On A String
by ROBIN TUNG
In 1997, Bill Clinton was inaugurated for a second term. Dolly the sheep was cloned. Titanic unleashed mass hysteria. Timothy McVeigh was convicted for bombing Oklahoma City two years before. Thirty-nine members of Heaven’s Gate committed suicide in their San Diego compound. The economy was booming.
We were girls in the 90s. We smoked on stoops away from our parents and called each other on our Nokias. We wore crop tops, plaid button-ups, baggy sweatshirts and jeans. Born in the 80s, we grew up desperate to reject the narcissism of our parents’ generation by borrowing from other girls because by twelve or fourteen we’d been molested, abused and raped. We stopped eating, we cut ourselves, we wanted to die; we were Prozac Nation.
Sometime during that year, Fiona Apple released Tidal. Fiona Apple was a miraculous voice in the wilderness calling to all of the girls who’d been violated. Apple grew up in New York City with two musical parents, and began writing her own music at 7 or 8, and composing essays on the existential nature of love and life’s chief purpose at 11 and 12 (she’s shaky with exact childhood years).
When Apple was 12 years old, she was raped inside her apartment building. It happened a day before Thanksgiving. In the 1998 Rolling Stone interview with Apple, Chris Heath writes: “She remembers letting out a sigh, and her muscles falling…When she gave her statement to the police — she had to retell it in all its specific ghastliness, over and over again — she was left in a room. On the table was a notebook detailing past cases. She says that her only true regret of this whole period was opening up that book and looking inside: the most horrible things, beyond imagination, all in a day’s work. A baby being molested. Stuff like that.”
Her track “Sullen Girl” speaks to the rape: “Is that why they call me a sullen girl— sullen girl / They don't know I used to sail the deep and tranquil sea / But he washed my shore and he took my pearl / And left and empty shell of me.” In the same year, The New Yorker speculated about an eating disorder because she appeared so thin in videos like “Criminal” and “Shadowboxer.” She confirmed this by saying,“For me, it wasn't about getting thin, it was about getting rid of the bait that was attached to my body. A lot of it came from the self-loathing that came from being raped at the point of developing my voluptuousness."
The confrontational debut Tidal, which sold over 3 million copies, melds rock percussion, loungey piano, echoey guitar, sorrowful violins, and jazz rhythms to accompany Fiona Apple’s vocals. Believing album titles are irrelevant, Apple said, Tidal is a pun on “title,” but it worked because it fit the emotional oscillation of her first album — accusatory ("Criminal" and “Shadowboxer”) and alternately quiet to allow for some wound-licking ("Sullen Girl").
Many of the songs on Tidal are about her first boyfriend, a guy named Tyson. Apple also dated David Blaine the magician; Paul Thomas Anderson who directed Magnolia, There Will Be Blood, and a number of Apple’s music videos including “Paper Bag” and “Fast As You Can,” and is now married to Maya Rudolph; and novelist Jonathan Ames. She was also rumored to have briefly married a French photographer.
In 1999 Apple released When the Pawn... Her sophomore album races in an up-tempo and complex rumination of pain, victimization, and more importantly, the aftermath, which is a theme in every album. While Tidal may have been a more direct reaction to her trauma and consequent failed relationship, in the second album Apple maintains a sort of blind, unilateral aggression towards love and men in general. In “On the Bound” she spits, “You’re all I need” repetitively with each round accumulating self-awareness, irony, and loathing. Apple’s voice trembles, rises, falls, juts forward like vicious eel in whirlwind lyrics. She’s angrier than Alanis Morrisette, whom she credits for paving the way for angry females in music, and as lyrically gifted as Regina Spektor. In “To Your Love,” she demonstrates her signature self-sabotage in acrobatic lyricism: "Please forgive for my distance / The shame is manifest in my resistance / To your love, to your love, to your love / My derring-do allows me to dance the rigadoon / Around you / But by the time I'm close to you, I lose / My desideratum and now you, so / Now you have it, so baby tell me what's the word?”
Then, still early in her career, two strangely delightful things happened. At the 1997 MTV Video Awards, she won “Best New Artist” and gave a tirade for which she received praise and considerable backlash. “Everybody out there that’s watching, that’s watching this world: this world is bullshit. And you shouldn’t model your life,” she began, but people were already whistling and applauding her from the audience. “Wait a second. You shouldn’t model your life about what you think that we think is cool and what we’re wearing and what we’re saying. Go with yourself. Go with yourself.”
with Jon Brion
And she broke away from Sony. She’d lost artistic control — or had rather yielded it because she didn’t know what she wanted on the second album in collaboration with Jon Brion. When she asked to rerecord the songs, Sony told her she’d only be given money to do one song at a time. It was an unacceptable process for Apple. “If I start letting that happen, then I’m dead,” Apple later said. That type of control hadn’t happened on the two previous records. She called her manager and quit. Then she unplugged her phone.
“I’m very easily swayed and doubtful,” she said in a very self-deprecating, self-aware way in the same interview. She raises her eyebrows, resists a smile, gesticulates, then draws her hands into her long-sleeved shirt.
In 2000 her famous public meltdown happened. In front of 3,000 fans at New York's Roseland Ballroom she shouted, “You know, I just wanted to do real well in New York ... But f---! I can't hear myself!" She cried and, after performing only a handful of songs, fled.
Six years elapsed between the second and third albums. People around her called her lazy, accusing her of wasting her talent and opportunities. Everyone wanted to know why the album took so long: Kimmel, MTV, fans, her close friends. “Really if I forced myself to do it, it would be crap… I won’t write a song unless it serves me in some way where I feel like I have to write the song to make myself feel better, you know. If you’re not overflowing with something then why — then there’s nothing to give,” she told Quentin Tarantino in a filmed conversation on art and process.
In 2002, Apple released Extraordinary Machine. Percussion plods along, the woodwind instruments slide down scales while her voice flutters to the highest notes she sings. But the album still holds on to the piano-heavy, dark melodies of the debut album, as in "O Sailor" where she hits the familiar chords of minor and natural keys, creating a jarring, overlapping, and almost atonal sound. The sway between major and minor drives “Not About Love." What’s different here is the deep calm beneath the music.
Fiona stopped having public meltdowns and dating men with physical resemblances to her rapist. She stopped her heavy drinking, self-injury. She adopted a gluten-free diet and rescued a pit bull mix named Janet. She became more and more aware of her process and experiences. “It’s somewhere in between conversation and sex. You’re definitely doing more physically with each other than it looks like. There is some kind of knowing of each other, some intimacy, some involvement, some braiding together of people,” Apple said of playing live.
On her fourth album, The Idler Wheel..., Apple evolves while maintaining her musical integrity. The lyrical growling in “Daredevil” and vacillating piano rhythms in “Left Alone” show her practicing restraint and experimenting with minimalism and tribal percussion.
In “Anything We Want,” my favorite song on the album, it sounds as if someone is playing spoons on glass and metal jars as the lyrics twist at every corner: “My scars were reflecting the mist in your headlights / I look like a neon zebra shaking rain off of stripes / And the rivulets had you riveted to the places that / I wanted you to kiss me when we find some time alone.” Her songs are still strange, and strangely beautiful. We feel the sublimation of her history of violation, all of which can be summed up in her taut, sweetly tuned wiry lyric: “Every single night’s a fight with my brain… / I just want to feel everything.”
Robin Tung is a contributor to This Recording. This is her first appearance in these pages. She is a writer living in San Diego. You can find her website here.
"Across the Universe" - Fiona Apple (mp3)
"Shaddy Doll" - Fiona Apple & Elvis Costello (mp3)
