There is a much-vaunted theory that suggests rock and pop music is dumbing down. American alternative rock has replaced Nirvana’s existential loathing with Limp Bizkit’s knuckleheaded “sports metal” and the Bloodhound Gang, whose most recent album was called Hooray for Boobies. There is no longer room in the charts for the situationist conceptualism of the KLF or the Pet Shop Boys’ droll ironies.
These days, the singles chart is strictly the province of boy bands, novelty dance hits and tabloid celebrities. And then there’s the world of the female singer-songwriter. A decade ago, Tori Amos was a multiplatinum artist. She wrote complex, provocative songs about rape, masturbation and hallucinogenic drugs. By the mid-1990s, she was replaced in the public’s affections by the featherweight angst of Alanis Morissette and Jewel. In turn, they have been superseded by artists such as Nelly Furtado, who is neither provocative nor angsty, but who is prepared to splash around in a mudbath in her current video.
The news that Amos’s latest album, Strange Little Girls (Atlantic), is a collection of cover versions seems unlikely to send her former fans stampeding back to the shops. A bad smell hangs over the whole province of covers albums — they seem a desperate SOS that reads, “We have run out of ideas, please advise.”
If Strange Little Girls has a problem, however, it’s a surfeit of ideas. The concept — songs written by men about women, reinterpreted by a woman — is fascinating. The songs are varied and intriguing, from Slayer’s thrash metal to new-wave obscurities such as Joe Jackson’s Real Men.
Amos’s interpretations are remarkable and transformative, nowhere more so than on ’97 Bonnie and Clyde, Eminem’s saga of a man murdering his wife before their infant daughter’s eyes. While Eminem’s sing-song delivery lends the original a grim comedy, Amos mumbles the lyrics in a flat, unfeeling monotone. Her voice is backed by queasy strings. The end result is compelling, dramatic and impossibly harrowing.
Amos sings 10cc’s I’m Not in Love to a stark backing of drums and screeching feedback. In those surroundings, the lyrics sound less like an early-hours seduction soundtrack than the disturbing ramblings of a stalker. She slows Depeche Mode’s Enjoy the Silence to a diseased crawl. Her version of the Velvet Underground’s New Age is similarly unsettling. A nervy vocal and the chaotic, guitar-laden crescendo send Lou Reed’s languid tale of unrequited love into the realms of obsession.
Reworking songs so drastically is a risky business, but Amos overstretches herself only twice. Turning John Lennon’s oblique Happiness Is a Warm Gun into a song protesting United States handgun laws seems hopelessly unsubtle and reductive. By contrast, her take on Neil Young’s Heart of Gold is utterly impenetrable, a mess of distorted slide guitar and wailing Goth vocals.
Strange Little Girls is a brave and uncompromising album — when it fails, it fails because it tries too hard. In a market saturated with low-risk rock aimed at the lowest common denominator, Strange Little Girls is something of a rarity: an album that makes demands on listeners, but repays their efforts with startling and unique music.