and he can see no reason ’cause there are no reason
(or: september 3’s honey from the hive)
posted at 7:57 am by brandon in sweet you rock and sweet you roll
Tori Amos — “I Don’t Like Mondays” (from Strange Little Girls
A and I trekked down to Austin’s Alamo Drafthouse last night to join in the obscenely awesome fun of the ’90s alternative sing-along, hands down my all-time favorite among the Action Pack’s festivities. For damn sure, we got our quota filled of classic Smashing Pumpkins, Stone Temple Pilots, Bush, and No Doubt. (We even got a little Jamiroquai tossed in for good measure!) And of course, we all in that theater got our moment in the sun to scream along with Eddie as he relayed a riveting story about King Jeremy the Wicked. And that got me thinking about other songs about school shootings and apeshit-crazy teenagers, which naturally led me to
The Boomtown Rats’ “I Don’t Like Mondays,” and that immediately brought me to my astonishing Ms. Amos, and to her devastating 2001 cover of same. How crazy-brilliant is Tori? Here’s how: The Rats’ Bob Geldof sang his take on “Mondays” from the point of view of the confused little girl who inaugurates a fresh week by opening fire on her classmates; Tori, meantime, without changing a damned syllable of the text, unspools the same story from the point of view of the peace officer who first encounters the carnage. You’d best believe this was dicey stuff a decade ago, released as it was in the immediate wake of 9/11, but rarely has such wrenching, raw material emerged this riveting, or this breathtakingly cool.
