Tori and Racism

As per Th.'s recommendation, which was not really a recommendation but I chose to take it as one, I have checked out several Tori Amos CDs from the library. I like them. As I've mentioned before, I like Little Earthquakes and I've always trusted that Tori is an excellent musician simply because she comes highly recommended by Neil Gaiman. As I've been listening to more of her music, I've enjoyed it. She has a beautiful voice, the songs all have nice piano or other instrumentation, and her lyrics are always interesting.

Here's the problem: it all sounds the same to me. I'm sure it is not all the same, but I don't speak the language of the genre, so it's like how Spanish sounds like indiscriminate noises to people who don't speak Spanish, how all Asian people look like indiscriminate Asian people to people who don't know Asian people, and how all hip-hop music sounds like indiscriminate beats and swear words to people who don't listen to hip-hop.

I suspect it's because I'm racist. See, I'm white but I grew up in Hawaii where it's not good to be white, and I still have that mindset so subconsciously (and occasionally consciously) I try hard to not be white. So I listen to Black and Latin and Asian music (okay, I admit, the closest thing to Asian music I listen to is rap music by Lyrics Born, who is a Japanese American from California) and occasionally I dye my hair black or dark brown because I don't like light-colored hair and when I go back to Hawaii to visit and I'm talking to locals I try really hard to subtly drop a local expression or two or even a slight local intonation (without attempting to speak full-blown Pidgin, which would sound stupid coming from me) in order to make sure no one thinks I'm a (heaven forbid!) mainland whitey. (It never works, by the way. They take one look at the color of my skin and they assume I'm from Nebraska.)

So, being aware of this self-racism, it makes me happy that I can listen to Tori Amos and enjoy it. And unhappy that I cannot distinguish between one song and the next. FoxyJ has Tales of a Librarian: A Tori Amos Collection on her Amazon wishlist, which I think is a good solution--I'm not going to run out and buy every Tori album if I can't tell them apart, but it'll be nice to have some more of her music in the playlist to help me accept my white roots.

I suppose I could compromise and start listening to Eminem, but I can't bring myself to it. Eminem is who white people who like hip-hop listen to.