d.a.walker wrote:It frustrates me that a woman so famous for baring her soul so deeply on her records is now resorting to concept fattened quantity epics in some desperate attempt to look interesting. The saddest part of this is that Tori is fascinating, but no longer seems to want to share herself with her audience, something she seemed to do so genuinely back in the LE days.
Well this is the heart of the matter, and general feeling amongst those in the know is that the marked change from 'personal' to 'concept' is down to one person - ie Husband. You might remember that when Tori was still with Eric Rosse, she talked very frankly about their relationship in the press - how he helped her to get over being attacked and so on. Apparently when she married Mark, however, he put some sort of sanction on her talking publically about him and their relationship. He also, according to Tori herself, asked her why she kept on making 'cliche victim music', and suggested she start to portray herself as a strong, healthy woman in her music instead. Which was right before .... oh yes, The Beekeeper.
I think there's definitely been a moving away from the personal to the conceptual, and Mark might be one reason, but I also suspect it's largely down to Tori's huge need for approval from the music critics. They always had a tendency to belittle her because her music was directly inspired by her own life - the old 'it's not art, it's just a diary' thing that tends to be levelled at female singer-songwriters, although strangely not at male singer-songwriters who also write about their own experience [l)] - and I think that really stung her. Remember that interview where she flared up at the memory of some journalist asking her how it felt to be marketing her pain? She was fuming. I really think she has a huge need to be considered a great rock icon, to have the kind of respect and admiration she thinks she deserves, and she changed the way she writes because of that. Same with the music - the press didn't 'get it', so she started churning out the kind of straightforward rock/pop she thinks they'll understand. It's all about this need for approval, and that is very sad in a woman as unique and gifted as she is. By changing her work to win this approval, she's pissing all over the very things that made her so wonderful. [b)]
d.a.walker wrote:The fact that she shed a song as glorious and upbeat as Not David Bowie in favour of the dire contemporary adult pop that littered TBK, speaks volumes.
Exactly. Not David Bowie and Garlands were far and away the best things recorded during TBK era, yet one gets shoved on a DVD and not even given a proper CD release, the other has to wait to end up as a bonus track on a box set. I mean, WTF? Not David Bowie is a fantastic old-skool Tori track, angry and brimming with energy, and Garlands is practically Debussy, ffs. Both tracks amply demonstrate the qualities that ACTUALLY make her great, yet she treats them as afterthoughts.
Ice, you were the one most tender with the rivers.
You, the roof of the waves, layer after layer after layer ...
