Kate Mossman at The New Statesman:
At the centre of her debut album, Little Earthquakes, released 30 years ago, is “Me and a Gun”, an a cappella song about a rape so brutal that were Amos emerging now, the experience would define her entire public identity. In a few of her earliest interviews, her rape is edited out, passed over as “a frightful event”, though she had clearly spent part of the interview talking about it. Who knows whether it scared the male-dominated music press of the 1990s; whether it contributed to the way Tori Amos was seen – as someone both away with the fairies and too raw and physical to be comfortable with. An NME review of Little Earthquakes described it as “a sprawling, confusing journey through the gunk of a woman’s soul”. Her brand of sexuality was a challenge for straight men, as she humped her piano, or suckled a pig in images for her third album, Boys For Pele. She was no Kate Bush after all. Asked once who would play her in a film, she replied: Tonya Harding.
more here.