The Brotherhood of Baltimore (Baltimore)
Baltimore (unreleased 1978 recording).
Like most pop artists, Tori Amos’s career has a vaguely embarrassing starting point. Fame comes slowly, and rarely on the first try, and most artists have some embarrassing recordings from their early efforts at success that are just waiting to be slapped up on YouTube or, in the case of “Baltimore,” tossed into VH1’s Before They Were Stars, a series dedicated to exactly this. The five minute segment in which this was publicly unearthed sticks mostly to a simplistic biography in which Amos’s piano bench gyrations in the “Crucify” video are juxtaposed with her upbringing as the daughter of a minister. The complexity of the story is acknowledged, but the underlying point is unequivocally rooted in teasing Amos for the naive innocence of her upbringing. “Baltimore” is introduced in a veering segue as the segment goes from the infamous image of Amos breastfeeding a pig in the Boys for Pele liner notes to her parents talking with rueful amusement about her love of shocking them, at which point the voiceover interrupts them to say “if you think that’s shocking…” as a leadup to Amos performing “Baltimore” on local television.
It’s cynical, more than slightly sexist, and ultimately effective, mostly because “Baltimore” is, at first glance, an absolutely ridiculous song, doubly so coming from Tori Amos. Its opening peel of morning show piano backed with a daydrinking hi-hat is utterly laughable in its twee insistence, and that’s before you get to the lyrics about how “the sun sets across the bay / I‘m glad to spend my day / in a working American city / with the people who made it that way.” Everyone knows exactly what this track is: a work of juvenile over-sincerity—a cloying love letter from a not-yet-world weary Tori Amos to her beloved hometown for a 1980 contest to pen a song for the Baltimore Orioles.
Virtually every part of this, however, is wrong. Let’s start with the notion that “in Baltimore / love is what you find,” as it is substantially more bathetic than many alternatives. Had Tori Amos written a jingle for her local baseball team in New York or Los Angeles, the sense of naive enthusiasm would still have been tangible, but the result would not have been ridiculous per se. Had she penned an ode to the Kansas City Royals or the Cincinatti Reds, it would have been slightly absurd, but in the sense of a disproportion between the song’s enthusiasm and the apparent cultural significance of the city. But with Baltimore she has a subject whose reputation is the polar opposite of the saccharine camaraderie she’s singing about.
The end effect is much like “Good Morning Baltimore,” the opening number of the 2002 musical adaptation of John Waters’s 1988 film Hairspray. In it, the main character, overweight but cheerful high school student Tracy Turnblad, wakes up and sings the praises of her city. But unlike “Baltimore,” “Good Morning Baltimore” is unequivocally playing with the irony of being so cheerful about Baltimore in particular, having Tracy sing about how “the rats on the street / all dance round my feet” and greeting “the flasher who lives next door” and “the bum on his barroom stool” as she goes to school, eventually missing the bus and hitching a ride on a garbage truck.…
run on the site come Monday. In the meantime you can still follow me at 
So, my next blog project, starting on Monday August 5th, is Boys in their Dresses: A Psychodiscography of Tori Amos. And I wanted to start by talking a little bit about why this project interests me, and also a little bit about my short to medium term blogging plans in general.
The long awaited (by a small number of people with extremely good taste) return of the Shabcast. I chat with Kit Power about his new books, a non-fiction book about the movie Tommy and, more particularly, his new novella The Finite.
writing on other subjects, please consider pitching in. I’ve recently added a $10-per-post tier to the Patreon for those who’d like me to proofread their writing. If that interests you, we can talk. Any money at all significantly helps out this minimum-wage-working trans writer. Thanks for your support.
On October 7th, 2017, just over two months after The Doctor Falls, police were called to several McDonald’s locations following a disastrous promotion in which the fast food restaurant brought back an obscure McNuggets dipping sauce, “Szechuan sauce,” that had briefly been released nearly twenty years earlier to tie-in with the release of Disney’s Mulan. The limited amount of sauce released to select McDonald’s was wildly insufficient for the crowds that arrived, which consisted of hundreds of people lining up for hours only to discover that restaurants had as few as twenty sauce packets. The result was bedlam—young men (the crowds were almost exclusively male) hurling obscenities and venting their frustration on minimum wage workers. On Twitter, people seriously suggested class action lawsuits and claimed that any workers who had a bad day deserved it because of the company’s bad actions.