Rethinking Evanescence

Fanpop

Black symphony’s earlier post on the new Evanescence single reminded me of the reason why I got interested in this band in the first place. Although Evanescence acheived enormous commercial success, their position in the mainstream was rather ambiguous, and to a certain extent even contradictory. Let’s first have a look at one of their lesser-known songs, as well as the video of a rather famous single.   

The Last Song I’m Wasting On You was a studio outtake from the recording sessions for their second album The Open Door, and was included in the Lithium single. The lyrics contain references to forms of domestic violence such as physical aggression and emotional abuse, and seem to trace the course of a woman from depression and despair to self-empowerment. The song is arranged for voice and piano, and it includes a number of demanding changes in the melody; and the result is closer to Tori Amos’ aesthetic, than it is to the style of their earlier ballad My Immortal:

Sparkling grey, they’re my own veins
Any more than a whisper, any sudden movement of my heart
And I know, I know I’ll have to watch them pass away
Just get through this day

Give up your way, you could be anything
Give up my way, and lose myself, not today
That’s too much guilt to pay

Sickened in the sun, you dare tell me you love me
But you held me down and screamed you wanted me to die
Honey you know, you know I’d never hurt you that way
You’re just so pretty in your pain

Give up my way, and I could be anything
I’ll make my own way, without your senseless hate

Hate, hate, hate

So run, run, run
And hate me, if it feels good
I can’t hear your screams anymore

You lied to me
But I’m older now
And I’m not buying baby

Demanding my response
Don’t bother breaking the door down
I found my way out

And you’ll never hurt me again 

Everybody’s Fool was the fourth single off Evanescence’s debut album Fallen. The video includes a number of spoof commercials, which parody advertising clichés and the associated gender stereotypes. This sugar-coated and ideologically loaded universe is furthermore opposed to the bitter realities of a model’s real life. This contrast forms the video’s narrative structure, and, interestingly, the model is played by Amy Lee herself, who here appears willing to undermine her own overtly stylised image. There is a key scene inside an elevator, where the model/Amy is made fun of  because she is not at all similar to her public image.

  

Amy Lee has been critical of media images of women and the commodification of female sexuality; and she has also expressed distress with regard to the suggestion that she should loose weight (interviews in Rolling Stone, St. Petersburg Times, and mtv). Although one cannot address Evanescence as a feminist band, it is nonetheless interesting that such arguments and choice of material were put forward at the height of their popularity. 

Culture is a field of contest between different ideologies; as Douglas Kellner has argued, media texts encode relations of power and domination, or oppose hegemonic ideologies, or display a contradictory mixture of domination and resistance (Media culture: Cultural studies, identity and politics between the modern and the postmodern, London: Routledge, 1995). And in this respect, examples such as the above may be seen as characteristic of the  ideological tension and diversity which is occasionally displayed in the field of popular culture .