Are you aware of the fact that you're already considered a big sister for all little Tori Amos-es in the world?
"Yes, and I have mixed feelings about that. I like it a lot when girls and young women see me and hear me, and think, 'Hey, what an independent, uncomplicated, emancipated type! That's what I want to be like: she is it, so it can be done.' I notice that in the letters and fans I meet. I think it's fantastic when my voice helps them find their own. Their personality is still asleep, and I feel like a princess kissing them awake. Because it is about their voice. When you pierce your nipples or your penis when you think it's hip, or wear a type of jeans because Lenny Kravitz does that, okay. As long as you speak out. That's also the strength of 'New Age' or 'The new Order' or whatever you want to call the new consciousness: young people are finally searching in themselves for values; they don't want the outside world as reference for their acts and principles. When all young people would start listening to their own voice instead of saying what adults say or whatever MTV dicatates, this would be a whole different planet. "On the other hand for example the commercial world has found the 'Big Sister Tori Amos' concept already. They think: "Aha! Through the Amos-woman we can reach the young, independent girls and influence them!" They want to use my music and personality - 'image' is such a dirty word - like the Trojan Horse with which they can reach the hearts, heads and purses of young girls. In America they wanted to use 'Silent all these years' for a beer commercial. How absurd! That can only happen in America! It's a very sensitive song, but that's how it goes: when they can bottle something in booze or sex, they won't leave it lying there. It strikes me, because I , more than others, sing openly about sex. All subtleties get lost. I can sing about the color of the skin of my lover in the morning after I've waked him with an intimate - present, and all that gets across in the media is..." (Makes the 'up your ass' gesture)
Artists in other music genres quickly form groups: R.E.M. become part of Neil Young clan, Soundgarden are friends of Pearl Jam, Guns and Roses tries to get chummy with the stones... but you're from nowhere, seem an outsider.
"I kick on people, and I don't care what they do. I don't have to be a friend with wellknown rock 'n' rollers to work myself up. I force no contacts, and my manager doesn't have to arrange so-called spontaneous jam sessions, or domething like that. But recently I met Bjork, and she's exactly how I picture my 'best friend of the future'. She's so free and full of wild ideas and without pose or false pretences. Also, she doesn't have this cramped rock and roll habit to wake all sorts of demons in herself. She sees creativity wider than that. A wonderful person. I don't see her as a musician, rather like the 'phenomenon Bjork'. "I had the same feeling with Evan Dando of the Lemonheads. In my songs I am open, but I am still fighting with all sorts of problems. Bjork and Evan seem to have passed that stage. Their work is pure life's joy and childish openness. I have thought a lot about that lately: why am I still in the cellar groveling between the rats, whereas Bjork and Evan are upstairs cooking? And it smells so darn good there... I still need my songs to cope with my double cursing of feelings of religious and sexual guilt. And I would like by now to peek in the kitchen upstairs...
You beam out total freedom on record and in real life; you seem to me one of the most 'naturel', complexless, doubt- and posefree women I've ever met.
"Yes! Well, the good thing about it is that I've never had to work for it. I mean: I didn't study for it. I think that's strange: I have talked with people who've read all books of Jung and Freud and Shere Hite, and the Kamasutra and those things, and "Discover yourself"courses, and they could all explain it thoroughly, but they didn't beam it out. It fascinated me how some people can be so intelligent and culturally educated, while their emotions are from the stone age. Those people can talk about your 'shadow side' for hours, and then finish with: 'I am not violent myself, but I do think that we should shoot all violent people.' "I've had to fight to win back the primitive energy I once owned. I only had it when I played the piano; in daily life she was suppressed by all the Christian principles of my childhood education. "My father is a minister, and the difference between love and lust was pumped into me from really early. My grandmother is the prototype of the a-sexual mother who has denied her hate all her life.For a while that seemed to become my fate: grandma made God look like an inexorable, hard-hearted judge who looked sternly upon we when touching myself. A voyeur, sort of. But now I can't and won't live 'dryly', dry like my grandmother, who sacrificed every tendency toward sexuality in her body to the Virgin Maria. I was thinking about sex as early as since my sixth. I looked in my record collection, had some doubts as to whom I'd sacrifice my virginity - David Bowie or Robert Plant? I had it all figured out.
The openess in your lyrics may shock sometimes, it all seems a little too openhearted, almost neurotic. Maybe because we're not used to openheartedness.
"Yes, in most people's songs men are always potent, women never have their period, rapes unexistant and orgasm vaginal or faked. They're Barbiedoll-songs, songs without pubic hair or obvious genitals; they don't fit anatomically. My songs come rather from my womb than from the heart. You know, there's some fucking going on in other people's songs, but no-one ever gets into an unwanted pregnancy. I sing: "Boy you best pray that I bleed real soon" (in Silent all these years). In other songs a rape - if there's even sung about it - gets a happy ending. In America some radio stations didn't want to play 'Me and a Gun' because of 'too feministic' and 'too realistic'. I sing: 'Yes, I wore a slinky red thing. Does that mean I should spread for you?' That's the way it is, yes? 'But mister judge, she was hitch-hiking in a mini-skirt!' Bullshit!"
On one hand you're interested in things like hypnosis, meditation and psychoanalysis, but you seem so independent that I can imagine the tables being turnes at the psychiatrist: after 10 minutes you are asking the shrink about his problems...
"That has already happened. Haha. Well, I have a rather good radar for ulterior motives of swindlers. So I won't search for fortune tellers in every city. I know an older woman at home who's a medium - - dependable, so not someone who won't seek publicity or who wants your house or your firstborn child as collateral - and I ask her for advice at times. She immediately gets to the bottom of things. "I am fascinated by things that are beyond us, but I don't feel obliged to call myself the new New Age Princess. But when I visited Avebury ( an archeologic site like Stonehedge), I felt an undenible energy. Also when I was in Idstein visiting the Witch Tower. Yes, I think I was burned as a witch in a former life. No big deal. By the way: witches have nothing to do with hocus-pocus: the 'witches' were midwives, the doctors saw unfair competition in them. Witch hunt was historically nothing more than a gossip campaign.
In Cornflake Girl you make a difference between 'Cornflake Girls' and 'Raisin Girls'. What's the difference?
It's like in 'Possessing the secret of joy', that novel by Alice Walker: cornflake girls are prudish, unconformistic and obedient to authority, whereas raisin girls are original, wilful and sexual. A cornflake girl is wonderbread, whereas a raisin girl is wholewheat bread. IN an American perspective the cornflake girl comes from a redneck-family from the midwest and the raisin girl would be the product of a multi-racial circle of friends from the big city. It's of course, like all previous generalizations, a black/white picture. And the whole idea of good girls and bad girls is of course relative. That's wy I like 'Trading places', with the homeless moron Eddie Murphy temporarily takes the place of a manager. So much depends on the way you're living... i must admit, by the way, that long ago, I played the role of a bar pianist in an add for cornflakes. I flattered myself with the thought I was the Trojan Horse there: a raisin girl amid cornflake girls.
When you take the difference to popular music, you and madonna are both 'Raisin Girls', whereas you both have not much in common. I mean, I would imagine your coffee table book about 'Sex' would be more original and subtle than hers...
"Haha. You know what I thought of that book? Madonna never seemed to enjoy herself much on any page of that book. Good sex would give you a big happy smile on the face, wouldn't you think? But it was all so serious with her, so cold, so calculated. Okay, there were some daring pictures in it, when you define 'daring' as something with handcuffs and pierced nipples... Haha. But I think 'daring' would be: photo's on which you would see lust or enjoyment, on which you can read from someone's face a just-had-an-orgasm-and- already-craving-for-the-next-one expression. Madonna doesn't understand the 'dripping mango concept'.
The What?
"The dripping mango concept', Amos repeats. She takes an orange - a mango can't be found easily - and bites in it repeatedly, until the juice drips over her chin and throat. "Madonna is like the shadow side of the Virgin Maria, and as such I appreciate her. Christian breeded girls still get that totally a- sexual picture of Maria. Okay, Maria had a child with Jozef, but it's never mentioned that she enjoyed the deed, or if she had pleasure from whatever form of sex. No dripping mango's in the bible. Haha. The importance of Madonna is that she used her energy to sexualize it, that she showed her fans they could also see themselves like that - like sexual beings. I only fear that Madonna has gotten so addicted to the commotion she caused in the outside world, that she has been scandalized her inner self, and has no more pleasure out of it anymoere. Only pride and power and a sort of sense of superiority, but no pleasure. She should eat more mango's... Gee, now I want one myself...
Typed in by Marcel F G Rijs
translation to spanish.. laura damico