«SILENT ALL THESE YEARS» OR BECOMING IN EVERYDAYNESS: TORI AMOS AND HER POETICS OF THE QUOTIDIAN

Created by the American singer-songwriter Tori Amos «Silent All These Years» is a prominent cultural product of the 1990s in the domain of western popular music. Released in the beginning of the decade it has actualized the current sensibilities, ethically and aesthetically. Deploying the efficient mutual engagement of feminist and postmodernist strategies the author mobilizes the quotidian and performs its intellectual aestheticization. The study focuses on the ways the everyday operates in the song lyrically and musically, as well as on the author’s intention of aestheticizing the mundane. There is an important interdependence between the material circumstances in which the song was created and its genre form of an indie ballad — an ironic gesture that subverts the «heroic» becomes definitive of the piece. The embodied «women’s» experience of the mundane comes as grotesque, «women’s» time threatens to devour the time of «progress», elements of western eschatological mythology undergo domestication and the archetypal image of the Mermaid receives a re-reading, urban everyday vocabulary ruptures the «high» register. An intensification of sameness, repetition and monotony, however, accentuates a non-ironic potentiality of emancipation and insight. The poetics of the quotidian in Amos, thus, presents itself politically by locating the invisibly heroic becoming in everydayness as opposed to a one-time extraordinary action. One of the singular possibilities of such a becoming is a possibility of a continuing, and always risky, dialogic exchange.