Strange Little Girls & Real Men
There are concept albums, and there are covers albums, and rarely do the two meet. Very few covers albums have a concept, at best they might have a loose theme, and most don’t have much to say beyond “here are some songs that I like”. Strange Little Girls, the 2001 covers album from Tori Amos, is different though. The concept itself is fairly straightforward; songs originally written by men, about women, performed from a woman’s perspective. What stands out is how wholeheartedly Amos goes for the concept, to the point of creating a different female character for each song, with herself pictured as each in the artwork of the record. As I wrote a few weeks back, a good cover version isn’t about improving on the original, but recontextualising it, understanding it in a different way. Rarely has that aim been so clear and explicitly stated as it is with Strange Little Girls.
The album met with mixed critical and commercial success upon release, but was briefly notorious for its’ version of Eminem’s ’97 Bonnie & Clyde. I personally can’t decide whether it is the most or least interesting song on the record. On the one hand, the violent & deeply misogynistic content of Eminem’s lyrics were widely recognised, and people have debated whether this means Eminem himself is a violent misogynist has been throughout the career, so does this version have anything new to add? On the other hand, Eminem was one of the most famous, successful musicians in the world at the time, and Amos’s version of his tale, which involves disposing his ex-wife’s dead body with his infant daughter in tow, does emphasise how deeply disturbing this particular track actually is. I listened back to it once for the purpose of writing this article, and have no great desire to listen to it again.
I think it’s some of the well known, but less obviously awful songs which benefit most from their reinterpretation here. Songs such as Enjoy The Silence, Happiness Is A Warm Gun, Heart of Gold & I’m Not In Love. The change in perspective can take a song which seems romantic, protective or kind from the point of view of the original writer, and make it seem patronising, unpleasant, even sinister.
I’m a fan of retelling stories from a different perspective. I’ve just finished re-reading the novel ‘Wide Sargasso Sea’ by Jean Rhys, which tells the story of the first Mrs. Rochester, portrayed in Jane Eyre as a madwoman, a wild beast kept in the attic. That book sheds a very different light on Jane Eyre, in the same way that Amos does with the songs on this record, widening and deeping your understanding, revealing aspects you had not noticed before. And the thing is, once you start thinking about stories and songs from a different viewpoint, from the perspective of the subject rather than the writer, from the perspective of a minor character rather than the main protagonist, you can never really stop, and it helps you view art in an entirely new way.
Strange Little Girls ends with an exception to its’ own concept, a cover of the bisexual singer Joe Jackson’s song ‘Real Men’, After 11 songs which ask questions about the attitude of men towards women, ‘Real Men’ asks the question “what is a man anyway?”. Does a man have to conform to macho stereotypes to be a real man, to be violent and unable to talk about his feelings? This was a song about toxic masculinity long before that phrase existed, or at least seems that way when sung by Amos.
I’ve have occasionally heard people say that what they like is “a real man”. I’ve never been 100% sure what they meant, but have always been 100% sure that they did not mean me. Someone who’s practical, a handyman? A friend of mine once said she would never date a man who didn’t own their own toolkit. Needless to say I did not. Do they mean the strong silent type? (the Gary Cooper type as Tony Soprano often used to refer to them). Again, not exactly me, although I oscillate between oversharing and having to be coaxed into talking about my feelings.
Whatever the people who used the phrase meant, it used to bother me a little that it wasn’t me, that I wasn’t a ‘real man’ in some peoples eyes. In time though, I came to realise that a real man is just any man. Just because I don’t fit into every stereotype of what a man should be, for better or worse that is what I am.
Strange Little Girls is 21 years old this year, released almost exactly half my lifetime ago. There are albums that I’ve listened to more in that time, many of them in fact, but there aren’t many that I’ve thought about as much. In a subtle way, it helped to change my perspective about art, and it also made me think about what it means to be a man, and for that alone it’s a record that will always hold a special place in my heart.
Originally published at http://colourthecortex.wordpress.com on August 31, 2022.
