The Tris McCall Report
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Do not disturb the Concept-Master at work
In a war year, Tori Amos releases a powerful humanist document
Usually it’s tough to write a record review when you don’t have the album in front of you. Steve took his copy of Scarlet’s Walk back to his office in New York City and he’s probably listening to it right now, with no intention of bringing it home soon. I suppose I could go down to Tunes in Hoboken and pick up my own copy, but today I feel it’s unnecessary. I only had Scarlet’s Walk in my immediate presence for about a week, but over the course of that week, it inscribed itself on my consciousness so thoroughly that while I couldn’t sing you any particular song from start to finish, I feel like I knocked the record around enough that it opened up for me.
That might not work for you. I believe Amos is a major artist, but I also concede that she’s annoying, and, like many great writers, she will frustrate you to pieces while you’re on your way to enlightenment. Like most of Amos’s records, Scarlet’s Walk ain’t too tuneful, and the production will put you in mind of some of the slicker reaches of the Lilith Fair aesthetic. Amos is one of the few formidable lyricists working in pop music, but there’s nothing pithy or clever about her mode of address – she asks you to work with her to riddle through her admittedly difficult and highly associative verse. As a singer, Amos is a taxing listen – she twists and tortures her vowels beyond intelligibility, makes weird dying-bird noises, whoops and hollers, and generally does everything she can to take you out of the experience of the song in the name of some emotional payoff that will probably not register unless you’re among the previously committed (and I know that you aren’t). So a caution to you, and one I don’t give lightly: listen to Scarlet’s Walk with the lyrics in front of you, at least until you can get some traction.
You also need the lyric booklet because the album won’t make sense without the enclosed map. Over an elementary-school representation of the United States, Amos has traced eighteen lines, each representing a different song on the album. This is the "walk" of the title, and if Scarlet, the title character, travels most of these miles in a car or plane, it’s still a journey you could hypothetically follow, and I wonder how many of amos’s absurdly devoted fans are getting their itineraries set as I type this. Scarlet’s walk takes you through all fifty states, and one of the nicest things about the album is that the road doubles back on itself enough that many of the states get a couple of passes, or glosses, which means that Scarlet’s impressions of her surroundings have usually changed by the time she gets back to where she was previously. If you’re following along at home with a comprehensive atlas (and I suggest you do), you can trace the journey from Los Angeles to Vegas and then Alaska by plane, through the Pacific Northwest, across the Plains to Minnesota and then back through national historical sites to the Southwest, through Texas – Texas gets four pivotal songs – up the Mississippi and Ohio rivers to the Northeast, through New England and onto an ill-fated flight from Boston to New York (but more on that in a bit), by car through the rust belt to Chicago, back down the Mississippi to New Orleans, from Florida to Hawaii by plane and back again, up the Atlantic Coast to Washington, D.C. and the eastern shore of Maryland, where the trip ends. It’s exhausting – and what cross-country trip wouldn’t be? – and as anybody who’s driven through Pennsylvania could tell you, parts of it are really boring. But that’s the country, and that’s the album Amos set out to make. A non-stop thrill ride wouldn’t have told us anything useful about America, and would have felt disingenuous.
Besides, Amos doesn’t do thrill rides. At her best, she gives you entire-statement albums, albums with dark and puzzling lyrics that demand scrutiny, songs that don’t make much sense in isolation, but achieve great kinetic energy when they’re allowed to chemically interact. Amos the singles artist is not anybody you’d want to know – when she comes with an album of self-contained narratives, she tends to wallow in the shallow end of the Lifetime Channel pool, spinning out your standard wild-woman-in-peril stories with dumbed-down, melodramatic lyrics. She reached the nadir of this approach, complete with orchids growing and a tearful miscarriage, on "Playboy Mommy", the second single from the gruesomely uneven Choirgirl Hotel album, but she’s always shown herself willing to dance precariously on the lip of the silly-business abyss. Luckily for us this time out, Scarlet isn’t written as much of a wild woman character, and Scarlet’s Walk keeps the melodramatics to a minimum. This isn’t Amos-as-reporter, exactly, but nor is it a Hejira-type introspective set of personal impressions gathered while traveling (which is what, to be honest, I was expecting) – it’s a public statement, as coherently political as anything by Phil Ochs, and as complete as The Final Cut, the album it most often resembles in tone and purpose.
In making such a record, Tori Amos is simply responding to a challenge made more than a year ago by a bunch of Islamic fundamentalists, a thrown gauntlet which nearly all of the major figures in our popular culture have willfully ignored. Sure, Eminem dressed up like Osama Bin Laden in the "Without Me" video and danced around, but as the Chaplin figure of the moment he’s expected to do that, and the content of his singles this year have been nothing but the usual self-dramatizing schtick and tired complaints about his mother. It’s now been sixteen months since the attacks on New York and Washington, and our so-called cultural spokespeople continue to make their crap romantic comedies and rhyme about bling bling like nothing happened. Indie rockers, allegedly unconstrained by the corporate machine, have been about the worst of it, cranking out genre records and retreating into further fetishization of formal songwriting structure and retro authenticity (I do consider Spoon’s Kill The Moonlight an extremely oblique attempt to address the attacks – or at least the feelings of fear and isolation that they engendered – but I acknowledge that it’s more of a feel thing, and I’m nowhere near ready to spin out the case for that reading, so, um, don’t ask just yet).
Amos, on the other hand, is constitutionally incapable of backing away from an issue, and takes her role as sociocultural interrogator seriously. She’s comfortable stringing you along through the lengthy recititive sections of Scarlet’s Walk in order to make her points in part because she recognizes tight songwriting formalism as a deathtrap of sophisticated meaning, but also because (and God bless her) she’s unafraid of bulling around in the china shop and making a big fool of herself. To be fair, though she’s not a mega-platinum artist, she’s working with a massive safety net. If Mariah Carey came with a complex album of hookless folk songs investigating Islamic fundamentalism, her audience would be on to the next diva faster than you can say don’t be fooled by the rocks that I got. Amos, on the other hand, enjoys a Waco-esque following with a commitment to her and her musical explorations that borders on the psychopathic, and she could probably release an album of Slayer and Depeche Mode covers and not leave a bruise on their fanatical devotion. But wait, this isn’t speculation – Amos actually did release an album of slayer and depeche mode covers (2000’s ghastly Strange Little Girls) – and after that bizarre experiment, Scarlet’s Walk probably feels to the faithful like a safe and dependable return to form.
It’s not. It’s a departure, as all of Tori Amos’s albums are, but it is also more strictly novelistic than a pop album has any reason to be, it’s tremendously coherent while never managing to become entirely prosaic, and it’s hard to imagine anything more linear than an album about a line. Scarlet (semi-autobiographic but not, thankfully, a transparent figure for Amos) is the protagonist, and while other incidental characters get named, the other important recurring figure is a young woman who could best be understood as a spirit of America. If that sounds cheesy, well, that’s my fault and not Amos’s – the author’s handling of the conceit is amazingly skillful, and never degenerates into magic realism. The national spirit finds her avatars wherever Scarlet travels – here she’s a porn star, there a suicidal downhill skier, later a woman in an emotionally abusive relationship, still later a desperate dancer attempting to remain cheerful in the face of death. While many travel narratives describe a search for America, Scarlet appears (at least at first) to be fleeing from it, as one might shirk responsibility to a charge, or a younger sister. Scarlet’s eventual and dynamic reconciliation with the spirit of her country is the story, and over the course of eighteen long and occasionally sprawling tracks, we watch the character change from a transient, detached obeserver in her own land to a survivor of heartbreak and horrors who has looked America in the face, acknowledged its blood, competitiveness and violence, and stands ready to work with her as best as she can.
If it sounds like what I am describing here is a big and difficult album, oh baby, yes I am. You will not hear any of Scarlet’s Walk on hit radio; your band is probably far closer to TRL than anything present here. To guide you through the thicket of associations and wordplay, Amos offers an accompanying interview disc and an interactive, excruciatingly-detained online map for those who care to stick their copy of Scarlet’s Walk into their CD-Rom drive and then connect to www.toriamos.com. I’ve seen Amos on television enough times to know that the interview disc would mainly be good for confirming two things about the artist that anybody who’s followed her this far already knows well – first, that she’s an extremely intelligent woman, and second, that she’s a colossal flake who’s comfortable discussing fairies. I passed. As for the interactive map, it’s a cool concept, but anybody with a cursory background in american history and geography can tell at a glance where Amos – or, rather, Scarlet – is going: to famous sites of conflict between Native Americans and white settlers.
From Wounded Knee to the Trail of Tears, Scarlet walks them all. The locations aren’t mentioned by name in the lyrics, but if you know that a song about apprehension and suicidal danger is set in part in Little Big Horn, well, it adds a topspin of resonance. Scarlet’s obsession with Native Americans begins in the west amidst a very ordinary break-up – on a car ride through the canyons of New Mexico, she and her soon-to-be ex look for "Indian blood" in each other before concluding they are "imposters in this land". These are limousine-liberal reflections, and though Scarlet knows this, she also recognizes in her alienation from an imagined Native American essence a reminder of displaced responsibility. that reminder serves to drive her forward through a country where the landscape continually speaks to her – a phantasmagoria of physical associations generating a topographical map of American beauty and culpability.
The walk starts in Los Angeles with "Amber Waves"; without a doubt the most effective antipornography track in rock history (not that there’s been very much competition) and one of the more tuneful pieces on the album. Scarlet addresses an old friend who "gave it up on dvd and magazine" and consequently feels reduced, stripped of her identity by the camera, converted into product. Where Peter Wolf felt outraged and bamboozled by his homeroom angel’s betrayal of his imaginary nostalgic contract with her, Scarlet finds herself incapable of following the suggestion to "leave it alone"; instead, she takes a flight to Alaska to check on the health of the northern lights – an entirely different kind of projection – at her friend’s desperate request. While "Amber Waves" treats the pornographer harshly – he’s portrayed as promethean but ultimately guided by forces beyond his control – it’s Scarlet herself who leaves the interaction feeling guilty and rueful.
The reasons for her guilt are explored further in the next song. But before we get to "A Sorta Fairytale", with its four and a half bizarre verses and shifts of setting and perspective, I want to take a time out to briefly look at "Amber Waves" (the name itself, not the song, that would take forever, and I’m conscious I’ve already spent forever, and I’ve got forever yet to go, but hey, that’s the kind of album this is) and lay out exactly what I mean when I call Amos a formidable and top-flight lyricist. Many critics who are accustomed to listening to dozens of records for review superficially, tend to reward superficial lyrical approaches – cleverness, obvious jokes, universalism – and don’t know what to do with Amos, who demands that you sit there in front of your stereo and follow along word by saturated, referential word. To a writer like Jim Farber at the Daily News who doesn’t want to have to think when he’s listening, Amos is an obscurantist – but from my perspective, he’s just too lazy to do the work required to unpack anything more complicated than your standard Eminem couplet. Amos writes allusively, true, but if you catch half of them, her commitment to generating meaning might compel you to hunt down the other half. Amber Waves, for instance, is a porn star character from the movie Boogie Nights. I haven’t seen Boogie Nights, but I know what it’s about, and I can’t imagine that there are all that many people who don’t. By referencing the movie role in the first line – "he lit you up like amber waves" – Amos quickly establishes that she’s singing about pornography and the "body" of America, some relationship between the two. And, in passing, she introduces three characters: a Woman Number One who is a subject, a man who is doing something to that woman, and a narrator (Scarlet) who is observing and wondering whether or not to get involved. This triangle appears all over Scarlet’s Walk: it’s the fundamental relationship dynamic on the record, and Amos wastes no time getting it established. This is a writer who thinks hard about beginnings and endings, and places each word carefully, for precise effect. So the amber suggests the gold light of the pornographer – the "sepia" of his instruments – and also a substance that traps you and holds in place, creates something of value by slowly killing what it catches through imprisonment, suffocation. The beleaguered, drained porn star worries that the northern lights are "drowning"; Scarlet, who "has the time", observes for herself, and concludes that they’re "waving". Besides being a really nice image that refers back to the title, title character, and the video waves she’s trafficking in, this is an allusion to "Not Waving But Drowning" a disturbing poem by Stevie Smith. Amos doesn’t get this kind of associative mileage every time she takes a metaphor for a spin, but she covers more ground than anybody working in current pop music, and every song on Scarlet’s Walk is rich with depth of reference. So if Jim Farber doesn’t care to know or learn who Stevie Smith is, that’s fine; he’s stuck with his Eminem records, and it probably serves him right.
"A Sorta Fairytale" takes Scarlet into the desert for the first time, and gets her face to face with her feelings of liberal guilt during a breakup – politically motivated, or in any case exacerbated by the boyfriend’s insensitivity. Woman Number One is present here, too, but she’s a shadowy figure in the background, and it’s probably the case that Scarlet leaves Ventura and California for the desert to try to put some mileage between her and the spectre, only to find that the traces of Native American culture inscribed on the landscape only manage to make her feel worse. "Like a good book, I can’t put this day back", says Scarlet in one of the album’s few singalong choruses; she’s simultaneously compelled and revolted, urged by her internal compass to make a connection, but too dislocated to know where to start. Perhaps because of that obvious chorus, the "Fairytale" is the single here – but really, the whole notion of a radio hit from Scarlet’s Walk is ridiculous, there’s no way to understand what’s going on in any individual song without having the rest of the record present as proper framing. That’s a strength, mind you, and another site of comparison to Roger Waters, who used to do the same thing to great effect. I digress. Both "A Sorta Fairytale" and the paranoid "Wednesday" end with Scarlet alienated, unable to communicate with the male figure and with the spectral charge out of sight. "Lost in a place called America", looking for help, Scarlet reverses Liz Phair on Whip-Smart, and instead heads east. We’re finished with the West Coast.
What follows are a set of three character/relationship sketches, set amidst the Plains and the Rocky Mountains; if there’s something a bit Bridges of Madison County-ish about this segment of the walk, her performative approach is too wordy and weird to ever bog the narrative down with cinematic cliches. Amos generates the feel of Big Sky country by slowing down the pace and presenting long, reiterative ballads; emotionally intense, sweeping, arguably boring, rich with meaning but low on pyrotechnics of any sort. It’ll be four songs before the tempo perks up a bit, and I acknowledge that this particular stretch of highway is going to lose some listeners. A different mix – one that emphasized the playing a bit more – probably would have helped things along, but it’s hard to Monday-morning quarterback the production choices at this distance. As anybody who’s heard Boys For Pele knows, Tori Amos is a terrific pianist, but Scarlet’s Walk isn’t a piano showcase album – it’s all about the words. Like Carole King, Amos has a weakness for pedestrian, chopsy backing groups and busy, wack bass players; John Evans is a veteran destroyer of some of her songs, and he’s up to his tricks here. Now, there are a million ways to be a bad bass player, and Evans manages to hit about nine hundred thousand of them on Scarlet’s Walk, combining coffee-shop jazz dorkiness with sub-Jaco high note riffing at inappropriate moments, and throwing in some muted fabric-softener commercial glissandos for vile effect. Amos has a great left hand, and Evans has no problem stepping all over it and grinding it into the dirt. Homie needs to take a luden.
Anyway, all this is to say that just like counting license plates doesn’t really make a long drive go any faster, you’re not going to hash your way through some of the tedious stretches of Scarlet’s Walk by concentrating on the band. You’re here to listen to what Ms. Amos has to tell you, buddy. "Strange" takes you through Montana, North Dakota, and the upper reaches of Minnesota; make a trip like that and you won’t be entertained non-stop, but you’re going to be glad you did it once you’re through. Glacial and elegant, but poised, it’s a story about Scarlet wanting to give herself over to the land and a different way of life, but finding herself unable to do it. Scarlet is still too guarded at this point; she’s still the wounded and worried narrator of "Wednesday". After logging more mileage, she’ll revisit her will to surrender two songs later on "Crazy", and by then, she’ll have been knocked around enough to be ready to lose herself to the landscape. As we know from Revenge Of The Nerds, all nerds ever think about is sex, and Amos is no exception: in fact, her sex obsession is one of most rewarding elements in her work, since she tends to give her best and most straightforward performances when she’s being naughty. "Crazy", genuinely sexy (a rarity in a year where the aggressive – if brilliant and hilarious – raunchiness of Ludacris and Missy Elliott has become the pop music standard), finds Scarlet getting busy with the title character amidst the mountains and canyons. Above all, it’s a song about sexual surrender to the landscape itself as Scarlet "melts into native shelter" and "unzips her religion down". As a liberation-through-boning number, it’s pretty perfect. More importantly, Scarlet has begun to allow the country to live through her, and from now on in, her reserve is shattered, and she will feel each encounter far more acutely.
With the loss of detachment comes knowledge, but also accompanying vulnerability. After a brief a cappella number – surprisingly palatable given Amos’s vocal weaknesses and present mostly to further the Native American theme – Scarlet gets back to the serious business of circling Woman Number One from a protective, and protected, distance. The triangle returns with vengeance on "Don’t Make Me Come To Vegas", a conceptual pair with "Carbon", the second of the Great Plains character sketches. Both songs find Scarlet forced to guard and guide an imperiled younger woman – possibly a little sister – and in both cases, she guiltily acknowledges her difficulty maintaining focus on the job. "Just keep your eyes on her", Scarlet chastises herself, but Carbon is suicidal and probably psychotic, and "only wants to be unmade". Here’s the dark side of Scarlet’s own will to lose herself, and her identity, to the landscape – a downhill skier craving the crash that will finally and forcibly return her atoms to the earth. (Comic-book author Neil Gaiman makes a cameo appearance in this song in the role of long-distance wisdom supplier, which is pretty unnecessary, but at any rate a better claim to fame for a graphic novelist than overpaying for Mark McGwire’s seventieth home-run ball.) After getting down with Crazy, a comparably relaxed Scarlet addresses a less-suicidal junior in "Vegas", but still continues her inexorable drive away from her. Even as the futility of "Carbon" gives way to Scarlet’s tough talk, the young women can’t be rescued or redeemed yet. Though peril is inscribed all over the road, Scarlet’s caught up in her own trip. She’ll need to right her own ship before she can approach the riddle of her own guilt and responsibility toward the specter of America that she can’t seem to assist or influence.
By now, the heroine is deep within Texas, and here, for the first time, she’s offered a way to respond. "Sweet Sangria" is a revolutionary – probably a Zapatista, but in any case a leftist insurgent of one sort or another – and he tentatively attempts to recruit Scarlet to his cause. She’s sympathetic, but is turned off by his bitterness. "Are you with me or not?", he asks her, and despite her temptation, she’s unwilling to go along. Squeamish, perhaps, certainly liberal-minded and idealistic in her yearning for a "bloodless road"; yet her conclusion that his militarism is a sign of intellectual and procedural weakness is hard to refute. "Tell me", she asks, foreshadowing the cataclysm to come, "why does someone have to lose"? Beginning to see a murderous competitiveness hiding behind every agenda she encounters, Scarlet continues her trip, ready for the East Coast and full confrontation with the settler’s history.
"Your Cloud" covers more territory than any other song on the album – it begins in Houston and ends in Philadelphia – and it straddles that line between beauty and absolute and total bobosity that characterizes so much of Amos’s writing. The music, which has already been somewhat muted, recedes to atmosphere, and Amos chooses now to foreground the most tortured and strained vocal performance on the album. She has never met a vowel she can’t mangle, and, like Rickie Lee Jones, really ought to stop doing all the acrobatics, if only because she’s written a set of lyrics she desperately wants you to hear and understand, and there’s no making out what the hell she’s saying when every one-syllable word contains mega-dipthongs of her own invention. "Pancake" reverses "Sweet Sangria" by confronting a conservative professor or priest on his own home turf. the music echoes some of the rock-band excess of From The Choirgirl Hotel, and will no doubt seem reiterative to long-time fans, but Amos was out of tunes by her second album, so I’m not really complaining – she’s got about two melodies and they’re both okay, so it’s what she does with them that counts. Here, the addressee is more revolting than the pornographer of "Amber Waves" – the amber he’s used to trap Woman Number One is his old and dessicated ideas, and his accompanying venerable justification system. Yet the world he purports to defend is about to come crashing down around him. He doesn’t know this; Scarlet has an inkling, but like the rest of us, is given no recourse.
If you’ve persevered and followed along attentively, if you’ve traveled the thousands of miles with the narrator, stuck with her through the dull stretches, watched her shed her detachment and slug her way through her own feelings of culpability and indecisiveness, your reward will be seven minutes of music as frightening and disturbing as anything ever waxed in the rock era. In isolation, "I Can’t See New York" reads as a creepy first-person account of the attack on Manhattan sung from the perspective of a woman on a re-routed airplane during the desperate moments circling above a city in flames. But if you’ve allowed yourself to identify with or inhabit Scarlet’s perspective, Amos manages to get you on the plane with a repertoire-defying, straightforward piano-and-voice arrangement that simultaneously communicates confusion, loss, longing, and horror; so dress warmly, as you will get the chills. As "I can’t see you" becomes "I can’t see new york" and finally just "I can’t see", blind terror overcomes the protagonist, lost thirteen thousand feet above the country in a white cloud; no longer "Your Cloud" but its sinister counterpart, a shadow of national violence made manifest. From the twist and bend of the jacaranda tree in "Don’t Make Me Come To Vegas" to the threatening, violent names of Carbon’s suicidal downhill trails to the reflections on the eagle in "Wednesday", omens had been scrawled across Scarlet’s landscape, yet Amos doesn’t exactly prepare us for the crash. We can only look back, as Scarlet does, and see a thread that might have led us here, and try our best to follow that thread forward.
The inconceivable public disaster is echoed two songs later with a private, personal tragedy: the death of a beloved friend, and a long funeral drive from Chicago to New Orleans. (In between, Amos gives us – and the shellshocked protagonist – a pretty breather with "Mrs. Jesus"; Scarlet, "in a state", turns to an entirely different kind of religious figure for comfort, but who doesn’t manage to answer any of her important or persistent questions). "Taxi Ride" sports more Lilith Fair cliches than anything else on Scarlet’s Walk, but by now you’ll probably be craving a singalong chorus so badly that the consonance alone ought to feel like a salve. At long last, Woman Number One accompanies the narrator; Scarlet is annoyed by her and feels as if she is acting inappropriately, yet is able to approach her as a peer rather than a guardian. "I’m glad you’re on my side", a desperate, bruised Scarlet realizes, both to her relief and surprise. Both the detachment of "Carbon" and the bravado of "Don’t Make Me Come To Vegas" have been burned away – what’s left is a woman humbled by the immensity and tragedy of the nation she’s seen, and who is finally ready to stare its figure in the face; not guiltily, not responsibly, but as a compatriot in a "long taxi line" of waiting, struggle, senselessness.
Nothing’s left now but the introspective, self-examining epiphany, and this being Amos in top form, she brings it to you forthwith. Scarlet’s in the deep South now; Amos’s home territory and the setting of most of her most disturbing songs. "You have come to discover what you want", the narrator is told on (in?) "Another Girl’s Paradise", and Scarlet, still protesting, reflecting on everything she’s witnessed and encountered, paraphrases another famously disingenuous but sympathetic searcher: "what I want is not to want what isn’t mine". Fine. But her desire proves irreducible, and at once she recognizes her fundamental conceit (and, by extension, the fundamental national conceit) – that the protection, warmth guidance, tough-guy talk, and annoyance with which she has alternately shown Woman Number One have been nothing more than masks for her own deep and characteristically American competitiveness. Just as acknowledgement of our national history of violence is no end in itself, Scarlet is not redeemed by her self-recognition. Yet she’s gained wisdom, and with it she’s become a genuine citizen, a knowing participant in the national drama, a dynamic actor rather than the passive, drifting "impostor" of "A Sorta Fairytale".
Having reached a tentative kind of closure, Scarlet recedes in the background for a bit, and Amos gets up on the soapbox to do some clean-up work and connect the dots with clearly visible lines, much the way Phil Ochs used to do on his supremely politicized late-Sixties concept albums. The lyrics to the title track and "Virginia" are Amos at her most explicitly topical – which means they’re still pretty associative and fragmentary, even if their ultimate coherence is undeniable. here she lays out the Native American/Western competitiveness/exploitation/legacy of violence algebra with chilling precision, particularly on "Virginia", which, terrifyingly enough, retells the story of "Amber Waves" by substituting an Indian girl for the porn star. The effect, for me at least, is something akin to having a battery of alarm bells going off inside my head all at once. The "ghetto pimps and presidents" who figure here for the pornographer of "Amber Waves" have left Virginia stripped of her identity, unable to remember her name. These songs aren’t strident, they’re not jeremiads – Amos can't be bothered with that. She writes from ambivalence, pain, and recognition, not ontological certitude: "and in some things", she owns up, "maybe he’ll be right". Sorrow, sure, but no excuses here.
As for Scarlet, she can walk into Washington and look in the reflecting pool and actually see herself there; not a phantom, specter, or impostor, but an American – for better and for worse – with the dust of the country covering the "map" of her body. "Gold Dust" ends Scarlet’s Walk with the birth of the narrator’s daughter. Whose child is it, do you think?, I’d hope it’s Crazy’s, but probably it’s the alienated boyfriend of the "Fairytale"; in any case, all plot points and speculation aside, it’s a hopeful conclusion. Scarlet is no more justified by motherhood as she was by self-knowledge, but if the toughest thing about being an American is surviving it intact, she has avoided the fate of Virginia and Amber Waves. She’s not a hero, because that’s a concept for the news. She’s a woman with her eyes newly opened. If at the end of "I Can’t See New York" she was blind with terror, well, you were, too, weren't you? The experiences she’d had before her aborted plane ride readied her, and her persistence in following the thread, through her difficulties, granted her full vision.
And that’s the end. If it feels like I’ve explored countless threads of meaning during this interminable review (a review I felt was absolutely necessary to write as a response to so much of what I’ve encountered over the past sixteen months), rest assured that I haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of the associative and referential depth of Scarlet’s Walk. This is about as rich and saturated a pop album as is imaginable, and I am sure I’ll keep discovering new dimensions to it as longs as I’m listening to music. Is its noncommital liberal positivism wearying, in all its thoughtful, rueful ambivalence? Maybe a little. Is its portrayal of Native Americans and Indian culture dangerously romanticized? Probably. Is the anti-intellectualism of "Pancake" and the rest of the walk through our neck of America disappointing? Definitely, especially coming from a card-carrying chess club egghead like Amos. But she’s a North Carolinian by birth, and I understand the Southerner's need to lash out at our institutions. So I’m giving her a flier on the third objection. As for her primitivism, sure, it’s tedious, and were I a Native American, I might be a little chafed. But I’m not a Native American; in fact, I don’t even know any Native Americans. The Native American experience is so alien from my own – and from yours, too, I’d wager – that I’m compelled to give Amos credit just for forcing me to think about it. For most of us, the acknowledgment that the precondition for our national existence was the extermination of a native race is a given, but then once it’s given, it’s swiftly forgotten. Amos doesn’t want us to forget – when we’re discussing America, she doesn’t want us blanking on the nature of its establishment. She’s right.
Finally, there’s the politics, their misty contours, Scarlet’s desperate flailing against violence and rejection of extremism, her ambiguity and closely-held contradictions. Folks are going to take potshots at this (if they engage, which is another question altogether). But listen: every day, my mailbox is filled to overflow with exhortations to action sent from people who just absolutely know what our national response and policy ought to be, from e-greetings that sing "all we are saying/is kick Saddam’s ass" to conspiracy-minded sharpshooters who are certain that the World Trade Center was detonated by depth charges planted by a U.S. government that functions as the stooge of something called "Big Oil". This relentless dogmatism is echoed in newspapers, magazines, and telecasts by journalists who are convinced that their perspective is airtight and the only one that matters. Last year’s attacks may have galvanized popular support for our administration among the masses and sent thousands of others onto the rolls of the International Action Committee, but it’s clear that they haven’t knocked one ounce of humility into any of us. Scarlet’s Walk is probably the first intelligent response to the crisis that I’ve encountered – the first with the proper relationship to the epistemological challenges of ferreting out meaning in musty areas where meaning is in short supply. It’s not Tori Amos’s job to provide definitive answers; certainly not when so many questions need to be raised. Raising questions is the artist’s role, according to Ibsen, and today, according to me, too. We can’t expect to get responses of any value from the government, or from journalists, or from dogmatists of any stripe. We’ve got to create those responses ourselves. In 2002, we hid: we did cock rock, formally skilled songwriting, and playa rhymes, and we tried to pretend that we weren’t living through a war year, and a murderous one at that. In 2003, we need to get out on the barricades. Scarlet's Walk isn't an end or an answer to anything; it's the beginning of a discussion that we all should be having. Hey, sometimes getting the ball rolling is the hardest task we're confronted with. Tori Amos has done that hard work. Now it's on us.
Tris McCall -- Union City, December 19, 2002
Why do I crucify myself? Nothing I do is good enough for you.