Tori Amos appeared in the early 1990s as a prototypical confessional singer-songwriter. She sang candidly about the intimate details of a troubled, yet vividly lived life. Her recordings were marked by closely miked vocals and minimal arrangements which sometimes featured only her voice and piano. Both in terms of music and lyrics, it takes great courage to perform in such an exposed and revealing way, and it is difficult to come away from Amos’ performances or recordings without feeling like one has had an up-close and personal encounter with the musician. This effect is the stock-in-trade of the confessional singer-songwriter, and this is one key reason why mass audiences connect so strongly with artists like Amos. Her songs about her strict religious upbringing, her struggles to reconcile her budding sexuality with it, her recounting of rape and recovery, and her later miscarriage have called in a large audience who, in many cases, do more than relate to her experiences; in the manner of a ‘talking cure’, Amos’ songs have a healing effect for some by opening up topics, experiences and feelings that are often kept repressed or hidden.
In the analysis below, I consider how Amos’ songs of personal confession and mythology are framed by her cultivation of an image of an almost mystical ‘healer’. Indeed, Amos’ songs cohere around the notion of revelation: Amos reveals personal, spiritual, and symbolic ‘truths’ as a way to heal. Recalling the songs she wrote leading up to her 1991 debut album, Little Earthquakes, Amos said:
I think I’m working on that place in me that was terrorised and really afraid. Now when I sing it, it gives me a lot of strength because I’m not running. At a certain point, there does become a place where the heart opens up and people express their fears and pain. That’s when the healing really takes place.1
Elsewhere, Amos characterises healing through performance as an existential journey into the underworld of the self: ‘I’m very interested in chasing a shadow and chasing the dark side. This is what I do … To heal the wound, you have to go into the dark night of the soul’.2 The healing journey Amos describes here is self-consciously drawn from shamanism, a form of ritual and mystical healing. This chapter explores the idea of the popular performer as a kind of modern-day ‘shaman’, with singer-songwriters like Amos using the archetype of the spiritual healer as an important authenticating frame and a means to connect with her audience.
Shamanism in popular culture
The term ‘shaman’ is believed to have come from the Tungusic languages found in Siberia and Mongolia, referring to a medicinal and spiritual healer. Though applied initially to the ancient religions of Turks and Mongols, the term was later used by anthropologists to describe a variety of tribal spiritual practices, including those of the natives of the Americas. What most ‘shamanic’ religions share are practices involving chant, trance, spirit possession or contact, and the evoking of powerful symbolism, all of which are brought about by a shaman through charismatic ritual performances. Despite similarities among reputedly shamanic religions, by the 1960s, some anthropologists criticised the universal usage of the term by Western scholars for religious practices in almost any tribal society, which sometimes glossed over the significant differences between them.3 Nevertheless, renewed interest in shamanism among academics and the general public arose in the 1980s, as reflected in the appearance of popular books on the topic.4
Tori Amos performs a shamanic persona onstage and on recordings, and there is a long history of entertainers enacting such roles. Rogan Taylor, in his book The Death and Resurrection Show: From Shaman to Superstar (1985), makes a provocative argument that contemporary popular performers are the shamans of the modern West. Taylor states that:
the power that entertainers wield over their audiences cannot be explained [merely] by the advent of mass media. Performers have been surrounded by a highly potent aura for an extremely long time ... It may be a long way from the shamans of the ancient past to the pop idols of today, but between them there stretches an unbroken line of descent. The ‘magic’ of show business is real magic. It draws its power from an immensely well-stocked religious bank, which contains the deposited riches of perhaps a million years of human genius.5
Taylor argues that there is a human spiritual need for extraordinary and ecstatic experience. Expression of this need may be found in every human culture, even though, like language, the variations on this expression are as diverse as human cultures themselves. Many traditions of ecstatic religion, for Taylor, share a common feature – the presence of a mediator between the material and spirit worlds, which is the basis of shamanism. In late capitalist culture, this mediator can be a superstar of the mass media, and he tracks the careers of artists like Houdini, Bessie Smith, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, and John Lennon as mass media ‘shamans’ whose power over audiences had almost mystical overtones.
Taylor defines the shaman as a ‘transformed’ individual, one ‘who must change in order to survive’.6 Archetypally, an individual is initiated into shamanhood through an extreme, existential experience, a brush with death, or a traumatic ordeal. Through this experience, the shaman gains access to the ‘other-world’, with the powers and insights that such access brings. Once initiated, the shaman can call up intuitive sources of knowledge, and navigate the imaginary worlds of myth, and channel the spirit world for purposes of physical and emotional healing. This role is ambivalent: a shaman may possess uncanny talents or insights which may benefit society, but they can also be outcasts.
Amos’ biography manifests such ‘differences’ quite early. Born Myra Ellen Amos in 1963 in North Carolina to a Methodist minister and his wife, who was part native Cherokee, Amos showed prodigious talent on the piano as early as age two, and was sent to study at the Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore at age five. However, she left the school at eleven, as her intuitive musicality and rebellious streak fit poorly with the highly prescribed and structured curriculum of the conservatory. Meanwhile, the conservative religious environment in which Amos grew up left an impression that impacted her creatively throughout her career. At fourteen, she performed professionally in gay bars and lounges, and by twenty-one, she moved to Los Angeles and fronted a glam rock group called Y Kant Tori Read. Despite releasing an album in 1988, the group was a commercial failure. Moreover, during her time in LA, she was raped by an acquaintance to whom she had offered a ride home after a gig. Part of her recovery involved returning to her roots as a singer-pianist, and crafting the songs that would appear on her solo debut, Little Earthquakes. The album, including its a cappella rape narrative in the song ‘Me and a Gun’, did much to establish Amos as a performer of ‘healing’ songs, and it was here that the trope of Amos as a shaman gained traction.
Such descriptions abound in representations of Amos in the press: journalist Lucy O’Brien introduces Amos in her History of Women in Rock as America’s ‘shamanic piano-playing answer to Kate Bush’;7 John Patrick Gatta refers to Amos’ music as ‘techno-shamanic music for a new millennium’;8 an MTV news feature speculated that ‘the relationship that Tori Amos shares with her fans may well be studied by misguided religious historians centuries from now’, and says of Amos and her fans, ‘she is more than a musician to them; she is a mother, a healer, a saint and a shaman’.9 Even a People magazine interviewer felt compelled to describe Amos’ appeal in exotic spiritual terms: ‘There is an other-worldly quality about her – the moment I saw her I was entranced’, he says, speculating that ‘her brand of sorcery is rooted in her part-Cherokee ancestry’.10
Amos herself is aware of the power of the shaman archetype, and has referred at various times to shamanic spirituality as a source of creative inspiration and therapeutic restoration. She described to Tom Doyle in Q Magazine a period in the late 1980s when, in an attempt to heal herself, she experimented with a neo-shamanic spiritual movement in Los Angeles, which included taking Ayahuasca, a hallucinogen associated with native Amazonian medicine.11 With respect to her effort to discover her dark, angry side on the album Boys for Pele (1996), she told Ann Powers that she found ‘a woman, a shaman, who was reputed to know how to take you on a spiritual journey by uncovering things that you were avoiding in your view of yourself’; she described the journey she took with this woman as a kind of ‘initiation’.12 Her 2005 album, The Beekeeper was partly inspired by Simon Buxton’s book, The Shamanic Way of the Bee (2004), which, in part, probed pre-Christian spiritual ideas about female sexuality as nourishing and restorative, rather than sinful.13
Shamanism, healing, and song
Admittedly, the backstories of Amos’ life which provide so much topical material, gravitas, and truth-value to so many of her songs could be viewed simply as part of a larger singer-songwriter pattern. As Donald Brackett concluded, the work of singer-songwriters can be viewed as a ‘dark mirror’, a reflection of the pathology that the artists see in themselves, yet ‘speak[s] for all of us in a way that connects with what we all feel’.14 For Brackett, singer-songwriters trade on expressions of ‘dis-ease’, ‘travers[ing] an immensely huge landscape in a way that provides a haunting kind of coherence and continuity … [and] a discovery of a shared melancholy of alarming proportions’.15 It is striking how Rogan Taylor makes very similar remarks about the role of shaman with regard to pathology and healing: ‘The shaman’s sickness is, in reality, everybody’s sickness’.16 Even more broadly, the idea of musicians or poets speaking ‘divinely inspired’ and ‘universal’ truths is ingrained historically, and can be witnessed in, for example, the ‘cult of virtuosity’ in nineteenth-century European concert music, or in the ‘bodhisattva’ role ascribed to black bebop jazz musicians in twentieth-century American beat culture. The need to authenticate such music, or to explain experiences of ‘depth’ and profundity in its reception, may be the reason why the performers are sometimes given spiritual titles. For singer-songwriters, the terms ‘visionary’ or ‘prophet’ have been used in connection with artists like Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, so the term shaman is not an unprecedented means through which the potency of singer-songwriters may be described.
The songs which have been most closely associated with Amos as a healer are those which confess both trauma and feelings of isolation. Many commentators on Amos make ‘Me and a Gun’, where she narrates her experience of rape, a central part of this side of her repertoire, and with good reason.17 Amos sings the song unaccompanied, underscoring how alone and vulnerable the victim was during the attack. The melody is spare and narrow in range, and the vocal is delivered in a reserved and deadpan manner, not with overt emotionalism and pathos. If anything, the minimal delivery adds to the bleakness of her account. The lyrics intersperse details from the rape – being attacked with a weapon inside a car – with surprisingly trivial thoughts that went through her head at the time, which were actually part of her survival strategy. ‘I’ve never seen Barbados’, she sings, ‘so I must get out of this’. She also rehearses her response to the inevitable question levelled at the victim (‘was she asking for it’?) by insisting that her right to wear tight clothing does not mean she has a ‘right to be on [her] stomach’ and be attacked in a car.
In her study of Tori Amos fans, Adrienne Trier-Bieniek quotes a number of women for whom ‘Me and a Gun’ was experienced as an important source of healing from their own experiences of sexual assault.18 For one respondent, the song ‘triggered a flood of emotion, I guess, and I felt incredibly overwhelmed but also incredibly grateful because it felt like … I wasn’t so isolated … Tori is responsible for the first time I started healing from when I was raped. It’s her music that led me there.’19 Another respondent notes that Amos’ song led her to start talking about her own rape for the first time, which began her own ‘bridge from being a victim … to being a survivor’.20
While ‘Me and a Gun’ is perhaps the most high-profile example, a number of other songs work towards the same sort of healing through the breaking of silence. In the song ‘Silent All These Years’ (1991), Amos narrates the thoughts of a woman bravely rebuking an abuser after years of feeling voiceless. ‘Precious Things’ (1991) describes the ways in which Amos felt belittled and inadequate, and offers angry retorts against each of them. For example, an audience member says, ‘You’re really an ugly girl/But I like the way you play’, and Amos, to her own disbelief, thanks him for the backhanded compliment, and then curses him under her breath. Then Amos shouts down the sexual double-standards of the ‘those Christian boys’, and the ‘fascist’ backdrop to the world of the ‘pretty’ and ‘nice’ girls. The refrain of the song uses the image of a bloodletting ritual as a way of cleansing herself of these feelings: ‘Let them bleed’, she sings of these ‘precious things’ to which we hold on, ‘Let them break their hold on me’. As Reynolds and Press note, this rich image of haemorrhage as cleansing and release ‘offers physical and mental relief, gives vent to the festering negativity that’s pent up inside the body that’s been silenced for so long’.21
The song ‘Spark’ (1998) is another example of a deeply personal confession of trauma, in this case Amos’ miscarriage, in which she narrates the doubts (‘Doubting if there’s a woman in there somewhere’), the denial (‘You say you don’t want it/Again and again’), and the shaking of her faith (‘If the divine master plan is perfection/Maybe next I’ll give Judas a try’). While the song offers no resolution or answer to what happened, it is the intimate nature of her revelations that give songs like this their power to connect.
Problems and issues with pop-culture ‘shamans’
While it is clear that Amos has self-consciously cultivated shamanism as a frame surrounding many aspects of her songwriting and public image, problematic elements do surface. The image of the shaman or ‘medicine man’ carries historical connotations of primitive exoticism in Western entertainment. To appropriate shamanistic elements in song, concert, and video is, in part to take them out of their original contexts and into a sphere where their meanings and effects are unpredictable. Moreover, it places Amos’ work in a similar category with popular writing about shamanism targeted at general audiences, such as that of Carlos Castaneda, Michael Harner and Rogan Taylor,22 which some anthropologists suspect tell us more about what modern, Western urbanites want to believe about shamanism than about any actual shamanistic traditions.23
While Amos seems to genuinely respect the myths and spiritualities she explores, her own descriptions of participating in shamanistic rituals in Los Angeles and taking hallucinogenic plants like Ayahuasca are difficult not to see as embedded in the recent popularisation of shamanism which, for Atkinson, was ‘spawned by the drug culture of the 1960s and 1970s, the human potential movement, environmentalism, interest in non-Western religions, and by popular anthropology, especially the Castaneda books’.24 Like New Age spirituality and the self-actualisation movements of which it is a part, such ‘neo-shamanism’ may be critiqued as a sign of the privilege of white Americans, who can freely and eclectically sample the spiritually exotic as they search for meaning and identity.
Amos abets her spiritual experiments by publicly acknowledging her part-Cherokee ancestry, seemingly suggesting that the fraction of ‘non-Western other’ she carries within her provides a passport to authentic participation in alternative spirituality. Through this, she seems to use a kind of essentialism to add authenticity to her shamanic persona, and this is significant because none of the other rock musicians that have tried to tout a shaman-like performing persona – including her own influences in Led Zeppelin (who suggestively courted the Faustian myth of Robert Johnson), but also Jim Morrison (who believed himself to be haunted by the spirit of a Navajo shaman) and Bob Dylan, who was received as a countercultural prophet – could claim the kind of ethnic or biographical backstory that made Amos’ shamanic image seem so plausible.
In light of this, I believe that conferring some kind of authority and authenticity on Amos (and similar performers) is partly what is at stake with the rather loaded, complex shamanic label. Insofar as the term ‘shaman’ can denote a venerable spiritual tradition to some people, and is regarded as a universal human phenomenon by writers such as Rogan Taylor and Joseph Campbell,25 the label might be used to construct a sense of legitimacy when applied to a performer. The constructed relationship between shamanism and Western entertainment is discussed by Richard Schechner, who notes, like Taylor, that myth, ritual, and entertainment (theatre, especially) are more related than is commonly thought. Authenticity, in particular, is at stake. Schechner describes ‘attempts at ritualizing performance, of finding in the theatre itself authenticating acts. In a period when authenticity is increasingly rare in public life, the performer has been asked ... [not just to] mirror his [or her] times ... but to remedy them’. Intriguingly, Schechner discusses shamanism as an appropriate metaphor for this process: ‘The professions taken as models for the theatre are medicine and the church. No wonder shamanism is popular among theatre people: shamanism is that branch of doctoring that is religious, and that kind of religion that is full of ironies and tricks.’26 This gives us a good lens with which to contextualise the shaman image surrounding Tori Amos as a cumulative effect of her confessional, mythical and symbolic lyrical narratives, her career biography, and her reception in the press. This image is tied to discourses of authenticity, but also provides an example of an artist’s persona symbolising redemptive acts of ritual or theatre, as suggested by the theories of Taylor and Schechner. It places the theme of personal and psychological healing, common within the confessional singer-songwriter genre, in a compelling, if exotic, frame. With this in mind, one could regard ‘shamanism’ as a convenient and appropriate, if contestable, term for the functions and pleasures that Amos’ music serves.
