the context of what I had played, really changed the way I saw her as a producer and what she had envisioned. I frequently sign Strange Little Girls CDs, and the evidence is there that this record is important to people and they make the association between me and Tori and my contribution to the record. And then I realize they were probably turned onto me by Tori, and that’s an extraordinary thing for a musician to know. It is reflective of the community she builds in her work.”

Playlists

• JV
• KK
• MM

Songs of Tori Amos – Season 6 selections referenced in the episode

• New Age
  • KK is team FOX
  • JV and MM are team FUCKS.
• 97 Bonnie and Clyde