In the early hours of June 23, 1993, after her husband, John Bobbitt, raped her, Lorena Bobbitt reached under the covers for his penis, grabbed it, then cut it clean off with a kitchen knife. With the severed penis in hand, she drove to a nearby field, threw it out the window, and called the police, telling them where to find it. She was jailed for “malicious wounding.”

Over 1.3 million column inches were dedicated to the subsequent trial, and for a brief period, American culture underwent a reckoning with male authority and phallic sovereignty. Tori Amos read every piece on the trial she could find. She celebrated the final verdict in Bobbitt’s trial, in 1994: not guilty by reason of temporary insanity. Amos told Hot Press soon after: “I’m mad, mad at myself to this day that I didn’t kill the man who raped me.” Her third album, 1996’s Boys for Pele, plays out the fantasy: What if she had?

Two years before, Amos had released “Me and a Gun,” the a cappella retelling of her own sexual assault that—amazingly—launched her solo career. The song mimicked the meditative cadence of psalms as Amos recounted the unholiness of the act. It reflected the emerging third wave of feminism, part of a cultural reckoning with sexual violence that had produced Tracy Chapman’s 1988 song “Behind the Wall,” Suzanne Vega’s 1992 song “Bad Wisdom,” and Hole’s “Asking for It,” in 1994. That year, when Rolling Stone asked what Amos’ fans told her when they got the chance to speak to her, she replied: “That they’ve been raped.”

In order to survive your body being stolen from you, you have to take an active role. For Amos, that meant reviewing her own capacity for violence and violation, whether toward herself or others. On the Boys for Pele cover, Amos grips the weapon she once sang about, while a barnyard cock hangs dead from the rafters and a live snake curls behind her foot. With Amos now pointing the gun herself, Boys for Pele is her visceral and symbolically rich exploration of the fantasy of violent reprisal. While her previous albums, 1992’s Little Earthquakes and 1994’s Under the Pink, were more carefully wound and filled with an almost unrealistic clarity, Boys for Pele is a bristling, terrifying, and often inhuman affront in which Amos is an unholy brat on the edge of nonexistence, singing about clit-eating chickens, lacing ratatouille with poison, and coaxing men to kill themselves.

Through Boys for Pele, Amos finally found in herself a quality she had envied in her friend Trent Reznor. “I love the screaming male aggression of his music, because I’m not in touch with that part of myself so much,” she told Spin in 1994, eight months before she started work on her third album. On Boys for Pele, Amos brays bull-like with an open throat, her lyrics a revolt against the strictures of language. It is so strange, unsettling, and outside the bounds of any prevailing canons of good taste or common sense that it at once summons and repulses you. It is also extraordinarily beautiful.

Amos began working on Boys for Pele soon after ending her seven-year relationship with Eric Rosse, with whom she had co-produced her previous albums. During the album’s writing, she transformed the breakup into a mythic quest, one that aligned tightly with the concept as defined by Joseph Campbell, a writer Amos occasionally quoted in interviews (“a culture that doesn’t know its mythology is powerless,” she paraphrased to Spin). Campbell posited that the mythic quest involves a healer who can aid the hero in exposing that which is buried in the psyche, thus revealing society’s fantasies and fears.

On Boys For Pele, Amos finds the border where language fractures and the psyche begins to speak in symbols—where private experience becomes mythic narrative. Across its 70-minute runtime, she refracts her most hidden thoughts into an archetypal drama.

Boys for Pele takes its name from the volcano goddess Pele, of Hawaiian mythology. Pele has long been a source of fascination for tourists, who write to her and send gifts, including sands extracted from the islands. Because the sand is believed to be Pele’s body, scholars have interpreted its removal as a symbolic act of female violation. Before Amos, painter Enoch Wood Perry and explorer Isabella Bird likewise portrayed Goddess Pele as a symbol of the dark feminine.

Naturally, Amos went on an ayahuasca retreat in Hawaii shortly after her breakup. During her 16-hour trip, she drank tea with the devil and learned how to tango. She recounts the experience on Boys for Pele, whose mythic quest is ultimately a quest for provenance—tracing bloodlines back to the origins of music, femininity, and religion. In doing so, Amos seeks to understand herself and her own capacity for violence, much as a culture must confront its myths in order to understand its soul.

Amos’ own bloodlines presented a neat conflict between the Christianity on her paternal side (her father was a Methodist minister) and her mother’s Native American heritage. Within that lineage lay a story that she perceived as one of female triumph: Her Cherokee great-great-grandmother married the man who owned the plantation where she was enslaved. This was the side Amos sought to understand and claim.

Amos has said that 14 of the album’s songs represent the dismembered body parts of the Egyptian god Osiris; she notes that each track also embodies a part of herself she had not yet embraced. “As I wrote the songs for Boys for Pele, I started valuing myself through my own eyes, instead of valuing me through the eyes of others,” she told the Dallas Morning News. To arrive at herself, she not only had to reconfigure her relationship with men but also her relationship with the piano.

Amos struggled to disentangle herself from the instrument. As a child prodigy, she derived her sense of self-worth from the piano, believing that she was only as good as how she played. At two, she had stacked up a pile of phone books and lifted herself onto the stool by the family’s black upright piano, playing by ear the tunes her older brother and sister had practiced in their piano lessons that afternoon. Amos could not yet talk. By three, she was playing back in full the songs the family heard on the radio. By four, she could play Mozart and the entire songbook of Oklahoma! By five, she had composed her first song and auditioned for the prestigious Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, where she became the youngest student in the Conservatory’s history.

Despite the Conservatory’s strictly classical curriculum, she grew obsessed with Led Zeppelin while studying there. After school, she studied Jimmy Page’s tones and phrasings and translated his guitar playing to the piano, figuring she had found the bridge between classical music and popular rock. She learned to view the piano as an instrument of synthesis, capable of uniting conflicting traditions and ideas. With her right hand, she played grand, stately, and studied filigrees; with her left, jazzier, funkier voicings.

At 11, after she started stitching too much Beatles into her Beethoven and the school withdrew her scholarship (Amos melodramatically claims she was “kicked out”), she began performing across Washington’s lounge circuit. A gay bar took her in. There, she played almost nightly while the waiters taught her about men and the ways to please them. They gave her a cucumber to practice on: Teeth marks meant an extra late-night; a clean cucumber granted her a cup of chocolate milk. Around the same time, she began recording herself and sending the tapes to record executives in Los Angeles. Of the responses she did receive, most relayed the same sentiment: The girl-and-piano thing had died with Carole King. It was the early ’80s, and the piano was considered a sexless instrument that bore associations with obsequiousness, dowdiness: long gray skirts and pinafores. Amos didn’t so much sex the piano up as turn it into an instrument of masturbation.

The most succinct way to describe what it is like to witness Amos playing is to compare it to walking in on someone fucking themself. When she sings, she tugs at her own hair, throws back her neck, rocks back and forth on her stool in rapture—inspiring this all-time great Bob’s Burgers bit. She made the link explicit in an interview with Mojo: “[masturbation] kept me alive! It’s where I practice my piano licks.”

The word “masturbatory” is often applied to male musicians who take too much pleasure in their own virtuosity without troubling themselves with making sense or entertaining anyone else. That has some bearing on what Amos is doing, but she manages to invite others into her own world of self-gratification. Ultimately, her music asks: What if masturbation were generative?

Amos’ music is autoerotic and sealed off from public life; her fans are known to listen to it in a fundamentally private, even antisocial fashion. Toriphiles come to her shows not as a unified collective but as multiplied egos. Insulating themselves in Amos’ world, they have learned how to become fluent in Tori-speak, a lingua franca made up of illogical associations, overextended metaphors, and pop Jungianisms, that is almost unintelligible to anyone other than its speakers. Amos says things like: “Deep-sea dive with my male muses to explore new coral reefs,” and her fans say things like, “She tastes like a magical leader pied-piping us into the new millennium.” Inhabiting Amos’ world feels like taking pleasure in the paroxysms of tantrum. Standing outside of it is akin to watching a grown adult wail in the supermarket. What is hallowed to insiders can be, to outsiders, annoying or even disgusting.

What is almost certainly the longest written piece on Boys for Pele, Amy Gentry’s 33 ⅓ book on the album, also functions as a sociological treatise on disgust. “Disgust is a biological response onto which learned responses are easily grafted, both by way of and as a means of social reinforcement,” she writes, emphasizing disgust’s gendered aspect as a policing instrument that restricts girlish norms.

Embarrassment and disgust are common reactions to Boys for Pele. Upon its release, critics wrote about the album with a sense of self-evident aversion: “I just don’t like her,” wrote a reviewer in the Courier-Journal. “At 18 tracks, the album’s way too self-indulgent,” wrote Evelyn McDonnell for Rolling Stone in the most infamous pan of Pele’s press cycle, highlighting its “supposedly mystical” lyrics as “well, bad.” Yet these writers showed little desire to investigate this strong dislike. As forms of aesthetic (dis)engagement, embarrassment and disgust shut down critical faculties because they are so embodied—in the blush, the cringe, the gag.

Boys for Pele was met with one of the frostiest receptions of Amos’ career when she first unveiled it to her inner circle. She went out to dinner while her team at Atlantic Records held their first listening session. When she returned and poked her head into the studio, she discovered them outraged. “It was really just vicious,” Amos later told Stereogum, “the most vicious, shocking things you could hear from people.”

The label gave her license to self-produce, given the surprising success of her previous two albums, which both went platinum by the time Boys for Pele was released. Boys for Pele was the first album over which Amos had near-total creative control, and it was, correspondingly, her most peculiar. Kate Bush’s first self-produced album, The Dreaming, shares that insularity, though Boys for Pele is so deranged that it makes The Dreaming sound more like Teenage Dream in comparison.

On Boys for Pele, Amos is more willing than ever to build songs out of images and references whose significance is almost certain to elude anybody but her. On “Marianne,” a song she improvised on the spot, she sings about her childhood imaginary friends: Mr. Spaghetti and a purple monkey named Clunky. The Metro’s reviewer advised skipping the album and spending time instead with something “a little bit more intelligible—like maybe Gravity’s Rainbow written in Greek.” But even in gibberish, Amos voices the spontaneous expressions of the subconscious. To some, lyrics like “Marianne”’s infamous opening line: “Tuna, rubber/Little blubber in my igloo,” are hermetic nonsense. To others, they signal an entry point. Amos’ metaphors lend themselves to nearly boundless interpretation, drawing one of two extreme reactions: absolute withdrawal or total immersion.

Boys for Pele requires the latter in order to really work. The listener must be willing to step into Amos’ trip and find their own significance among the shapes in the floaty floors and ceilings. Just as Bible verses and horoscopes transcend literal interpretation, Amos’ symbols require their own personal decoding. The listening experience frequently involves appropriating the lyrics for one’s own understanding; even mishearing or misunderstanding the often indecipherable words can become an active part of this process. It’s common for phrases like “tuna, rubber/little blubber in my igloo” to be misunderstood, with listeners not registering the precise words; instead, they function more as a Rorschach test. Even the official lyric booklet reads differently from the recording. On “Hey Jupiter,” she sings, “And I thought I wouldn’t have to be/With you as something new,” while the lyric sheet renders the couplet as “And I thought you’d see with me/You wouldn’t have to be something new.”

On top of its nonsense lyrics, Boys for Pele also offers little respite from the harpsichord. In keeping with her quest for provenance, Amos traced the piano’s bloodline to its plectrum-equipped ancestor—an instrument she swiftly became obsessed with, despite its scant melodic or textural range, and, more crucially for Amos, its lack of sustain. For someone who pumps her piano’s sustain pedal as if she’s trying to resuscitate the notes back to life, Amos was severely tested by the harpsichord’s constraints. “I wasn’t interested in anything that didn’t challenge me, and as I started finding different parts of myself, I brought in different instruments to express that,” she explained to Spin. The greatest challenge with the harpsichord was to cleave it from its Baroque associations. She wanted to take out the whimsy and give it some ass. To do that, she made the low end growl by feeding a Bösendorfer piano through a Marshall amp . You can hear the rusty buzz and rattle of each of its keys. For Amos, compression was the ultimate taboo.

Amos referred to Boys for Pele as her “thrash harpsichord” record, a descriptor most befitting of two songs: “Professional Widow” and “Blood Roses.” She plays the former in an unnervingly standard waltz time, with parallel fifths that she smashes to smithereens in every other measure. On “Blood Roses,” she growls, “Chickens get a taste of your meat, girl,” alluding to a scene in Alice Walker’s Possessing the Secret of Joy in which the byproducts of female mutilation are tossed to the birds. On the harpsichord, she jounces between rapid-fire triplets and largo sequences, all while traveling across scales so swiftly it inspires the awe and horror of watching someone tap dance themselves into flight. She discovers the instrument’s blood.

Amos’ quest for provenance is also reflected in her deliberate choice of recording locations: a deconsecrated church in County Wicklow, Ireland, and a studio in New Orleans, Louisiana. Boys for Pele, with its bluesy tones and syncopations, re-synthesizes the influences that make up the musical identity of the rural South. She draws particular attention to the way Irish music made its way through the rivers of Louisiana in the 19th century, influencing the blues and the region’s cultural sound. “Mr. Zebra,” with its bouncy piano line, has the feeling of a slip jig; “Horses” rolls in non-linear arpeggios like an Irish air. Boys for Pele is a spiritual as well as musicological investigation of place.

To Amos, these sites symbolized, more specifically, the New World church’s stripping of Mary Magdalene’s sacred sexuality. Much of Amos’ musical project has long revolved around recovering Magdalene’s legacy—a legacy the modern church had reduced from Jesus’ bride to an unrepentant sinner. “If we were going to use a term to describe my music, it would have to be ‘theology of the feminine’,” Amos told The Oregonian in 1996. She believed not only that Mary Magdalene was pregnant with Jesus’ child but that this buried truth formed the blueprint for all women’s sexual culture—and that had the original myth remained intact, Amos would have been raised with a healthier relationship to her sexuality, to men, and to herself. Boys for Pele is her attempt to violently write into existence the sacred Bride that Christian theology has long obscured.

These ideas were so heady that Amos was never quite able to synthesize them into talking points during Boys for Pele’s lengthy press run. Many of the interviews instead concerned Amos’ relationship with the internet, a hot-button topic at the time. A curiously under-remarked aspect of Boys for Pele is how much the internet contributed to its success. Though Amos had touched a computer maybe twice in her life up to that point, she had an unusually devout online following. Her fans were very early adopters. Digital mailing lists devoted to Amos even preceded the World Wide Web as it came to be known, with some fans sending out digests on a daily basis in the early ’90s.

With the dot-com boom, a flurry of Amos fan sites emerged, including the First International Church of Tori, with its own dedicated “Altar Room.” At the time of Boys for Pele’s release, there were some 70 websites devoted to Amos—an extraordinary amount for that nascent era of the internet—and Amos supported those sites by giving them exclusive interviews. Atlantic Records cleverly tapped into the new niche by making “Caught a Lite Sneeze,” the album’s lead single, one of the world’s first songs to premiere as a free digital download ahead of its official release. Amos’ website also debuted samples of three Pele tracks on December 15, 1995, and upon the album’s release a month later, the Atlantic Records website scored two million hits, their most in a single day.

At school, Amos, a self-proclaimed nerd, was voted homecoming queen by the school’s nerd committee. This is sort of how her fame worked then and still does today. Despite significantly less radio play than her previous two records, Boys for Pele achieved platinum status much faster than its predecessors. The album debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 at No. 2, held from the top spot only by the unmovable Waiting to Exhale soundtrack. Her extensive 187-stop Dew Drop Inn Tour, running from February 23 to November 11, 1996, sold out within days and grossed $4.4 million, making it one of the highest-earning ticket sales of the spring.

Amos’ reputation and fame in the ’90s did not carry into the new millennium quite the way it had for her contemporaries Björk and PJ Harvey. She didn’t possess either’s sanguine cool. Before Amos made it as a musician, she’d ousted Sarah Jessica-Parker for a role in a Kellogg’s commercial. The director told her she did a good job, but to “tone it down please.” Instead, Amos toned it up for the rest of her career, transforming herself into a meta-Jungian girlband for 2007’s American Doll Posse and caressing herself onstage with a knife.

Even today, Boys for Pele remains the most distinctive record in her discography. Amos embodied such an extreme scope of emotion that it fell outside any frameworks capable of packaging or aestheticizing it. While other exceptional women of the ’90s transmuted their rage into power, Amos did something more akin to turning excrement into ecstasy, delivering her rage with a barnyard stench. It was an absolutely monumental achievement, a dive into another world from which no sound could escape. On Boys for Pele, Amos truly came undone, un-disciplining music while disassembling the spirit. She was convulsing, untouchable, and often illegible. Mystical Christianity dictates that this kind of abjection is a sign of close proximity to the divine, but on Boys for Pele, there was no God to be found.