A lot of people hate Fiona Apple.
I know this because I used to be one of them. I hated her for the way her handlers packaged her when her first album Tidal was released in 1996.
Here was a young, beautiful recording artist who in no time flat was on the cover of every music magazine in America. All of a sudden I couldn't walk into a record store without seeing her wide vacant eyes staring at me from cardboard cutouts and posters of that album cover.
It really didn't matter to me that she wrote her own materials (words and music) and people praised her meaningful lyrics. I personally could not see past the fact that she was being marketed as a young nubile extremely f*ckable kid.
One viewing of the video for "Criminal" only confirmed my suspicions. Here was Fiona and a dozen or so of her drugged up semi-clad friends lounging around the set of what appeared to be a low budget porn movie. As much as my friend Shuman loved it, I wasn't impressed and frankly it gave me a gross feeling in my stomach. The same feeling I got after I first heard about JonBenet Ramsey or Michael Jackson's inappropriate shenanigans with all those little boys. Yech! Combine all that with snippets I'd seen or heard about Fiona storming off stage or mumbling about something incoherent at an awards show, and it's pretty easy to understand why I avoided Tidal like the plague.
Flash forward several years where I find myself and some friends driving through Alaska on vacation. My fiancé brought his copy of Tidal along and for sheer boredom I was forced to listen to it about a hundred times on the drive from Seward to Wasilla. I was vaguely annoyed at first given my first impression of the artist but I'll be damned if the disk didn't grow on me. Apple's jazzy, world weary lyrics and vocal timing are incredible given her age and the pop inertia that engulfs her contemporaries.
If Nina Simone were a middle class white girl with a rosy pout, she might just resemble Fiona Apple. Her second album When the Pawn shows a little more studio polish but the girl has taken steps to avoid the image ghetto that she stepped into on her rise to the top. The focus now seems more in line with her music complete with music video much too serene and thoughtful to be played on MTV during the Britney years.
Fiona still has a lot to say and says it with pointedness and poetic brilliance while infusing musical styles from rumba to folk to piano laden torch songs. Pretty fly for a white girl. Here's what I know about her:
Fiona Apple Maggart was born September 13, 1977, in New York. Her actor parents split up when Fiona was four, and shared custody of the girl. She showed musical promise early, playing piano and writing her first song at age 11. This the same year that she announced to her class that she intended to kill herself and her older sister. This remark prompted the first of many trips to a psychiatrist for Fiona. The next year would be even more traumatic for her. At age 12 Fiona was raped in the hallway of her mother's New York apartment. Fiona has often said that the experience forced to to express herself creatively. In 1994 a friend would pass a copy of her demo to a friend who worked as a babysitter for a music exec. She was signed by Sony affiliate Work Records and began recording in 1995.
Thanks to a shrewd marketing ploy and Fiona's genuine talent, her debut album became a hit and tracks "Criminal", "Shadowboxer," and "Sleep to Dream" became airwave favorites.
Her cutie pie image led some critics to doubt her sincerity as an artist. Frequent appearances in fashion magazines and a high profile relationship with magician/babe magnet David Blaine didn't help matters much. Neither did her appearance at the MTV Music Video Awards during which our heroine stomped up to the podium and delivered a speech that made Farrah Fawcett's drugged up rambling on David Letterman look like a Shakespearean soliloquy. Accepting the award for Best New Artist, baffled Apple delivered a bizarre speech saying: "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 and everything," she protested, "Go with yourself."
Later on her website she wrote: "When I won, I felt like a sellout. I felt that I deserved recognition, but that now, in the blink of an eye, all of those people who didn't give a fuck who I was, or what I thought, were now all at once, just humoring me, appeasing me, and not because of my talent, but instead because of the fact that somehow, with the help of my record company, and my makeup artist, my stylist, and my press, I had successfully created the illusion that I was perfect, and pretty, and rich, and therefore living a higher quality of life."