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. Most of the interviews as a substitute involved Amos’ relationship with the web, a hot-button matter 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 perhaps 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 Vast Internet because it got here to be identified, with some followers sending out digests every day within the early ’90s.
With the dot-com growth, 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 unprecedented quantity for that nascent period of the web—and Amos supported these websites by giving them unique interviews. Atlantic Data 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 Data web site scored two million hits, their most in a single day.
In school, Amos, a self-proclaimed nerd, was voted homecoming queen by the college’s nerd committee. That is type of how her fame labored then and nonetheless does right now. 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 Scorching 100 at No. 2, held from the highest spot solely by the unmovable Ready to Exhale soundtrack. Her intensive 187-stop Dew Drop Inn Tour, operating from February 23 to November 11, 1996, bought 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 task in a Kellogg’s industrial. The director instructed her she did a great job, however to “tone it down please.” As a substitute, Amos toned it up for the remainder of her profession, reworking herself right into a meta-Jungian girlband for 2007’s American Doll Posse and caressing herself onstage with a knife.
Even right now, Boys for Pele stays essentially the most distinctive report in her discography. Amos embodied such an excessive scope of emotion that it fell exterior 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 might escape. On Boys for Pele, Amos actually got here undone, un-disciplining music whereas disassembling the spirit. She was convulsing, untouchable, and sometimes illegible. Mystical Christianity dictates that this type of abjection is an indication of shut proximity to the divine, however on Boys for Pele, there was no God to be discovered.
