News: Read The Music

Beth Winegarner — journalist, author, and one of Undented’s very own managing editors — has just released a book that will be of interest to music lovers in general and Toriphiles in particular. Titled Read The Music: Essays On Sound (a tip o’ the hat to Kate Bush, that), the first two essays focus entirely on Tori’s music, with threads of her influence continuing to be woven through several essays that follow.

Having vaulted into the world of professional rock journalism in 1995, Beth began writing for the seminal online music magazine Addicted to Noise. She went on to contribute to such heavy hitters as The San Francisco Chronicle, BAM Magazine, and ROCKRGRL.

But being a strong-minded woman with little patience for blindly going down paths that others have chosen, Beth ultimately chucked in her so-called “dream job” and firmly marched her passion in the direction SHE wanted it to go.

“Publications changed hands or went out of business, and I found myself weary of writing about music that, in many cases, did not matter to me. My interest in the professional rock-journalism world waned,” Winegarner writes in the introduction to “Read the Music.” “It was during that period that I wrote my first essays on music.”

From “Words Like Weapons: Tori Amos’ ‘Strange Little Girls’”):

Amos’ goal was to turn [”’97 Bonnie and Clyde”] on its ear, transforming it from a danceable rap song that Eminem dismissed as “only a joke” into both a gruesome murder scene and a final plea from the victim herself. Without changing a single word, Amos manages to make the lyrics come from the wife in the trunk, who is simultaneously grieving that she will never see her daughter again and helpless to protect the child from what she’s seeing. (For a while, I entertained the idea that the song could actually be sung from the little girl’s perspective, and it can be heard that way, but Amos is clearly siding with the mother.) In his review of the album, Rolling Stone editor David Fricke announced, “Eminem may get the royalties, but he no longer owns the song.”

and

If anyone could turn a Slayer song about blood falling from the heavens into a piano ballad, it’s Tori Amos. “Raining Blood” comes on like a quiet horror show, all suspense and dark shadows. Amos has said that the girl in this song is living during the period of the French Resistance, but she has also said that, to her, it represents female empowerment, a reclaiming of what’s been lost amid the patriarchy. “I was reading about what was going on in Afghanistan — the way women were being oppressed, the destruction of religious statues,” Amos told SPIN magazine. “And when I heard [Raining Blood], I just imagined a huge juicy vagina coming out of the sky, raining blood over all those racist, misogynist fuckers.” Graphic, yes, but so’s the song.

From “Back to the Garden: Tori Amos’ ‘Yes, Anastasia’”:

The song itself — “Yes, Anastasia” that is — is possibly the most epic song ever written about hitting bottom. It comes in softly with just a spare bit of piano, but before long we’re swept up in waves of storming piano and a string arrangement constructed by John Philip Shenale. The string parts in the first half of the song were inspired by Debussy, but the ones toward the end take after the Russian composers. The song is almost bipolar in its mood, swinging from manic and whimsical moments to thunderous passages: sometimes you’re chasing it, and sometimes it’s chasing you. “Anastasia” closes “Under the Pink,” capping 11 songs that not only discuss the betrayals of women,
but so much loss it’s unthinkable.

FULL LIST OF ESSAYS:

• “Words Like Weapons: Tori Amos’ ‘Strange Little Girls’”
• “Back to the Garden: Tori Amos’ ‘Yes, Anastasia,’”
• “The Soul is in the Software: Imogen Heap’s ‘Speak for Yourself’”
• “A Siren in the Sea of Names: A Perfect Circle’s ‘Mer de Noms’”
• “Out of the Mist: Two Views on ‘No Quarter’”
• “What You Couldn’t See: Days of the New”
• “Heart of Darkness: The ‘Cult’ of Apocalyptica”
• “The Shaman in the Arena: The Concert as a Spiritual Journey”
• “Magic in the Mix: Techniques in Recorded Rock Music”
• “Three Heralds of the Storm: Celebrate, Psychonaut, Sumerland”
• “Nefilim Reborn: ‘Zoon’.”

Read The Music is available through most online and retail booksellers.