Word: peled
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...then there was this exchange: "Pele?" "Henry Kissinger." Long pause. Come again? Henry Kissinger, the former Secretary of State? "He'd be perfect to write a Pele appreciation," argued assistant managing editor Howard Chua-Eoan, who oversaw this special issue. "He's the biggest soccer fan in the U.S., and helped bring the World Cup here in 1994." A call was placed, and the result is an enthusiastic and knowing appreciation of the great Brazilian superstar, as well as a cogent comparison of soccer and American sports, a realpolitik, so to speak, of two quite different regimes...
...evangelist --Che Guevara, guerrilla leader --Edmund Hillary & Tenzing Norgay, conquerors of Mount Everest --Helen Keller, champion of the disabled --The Kennedys, dynasty --Bruce Lee, actor and martial-arts star --Charles Lindbergh, transatlantic aviator --Harvey Milk, gay-rights leader --Marilyn Monroe, actress --Emmeline Pankhurst, suffragist --Rosa Parks, civil rights torchbearer --Pele, soccer star --Jackie Robinson, baseball player --Andrei Sakharov, Soviet dissident --Mother Teresa, missionary nun --Bill Wilson, founder of Alcoholics Anonymous
Next on Amos' list was "Cruel," from her latest album, which utilized the more subtle qualities of the stage lights and the band with fantastic results. "Caught a Lite Sneeze," one of the less disheveled but still haunting songs from Boys for Pele, was played next, with a charming amount of more energy and less eerieness. Amos then reverted into her good old acoustic charm with "Jackie's Strength," also from choirgirl hotel, and preceded it with a happy little speech about her recent marriage that drew delighted cheers from the adoring audience...
...fortunately, Amos has most definitely returned to the land of the reachable, though she's still not necessarily listed in the phone book. At points, some songs bear a hint of panic hidden in their almost predictable musical passages, almost as if Amos frightened herself with the inaccessibility of "Pele" and is holding back to be accepted by the mainstream music scene again. But for the most part, the album stands up as listenable (think "Tori Amos Lite"), with passages that are doomed to be caught in one's head for hours at a time--which is definitely...
...points though, one might wonder where the emotional supernovas are in from the choirgirl hotel. Boys for Pele had the mesmerizing "Caught a Lite Sneeze;" Under the Pink contained the scandalous "God;" and of course, Little Earthquakes remains a virtual apocalypse of emotion, despite the recent trends of radio stations to overplay "Silent All These Years." Is Tori Amos finally starting to make peace with the demons that drove her to create painfully honest pieces such as Earthquake's "Me and a Gun," which was based on her experience with rape? If she is, are her musical talents strong enough...