On the inevitable Tori Amos comparison. (Wrongly unmentioned: G. Kulka.)

I’ve always been annoyed by the critical practice of describing female performers by their relation to, and precise distance from, Tori Amos. Posting on it has been difficult, though. It’s hard to pin down exactly what bothers me about it.

At the most basic level, of course, it bothers me because an Amos comparison turns me right the fuck off. I’ve spent a solid decade in close, regular contact with a wide variety of Tori Amos fans, and as a result I’ve tried very hard to like her. I’ve heard every album. I’ve seen her live (and she was very good). I acknowledge her skill at the piano, her unique songwriting, her strong perspective; I see what the fuss is about, but that doesn’t mean I very often want to hear her. I’m not a fan. As a result, if I’m reading a review that compares someone to Amos at all, I don’t tend to follow up – and this is a shame, because pretty much every warbly female singer-songwriter gets the Amos-as-reference-point at least once.

Then there is the Amosing-as-dismissal. This started as a Kristeen Young thing. It’s strange, but almost inevitably, first-time listeners who like her call her “an angry Kate Bush,” while the ones who dislike her compare her to Amos. I heard it, too, at first. They do share an inborn vocal tone, and they both write unconventional piano parts. But where Young’s playing is loud and discordant, Amos’ is quiet, elegant and restrained; where Amos’ voice is naturally low and takes a complicated breathiness as its trademark, Young’s is piercing and sobbing, and makes frequent leaps from a mid-t0-high, almost falsetto rock belt into an extremely high classical note. Amos’ and Young’s classical training is respectively in piano and in voice, and that makes a vast difference in how they rebel against it.

All this is to say that, while I’m well-used to hearing this particular comparison, and to refuting it instinctively and at length, I also recognize its sway – its appeal to that lineage of female performers, running more or less from Kate Bush in 1980 to Bat for Lashes in 2009, and through Amos and Bjork somewhere in between. This appeal is a powerful method of dismissal: you are a child of this performer, a parent of this; I have now categorized you, and will therefore never see you as exceptional. This is particularly problematic because that lineage is not even real. It is an easy, false perception based on the (relatively) rational assumption, upon being shown the rock canon, that the few confessional women [or male New Wave moaners, or sweet-toned Northern Irish alternacrooners] in it must represent a distinct and specific plotline.

In turn, this type of perception is based on the common belief that artforms are collective – that it is possible for an unusual artist, for example (as I recently read a reputable person saying of Amy Winehouse) to represent “an aberration” against a more unified general narrative of collaborative progress.

I think that this is pure English-department crap, and I think so only because I spent many years fully convinced that I was very clever for thinking something like it.

So – yes; on one level, I’m just perpetually annoyed because a favorite singer sometimes gets a comparison I don’t like; on another level, I’m similarly snitty because I don’t really like Tori Amos, and if I see Hanne Hukkelberg compared to her, than I’m less likely to seek out the interesting work of Ms. Hukkelberg, even though I know better. On yet another level, it bothers me because it exposes my own willingness (as earlier) to believe in ideas, like quantifiable artistic lineages, which I actually think are nonsense. It’s also annoying for much more universal reasons.

This entire post goes double for Bjork and, in fact, triple for Ms. Bush.

Double.

Triple.