Tori Amos's Boys for Pele

It’s hard to think of a solo female recording artist who has been as revered or as reviled over the course of her career as Tori Amos. Amy Gentry argues that these violent aesthetic responses to A ...

It’s hard to think of a solo female recording artist who has been as revered or as reviled over the course of her career as Tori Amos. Amy Gentry argues that these violent aesthetic responses to Amos’s performance, both positive and negative, are organized around disgust—the disgust that women are taught to feel, not only for their own bodies, but for their taste in music. Released in 1996, Amos’s third album, Boys for Pele, represents the height of Amos’s willingness to explore the ugly qualities that make all of her music, even her more conventionally beautiful albums, so uncomfortably, and