These concepts had been so heady that Amos was by no means fairly in a position to synthesize them into speaking factors throughout Boys for Pele’s prolonged press run. Lots of the interviews as an alternative involved Amos’ relationship with the web, a hot-button subject on the time. A curiously under-remarked facet of Boys for Pele is how a lot the web contributed to its success. Although Amos had touched a pc possibly twice in her life as much as that time, she had an unusually religious on-line following. Her followers had been very early adopters. Digital mailing lists dedicated to Amos even preceded the World Extensive Net because it got here to be recognized, with some followers sending out digests every day within the early ’90s.
With the dot-com increase, a flurry of Amos fan websites emerged, together with the First Worldwide Church of Tori, with its personal devoted “Altar Room.” On the time of Boys for Pele’s launch, there have been some 70 web sites dedicated to Amos—a rare quantity for that nascent period of the web—and Amos supported these websites by giving them unique interviews. Atlantic Information cleverly tapped into the brand new area of interest by making “Caught a Lite Sneeze,” the album’s lead single, one of many world’s first songs to premiere as a free digital obtain forward of its official launch. Amos’ web site additionally debuted samples of three Pele tracks on December 15, 1995, and upon the album’s launch a month later, the Atlantic Information web site scored two million hits, their most in a single day.
At college, Amos, a self-proclaimed nerd, was voted homecoming queen by the college’s nerd committee. That is kind of how her fame labored then and nonetheless does right this moment. Regardless of considerably much less radio play than her earlier two information, Boys for Pele achieved platinum standing a lot quicker than its predecessors. The album debuted on the Billboard Sizzling 100 at No. 2, held from the highest spot solely by the unmovable Ready to Exhale soundtrack. Her in depth 187-stop Dew Drop Inn Tour, operating from February 23 to November 11, 1996, offered out inside days and grossed $4.4 million, making it one of many highest-earning ticket gross sales of the spring.
Amos’ popularity and fame within the ’90s didn’t carry into the brand new millennium fairly the best way it had for her contemporaries Björk and PJ Harvey. She didn’t possess both’s sanguine cool. Earlier than Amos made it as a musician, she’d ousted Sarah Jessica-Parker for a job in a Kellogg’s industrial. The director advised her she did a superb job, however to “tone it down please.” As an alternative, Amos toned it up for the remainder of her profession, remodeling herself right into a meta-Jungian girlband for 2007’s American Doll Posse and caressing herself onstage with a knife.
Even right this moment, Boys for Pele stays essentially the most distinctive document in her discography. Amos embodied such an excessive scope of emotion that it fell outdoors any frameworks able to packaging or aestheticizing it. Whereas different distinctive girls of the ’90s transmuted their rage into energy, Amos did one thing extra akin to turning excrement into ecstasy, delivering her rage with a barnyard stench. It was a completely monumental achievement, a dive into one other world from which no sound may escape. On Boys for Pele, Amos actually got here undone, un-disciplining music whereas disassembling the spirit. She was convulsing, untouchable, and infrequently illegible. Mystical Christianity dictates that this sort of abjection is an indication of shut proximity to the divine, however on Boys for Pele, there was no God to be discovered.
