Eruditorum Press

December 30, 2019

There are two approaches to choosing a title track for an album. One is to pick something that seems a thesis statement for the album, capturing its major musical and lyrical themes while not risking confusion by wanting to be a single. The other is to pick something with a cool title. It is this latter approach that explains why an album dominated by fairly simply arranged piano ballads featuring confessional lyrics flecked with spots of idiosyncrasy is named after an austerely ominous song whose lyrics are basically wall to wall crypticness.

Much of Little Earthquakes feels as though it appeared sui generis from nowhere save for the interior of Tori mos’s head. There are a few exceptions—the ruins and traces of Y Kant Tori Read and of the 80s at large lurk throughout the album. But for the most part, Amos feels profoundly singular. On top of that, Amos is historically extremely reticent to talk about her musical influences—one is left to infer them from what songs she chooses to cover, and given that her covers are often hostile takeovers rather than homages, this is an unreliable process at best. Nevertheless it bears mentioning that, excluding songs such as “Smells Like Teen Spirit” that were first recorded as studio tracks, Amos’s third most common cover in live shows is The Cure’s “Lovesong,” which has shown up repeatedly on tours starting with Under the Pink and continuing through Native Invader.

“Lovesong” is of course off of The Cure’s 1989 album Disintegration, which is by far the safest choice if you’re ever cornered by angry goths and told to name the best Cure album. And while it’s not quite clear that Amos namechecks the album in “Little Earthquakes,” given that the song belongs to the same set of recordings where she explicitly references Nine Inch Nails and Sandman, there’s an aggressive plausibility to the suggestion that Amos might have been thinking of an album that had only released its last single a few months earlier when she picked the word.

The better case, however, is simply found in the “Little Earthquakes”’ instrumentation. Its sweeping waves of dark synthesizers and deep drums conjure something very much like the drowned and moody beauty of The Cure’s masterpiece. The intro to “The Same Deep Water As You” is probably the best direct comparison, but Amos isn’t engaged in any sort of blithe homage of the sort that “You Go to My Head” was for Prince. “Little Earthquakes” is not using the same soundscape as Disintegration, opting to frame its forboding majesty around Amos’s piano instead of sprawling washes of guitar. It’s the difference between imitation and inspiration, and the fact that Amos has made that leap speaks volumes about how much she’s progressed since Y Kant Tori Read.…

December 27, 2019

The Pain of the Respect Thereof (Girl)

Elizabeth Sandifer boys in their dresses, little earthquakes, little earthquakes b-sides 2

The traditional Eruditorum Press post-holiday ebook sale is running from now until January 2nd. Details are here.

In many ways the slightest song on Little Earthquakes, “Girl” is hamstrung most obviously by its positioning as the second track on the album. Coming off of “Crucify,” it is doomed to be the markedly inferior of the two post-80s empower ballads. Coming immediately before the jaw-dropping triple threat of “Silent All These Years,” “Precious Things,” and “Winter,” it is subsequently doomed to be forgotten by “that doesn’t make you Jesus” at the absolute latest. That it made the album over “Upside Down,” ”Take to the Sky,” or even “Flying Dutchman” is in hindsight one of the more baffling decisions made about Little Earthquakes.

It’s not fair to say that “Girl” is a bad song. Indeed, individual moments are as fine as anything on the album—the haunting, arrhythmic male vocal over “sit in the chair and be good now,” or the mad spaghetti of sounds that make up the bridge. Really, the overall soundscape of the song is solid, even if there’s a slight degree of overproduction (a problem that arguably plagues all four of the Rosse/Amos tracks, but “Girl” is the least suited to maximalism).

The problem really is in its precise sequencing. Musically, it has the same debt to the 80s as “Crucify,” but where Siegerson’s restraint and desire to foreground Amos and her piano made for a well-crafted pop song with the 80s inflections you’d expect something in 1990 to have, Rosse and Amos’s excess begins to tilt the song towards the same mistakes as Y Kant Tori Read. There’s a profound difference of degree—“Girl” is a mile ahead of even the best songs on Y Kant Tori Read. But the basic error is the same, and coming after a song that does the same sort of thing musically only with vastly more panache is damaging. In the other direction, meanwhile, it also feels like a pale echo—“she’s been everybody else’s girl / maybe someday she’ll be her own” is the same sentiment as “Silent All These Years,” only dissociated onto an unnamed third party and made tentative as opposed to emphatic.

All of this oversimplifies. There is a dark mystery to “Girl” that the songs on either side lack—its skulking piano line laid over a firm drumbeat gives it a sense of strange menace, while its lyrics, with the girl crawling through the shadows, hints at a sense of abjection that makes it clear that this belongs to the same set of songs as “Precious Things” and “Little Earthquakes” as opposed to the cheerier confessionalism of the Siegerson songs. This isn’t simply a song that’s failing to live up to the ones on either side of it. But nothing that it’s doing comes off cleanly and decisively enough to distinguish it either.

Amos has largely seemed aware that the song doesn’t quite do the business.…

December 27, 2019

2019 Post-Yule Sale

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Another year over, which means that it’s time for the annual Eruditorum Press post-holiday sale at Smashwords. But first, a practical word: I’ll be putting another Boys in Their Dresses entry up tomorrow morning. I’ll do one more on December 30th. I have a few more written past that, so I’ll run the series on Fridays for a few weeks overlapping with Dalek Eruditorum, which will begin January 6th.

Currently Dalek Eruditorum is set to run in its 26-post version. But it’s a mere $35 away on Patreon from going up to its 39-post version, and has until January 6th to get there. That would add essays on The Crusade, Evil of the Daleks, The Green Death, Invasion of the Dinosaurs, Seeds of Doom, Deadly Assassin, State of Decay, Kinda, The Greatest Show in the Galaxy, the TV Movie, Planet of the Ood, Closing Time, The Magician’s Apprentice/The Witch’s Familiar, and something from Series 12.

Meanwhile, we have until January 1st to get to the $800 threshold needed for Series 12 reviews. If we don’t make it, I’ll do short reviews for $2+ patrons, but the full shebang Eruditorum Press reviews will only happen if we get up to $800. Will we do it? I don’t know. It seems increasingly unlikely, which is sad and weird-feeling, but we’ll see. In any case, if either this or the longer version of Dalek Eruditorum matters to you, time grows short to make them happen.

Right. On to the sale. This year it’s even easier than ever, because there’s one coupon code that affects every single book that I have in print. You can just go to my Smashwords page and pick any book that you want, and then use the coupon code RW23H to get the discount on any of my books.

Here’s the discounts I currently have running.

Neoreaction a Basilisk: $2.50 (50% off), matching the price it’s on sale for at Amazon.co.uk

The Last War in Albion Volume 1: $3 (40% off)

TARDIS Eruditorum, meanwhile, is on sale for the price of the relevant Doctor, as below:

TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 1: $1 (80% off)

TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 2: $2 (60% off)

TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 3: $3 (40% off)

TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 4: $4 (20% off)

TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 5: $4 (20% off)

Thank you all for a wonderful year. The support you’ve given me, especially with this spring’s “help me quit my day job” funding drive, has been nothing short of incredible. I have the best readers, and I love you all.…

December 25, 2019

I Don’t Speak German, Episode 38 – Charles Murray and The Bell Curve

Jack Graham fascism, i dont speak german, idsg, podcast 0

Merry Christmas! This Christmas Day, Daniel and Jack chat about Charles Murray, co-author of the infamous pseudo-scientific racist hoax The Bell Curve.

LINK

Content Warning.

Notes/Links:

Shaun, “The Bell Curve.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBc7qBS1Ujo

ForeverJameses, “Reading the Right – Volume One: The Bell Curve”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GgZFGgJlAsk

The Bell Curve PDF: https://lesacreduprintemps19.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/the-bell-curve.pdf

P 37-38 “The Creation of a Cognitive Elite Within The College System.”

John Ogbu p. 307

Ogbu and Simons, “Voluntary and Involuntary Minorities: A Cultural-Ecological Theory of School Performance With Some Implications for Eductation.” https://faculty.washington.edu/rsoder/EDUC305/OgbuSimonsvoluntaryinvoluntary.pdf

“From his comparative research Ogbu has concluded that (1) no minority group does better in school because it is genetically superior than others; (2) no minority culture is better at educating its children; and (3) no minority language is better suited for learning in school (Simons et al. n.d.). He has argued that from a comparative perspective, one cannot attribute the differences in minority school performance to cultural, linguistic, or genetic differences. This is not to deny genetic differences or to deny that cultural and language differences may have an adverse or positive effect on minority school performance; but culture and language do not entirely determine the differences among minorities. Consider that some minority groups, like the Buraku outcast in Japan, do poorly in school in their country of origin but do quite well in the United States, or that Koreans do well in school in China and in the United States but do poorly in Japan. Comparative research suggests that we might discover at least a part of the explanation by closely looking at the histories and sociocultural adaptations of these minorities (Simons et al. n.d.). More specifically, to understand why minority groups differ among themselves in school performance we have to know two things: the first is their own responses to their history of incorporation into U.S. society and their subsequent treatment or mistreatment by white Americans. The second is how their responses to that history and treatment affect their perceptions of and responses to schooling.”

Erik Siegel, Scientific American “The Real Problem With Charles Murray and ‘The Bell Curve.’ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/voices/the-real-problem-with-charles-murray-and-the-bell-curve/

““The Bell Curve” endorses prejudice by virtue of what it does not say. Nowhere does the book address why it investigates racial differences in IQ. By never spelling out a reason for reporting on these differences in the first place, the authors transmit an unspoken yet unequivocal conclusion: Race is a helpful indicator as to whether a person is likely to hold certain capabilities. Even if we assume the presented data trends are sound, the book leaves the reader on his or her own to deduce how to best put these insights to use. The net effect is to tacitly condone the prejudgment of individuals based on race.”

“Daring Research or ‘Social Science Pornography’?”

“”Why can a publisher sell it?” he asked in the proposal for “Losing Ground.” “Because a huge number of well-meaning whites fear that they are closet racists, and this book tells them they are not. It’s going to make them feel better about things they already think but do not know how to say.”…

December 17, 2019

Where Things Stand

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Couple of business updates for everyone.

First of all, TARDIS Eruditorum v5 is back in print just in time for the holidays. The Kindle and print editions are still stubbornly not connecting with one another, so here they are:

Kindle

At this point, volumes 1-5 of TARDIS Eruditorum, Last War in Albion 1, and Neoreaction a Basilisk are all back in print. I expect I’ll get v6 early next year, and v7 out in general… ooh, I had been saying January/February, but let’s call it March/April just cause November was kind of a train wreck for productivity. I have like three more essays to write, but they all involve a lot of television watching that I just haven’t found time for.

Speaking of Neoreaction a Basilisk, I’ve cut the UK Kindle price to the bare minimum for a bit in case anyone needs some cathartically funny reading about how we’re all fucked.

Finally, I wanted to highlight that Dalek Eruditorum is still only at the baseline 13 post version, with the Patreon stalled at $667. So it needs $33 to get the second swath of stories, and $83 to get the third. Perhaps more to the point, though, the Patreon is a full $133 away from me reviewing Series 12 of Doctor Who. Yes, I know that’s a very high goal. But equally, Series 11 was terrible and depressing and if I’m going to choke out another ten essays of trying to evaluate the Chibnall era then I’m going to need to be paid very well for it. That said, it’d feel weird and sad not to review Doctor Who, and so I remain hopeful that there’ll be a big surge of Patrons that will get me to that goal.

But let’s start with $33 to make Dalek Eruditorum a twenty-six week affair. To review, that will mean I cover The War Machines, Enemy of the World, Inferno, The Sea Devils, The Ark in Space, Horror of Fang Rock, The Horns of Nimon, Enlightenment, Terror of the Vervoids, Paradise Towers, Rise of the Cybermen/Age of Steel, The Bells of Saint John, and World Enough and Time/The Doctor Falls. So if that sounds good, the Patreon is right where it always is.…

December 16, 2019

Let Them Bleed Now (Precious Things)

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Precious Things (live, 1991)

Precious Things (1992)

Precious Things (TV performance, 1994)

Precious Things (live, 1996)

Precious Things (live, 1997)

Precious Things (TV performance, 1998)

Precious Things (live, 1998)

Precious Things (live at Glastonbury, 1998)

Precious Things (TV performance, 1999)

Precious Things (live, 2003)

Precious Things (TV performance, 2003)

Precious Things (official bootleg, 2007, Tori set)

Precious Things (live, 2011)

Precious Things (2012)

Precious Things (live, 2014)

In September of 1990, Amos submitted an initial version of the album that would eventually be called Little Earthquakes. The track list was in several regards perverse, even given that Amos only had the Siegerson sessions to go on—most puzzlingly, “Mary,” and “Sweet Dreams,” both made it on while “Silent All These Years” and “Upside Down” both missed out. Atlantic rejected this version of the album, however, and so Amos went back to work.

With next to no budget left for improving the album, Amos found herself working at a home studio with her then-boyfriend Eric Rosse. They brought in a handful of session musicians including Steve Caton, Amos’s guitarist from Y Kant Tori Read, and Amos set out to write a new batch of songs. The songs from these sessions generally skew a bit heavier than the Siegerson sessions—Amos’s piano is backed by Caton’s guitar on all of them, and they make much heavier use of conventional drums. This does not mean that they were poppier per se—it’s notable that none of the album’s four videos came from these sessions—but they marked a clear effort to make the album harder and to give it a bit more of an edge.

Even among these songs, however, “Precious Things” stands out. Indeed, there are few if any collections of songs that “Precious Things” would not stand out among. It’s a chilling piece, flush with both fury and emotional vulnerability. This combination is not unprecedented in pop music, but it’s most commonly associated with the genre of breakup songs. “Precious Things” is not a breakup song, although that’s not the worst starting point for understanding what it is.

Like a breakup song, “Precious Things” is at its core an exorcism. The emotional engine of a good breakup song comes from the push and pull between the singer’s anger/contempt and the singer’s pain/sorrow. Its central paradox is that the singer still cares enough about whoever they’re disavowing to be singing an impassioned song about them. Getting over someone is manifestly not the same thing as being over them. And this is the same dynamic at the heart of “Precious Things.” Its furious plea to “let them bleed / let them wash away” is undermined before it begins by the description of these things as “precious.” The song seeks to expunge, but the nature of this is that whatever is being rejected must at the moment of rejection have its teeth in you. “Let them break their hold on me” can only be said from within their grasp.

But again, “Precious Things” is not a breakup song; its targets are bigger than that.…

December 11, 2019

I Don’t Speak German, Episode 37 – Robert Whitaker and ‘White Genocide’

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In this episode, Daniel tells Jack about a lesser known but crucial figure in the rise of the ‘White Genocide’ conspiracy theory on today’s far-right, Robert Whitaker.

Direct Download / Permalink

Content Warnings for episode and links below.

NOTES:

Robert Whitaker’s Mantra: http://www.robertwwhitaker.com/mantra/

“ASIA FOR THE ASIANS, AFRICA FOR THE AFRICANS, WHITE COUNTRIES FOR EVERYBODY!

Everybody says there is this RACE problem. Everybody says this RACE problem will be solved when the third world pours into EVERY white country and ONLY into white countries.

The Netherlands and Belgium are just as crowded as Japan or Taiwan, but nobody says Japan or Taiwan will solve this RACE problem by bringing in millions of third worlders and quote assimilating unquote with them.

Everybody says the final solution to this RACE problem is for EVERY white country and ONLY white countries to “assimilate,” i.e., intermarry, with all those non-whites.

What if I said there was this RACE problem and this RACE problem would be solved only if hundreds of millions of non-blacks were brought into EVERY black country and ONLY into black countries?

How long would it take anyone to realize I’m not talking about a RACE problem. I am talking about the final solution to the BLACK problem?

And how long would it take any sane black man to notice this and what kind of psycho black man wouldn’t object to this?

But if I tell that obvious truth about the ongoing program of genocide against my race, the white race, Liberals and respectable conservatives agree that I am a naziwhowantstokillsixmillionjews.

They say they are anti-racist. What they are is anti-white.

Anti-racist is a code word for anti-white.”

“Anti-racist is a code word for anti-white” on RationalWiki: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Anti-racist_is_a_code_word_for_anti-white

White Genocide at Rationalwiki: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/White_genocide

Metapedia (far-right Wikipedia) article on Bob Whitaker: https://en.metapedia.org/wiki/Bob_Whitaker?__cf_chl_jschl_tk__=399089c0fdf5c55502f94a7b14618f8544f283e5-1575239608-0-ASsg9jPD6QX683L5pDGMYrWmbBo63JGKjDVO7qNc8fpZDk_JxqI0zgi85ND5_gtNqFlKA0aV1kZt93fvGK0eh38oZ1tkUIhoudZyDuBAi52HO8LQX3sCim0k5Dhs9PPp1B3AlIjZT5cN1PEbJW28Exr_UUO7bPlTZDnOiQvAMKYc8Pdcsi1gyX2TDoUA9zHgtFQonJUJ_F_adpxmh5nawDzTneSVy1oaYkaSFQCuEgJ7pLpWlrq9VU_zOTeDEgnPjzkKO2w9yZh7AWa94VtK2LQa994wugvE5TPxcP81-UsF

Robert W. Whitaker at Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/kindle-dbs/entity/author/B001KJ0KV4?_encoding=UTF8&node=618073011&offset=0&pageSize=12&searchAlias=stripbooks&sort=author-pages-popularity-rank&page=1&langFilter=default#formatSelectorHeader

“Why Johnny Can’t Think: America’s Professor-Priesthood” (free PDF) https://id.b-ok2.org/book/2957237/010a34

“”Why Johnny Can’t Think” shows that leftism means, “Professors should rule the world.” It demonstrates why each totally inbred generation of professors chooses a new generation of professors that is even more inbred and leftist and what actually happens when college graduates and professors actually try ruling the world through socialism, through criminal “rehabilitation,” and through the New Education. Whatever they call it, socialism or environmentalism or multiculturalism, each leftist program just means that professors should rule the world. And every time they try, it is a disaster. But college graduates keep pushing new leftists policies. That what they learned in school. That’s what we pay professors to teach them in school. Joe Sobran says in the foreword: “A former professor himself, Bob Whitaker believes that formal education has become dangerous, and often fatal, to common sense. This is nothing new, but Americans believe so deeply in formal education that they routinely sacrifice their children’s youth to it, often paying staggering amounts of money to shield them from the real world… “…the “social” sciences are another matter. These “social” sciences are often directly contradicted by the hard sciences.…

December 9, 2019

The Sea is the Sky (Flying Dutchman)

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Flying Dutchman (1992)

Flying Dutchman (live, 2001)

Flying Dutchman (2012)

Flying Dutchman (live, 2017)

Some time early in Amos’s time in LA, while she was still playing the airport Holiday Inn to pay her rent, a friend of hers helped her move, and asked her kinda sorta boyfriend Rantz Hoseley to help. Hoseley was attending art school in the city, and the two hit it off immediately (Hoseley cameos in the video for “The Big Picture”). A few years later, in the wake of Y Kant Tori Read, Amos called her friend to chat. Hoseley, an artist who wanted to make it in the comics industry, had recently left Los Angeles after a number of setbacks that included being told by Marvel editor Tom DeFalco that he should give up and become a plumber and what he describes s “some very scary near-fatal experiences,” and was living with his parents in Washington, but the two remained close. Amos was starting to bounce back from her own setback and in the early stages of Little Earthquakes, and asked her friend how he’d describe himself. Hoseley’s response, delivered from the depths of his depressive spiral, was to say, “Tori, I’m the Flying Dutchman.” And so Amos began to write Hoseley a song.

By legend, the Flying Dutchman is a ghost ship doomed to sail the oceans forever. The stated origins of the curse are numerous. In some tellings, the ship was cursed after it committed some horrific crime; in others, its captain made an ill-advised invocation of the Devil. In any case, the ship is now cursed to never find a safe port. To sight it is to see disaster, not least as the ship exists perpetually within a patch of foul weather. (In practice, supposed sightings were most likely Fata Morgana mirages.)

The song is a soaring and expansive piece, making liberal use of (sampled) strings and clocking in at six and a half minutes, with multiple different verse structures that get employed over the course of it. (One reporter, rather fatuously, suggested the song has “a kind of movement-like structure,” to which Amos, rather more accurately, replied that “it’s not the structure of your typical pop song.”) Lyrically, it’s a rousing statement of belief, first in Hoseley, who she sympathetically portrays as being constantly badgered about what he’ll do with his life, and in the second verse describing a woman who is chronically misunderstood by the “straight suits.” This is possibly Amos portraying herself after the failure of Y Kant Tori Read. Picking up on Hoseley’s identification with the famous ghost ship, Amos spends the chorus hailing the missing ship, imagining it not as a bunch of lost souls desperate to get home, but as some sort of intrepid explorer of far-out conceptual realms. As she tells her characters, “they can’t see / what you’re born to be.”

Understandably given its use of canned strings, Amos picked the song to rework on Gold Dust, where it’s one of the few songs not to feel like a pale echo of its original.…

December 2, 2019

A Little Warm in My Heart (Winter)

Elizabeth Sandifer boys in their dresses, little earthquakes 2

A fitting entry for a day I’m snowed in with a foot of snow. Anyway, quick update about where we stand on Doctor Who Series 12 reviews, as it’s just under a month until it debuts. The answer is that we are very, very far from them—the Patreon is at its start of month lull due to declined pledges, but as it stands we’re over $100 from the $800 tier where I’ll do Series 12 reviews. If you’d like me to howl into the void about Chibnall Who, you’ll want to go to Patreon and fix that. And in the process you’ll unlock 26 more Dalek Eruditorum entries.

Winter (live, 1991)

Winter (1992)

Winter (music video, 1992)

Winter (TV performance, 1992)

Winter (live, 1997)

Winter (TV performance, 2003)

Winter (live, 2005, official bootleg)

Winter (live, 2007, official bootleg, Tori set)

Winter (radio performance, 2009)

Winter (2012)

Winter (live, 2017)

Fathers are, of course, a standard of women’s art, whether about an invented relationship (“Papa Don’t Preach”) or an authentic one (“Daddy Lessons’). And traditionally there is a fraught tone to these. The character changes—the father can be treacherous, unreliable, abusive, authoritarian, or any number of other sins. But the basic dynamic is there—a patriarchal authority that must on some level be reckoned with. And then there is “Winter.”

The relationship between Myra Ellen Amos and Edison McKinley Amos is one of the most fascinating in pop music. It should be simple: he the rebel bent on reclaiming the feminine divine from the patriarchal Christian god, he the servant of that same god. And that’s more or less how it plays out in any number of songs—consider “Upside Down” and its tossed away claim that “my daddy would scream” at the idea of an interracial relationship, or Amos’s chanting howl to “wash me clean daddy” in 1997 performances of “Precious Things,” or literally the entirety of “Icicle.”

The only thing missing is the actual tense relationship between the Amoses. In fact Ed Amos is consistently supportive of his daughter, and has been throughout her life, from chaperoning her as she played Georgetown gay bars in her teens to any number of comments to the press in which he speaks warmly of his daughter’s career. This is not, to be clear, because he’s a radically progressive Christian. By all appearances he’s solidly moderate—Amos has spoken about her father’s support for the civil rights movement, but also made wry comments about how he’s evolved to seeing gay people as individuals instead of as a homogenous mass of “the gays.” Instead there’s a sort of wry pragmatism to his assessment of his daughter—one rooted in a profound respect for her ability. The relationship is perhaps best summed up by a comment Amos attributes to him in several interviews to the effect of “what would you have written about if I had been a dentist?”

And so we get the bemusing paradox of Amos penning a disorienting and sinister piece of musical ritual about the maternal while her song about her father is warm, sentimental, and loving.…

November 26, 2019

An Angel To A Girl Who Hates to Sin (Happy Phantom)

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Happy Phantom (demo, 1990)

Happy Phantom (live, 1991)

Happy Phantom (1992)

Happy Phantom (live, 2001)

I’m Not Gonna Fuck This One Up/Happy Phantom (live, 2007, official bootleg, Tori set)

Happy Phantom (live, 2014)

A slender, even whimsical doodle of a song, “Happy Phantom” sees Amos larking about on the occasion of her death, or more accurately its immediate aftermath. This, as Amos explains it, came from the collaborative interplay of the rest of her faery circle, which collectively “decided we needed to hang out with death for a while.” Speaking nearly twenty years later, Amos rationalized this as a need for a measure of ego death: “the image that I had created for whatever reason, had to die. If so, she balked big time in crafting the song. By and large, however, other options present themselves.

The song is simple enough—the second shortest on the album, coming in an entire second longer than “Leather,” it uses each of its verses deliberately, establishing a concept, adding depth to it, and finally subverting it. It opens with a jaunty and bluesy piano line which Amos plays with a loud and slightly out of control sounding abandon. The vocals, meanwhile, start off with Amos proclaiming that if she dies then she’ll become the eponymous happy phantom, embarking upon a mirthful post-existence of naked nun-haunting. Amos imagines her afterlife is a sort of eternal celebrity gala—Judy Garland schmoozes with Siddhartha Gautama at the opera while Confucius boldly works the crossword by pen. (It’s notable, albeit in a very white new-agey way, that Amos picks two non-western religious figures as inhabitants of her afterlife.) And Amos is wholly enthused about this, offering a rousing singalong chorus in which her and our approaching spectralities get a firm and unequivocal “woohoo.”

Amidst the revels, however, there’s an ominous chill appropriate to the song’s status as a ghost story. The cheery chorus gives way in its last line to a cold and empty space as Amos intones, “the sun is getting dim / will we pay for who we’ve been,” abruptly inviting in not only all the judgments and shame of organized religion, but the end of the world to boot. And the last verse continues the move towards pessimism as Amos imagines a surviving lover and frets that they will move on and eventually cease missing her, glumly asking “do we soon forget the things we cannot see?”

From this and a final, slightly more downbeat chorus, the song rallies for one last deeply ambivalent frolic, with Amos repeatedly trilling “and if I die today” as the piano grows ever more excited. But by this point the joy and enthusiasm has curdled that the effect is an unsettling ambivalence, so that the afterlife’s playground-like nature exists without actually altering the fundamental scariness of death.

“Happy Phantom” is also notable for being the first appearance of John Philip Shenale, credited here as Phil Shenale. On “Happy Phantom” his contributions are restricted to “finger cymbal and keyboard programming,” but he will go on to work arranging strings and orchestral parts for every subsequent Tori Amos album save for To Venus and Back and The Beekeeper, including taking lead roles on Gold Dust and Night of Hunters.…

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