The tension between secular desires and spiritual devotion has fueled rock & roll frenzy since Day One, so to speak, when the fundamen-talist-reared Jerry Lee Lewis took the highway to hell on "Great Balls of Fire" and the gospel-trained Little Richard began testifying in ecstatic boogie-woogie whoops. At various times in their lives, Jerry Lee and Little Richard have renounced and denounced rock & roll as "the devil's music." At other times the musical spirit has caused them to rise up out of their seats and throw themselves into their pianos with the unrepentant passion of possessed souls.
Anyone who has seen Tori Amos live knows that she, too, can writhe on the piano bench like a
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demon in heat. The daughter of a Methodist minister and a recovering Los Angeles big-haired heavy-metal singer herself, Amos knows what it's like to be stuck between hard rock and holy rolling. But as 1994's mischievous hit single "God" showed, she's more interested in questioning the powers that determine the notions of sin than in castigating herself for guilty pleasures.
"God" was just the opening salvo in the war on religion that Amos wages full-scale on Boys for Pele, her third solo album. This time around she's criticizing not just her own Christian heritage but most of the world's major religions. On various tracks she aims at Mohammed, Lucifer, Jupiter and a voodoo priest. The attack on deities is actually just part of Amos' larger struggle, which she has been detailing in oft-intimate terms since 1992's Little Earthquakes: the struggle against the patriarchy in general, with her own father symbolizing the fatherocracy. To borrow from the sort of mushy-headed New Age feministspeak that is Amos' stock in trade, she's on a mission to reclaim her – and our – inner goddess. "I need a big loan from the girl zone," she sings on "Caught a Lite Sneeze." Pele is a Hawaiian volcano goddess; the album's title could be interpreted as either (1) an appreciation of men willing to worship the female spirit or (2) a call for human sacrifice.
Although it's a bit hard to muddle through the enigmatic artifice and fanciful metaphors that Amos wraps around her songs like so much obscuring gauze, the answer's a playful (2). And who could blame her? As Little Earthquakes' a cappella "Me and a Gun" described in harrowing detail, Amos was raped several years ago, and she has been trying to recover her sexual health – already damaged by her strict up-bringing – ever since. Many songs on the new album are about relationships with unappreciative men, culminating in the scary but lovely codependent ballad "Putting the Damage On." In a demonstration of her bid for independence, Amos produced the 18 songs herself, her relationship with her previous producer and boyfriend, Eric Rosse, having ended.
Boys for Pele begins gently enough and indeed never works itself into a lather, which is one of Amos' failings; she
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