60 Songs That Explain the '90s - “Criminal” - Fiona Apple

Episode Date: December 15, 2021

Rob explores the radical and blunt nature of Fiona Apple. Nearly 25 years after “Criminal” made a jaded 18-year-old into an alt-rock superstar, Harvilla looks at the songstress’s outspoken antics, her views on exploitation, that infamous Spin article, and more.  This episode contains content about sexual assault and eating disorders. This episode was originally produced as a Music and Talk show available exclusively on Spotify. Find the full song on Spotify or wherever you get your music. Host: Rob Harvilla Guest: Katie Baker Producer: Justin Sayles Associate Producer: Lani Renaldo Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Ringer Films and HBO's final installment of the music box series is Juice World Into the Abyss. This documentary is an intimate and eye-opening exploration of the life and all-too-short career of Wonder Kid rapper Juice World. This real-time account of the Chicago native details his struggles to navigate his rise to fame, his drug use, and mental health issues through a wealth of never-before-seen footage, unreleased music, and dozens of industry interviews. Juice World Into the Abyss premieres Thursday, December 16th, on HBO or HBO Max. Hey, a quick note up top. This episode features some talk about sexual assaults and eating disorders. It's heartbreaking to read some of the letters I get. I actually cry. I want to call them up and say, come live with me, but I know I can't. That's Sarah McLaughlin talking to Rolling Stone in 1998. Just to clarify, that wasn't me talking. I do get the occasional very nice Twitter DM, but usually I

don't cry. Usually they're thanking me for ranting at unnecessary length about Jim Steinman or requesting that I do a troll episode on Snow's Informer or suggesting that I talk about the Columbia House record club. I really ought to do that. Actually, talk about Columbia House, not informer. No offense, but no, that was Canadian rock star and Lilith Fair creator Sarah McLaughlin talking to Rolling Stone about her fan mail, the intensity of her fan mail. The article says, She is talking about the chord her music strikes in many listeners, the young girls who write to tell her that they are being abused by stepfathers or boyfriends. But there are also other letters, different types.

And these are why McLaughlin no longer goes through her own mail. That last part is a reference to the first Sarah McLaughlin song I ever heard. Perhaps that's true for you as well. divine. The song Possession from Sarah's third album, Fumbling Toward Ecstasy, released in 1993, was famously inspired by disturbing letters she'd received from a stalker who later took his own life. Physical letters, obviously, typed or even handwritten. Email's not a thing yet. The tangible object is a chilling aspect of this to me. Something she can hold in her hands. Something that rattles. Something that has invaded her.

her physical space. Multiple stalkers also. In an earlier Rolling Stone interview from 98, she'd said, and this one person wasn't the only guy. Thankfully, this is the only fellow who committed suicide, but there were a lot of letters from other people saying the same kind of thing. So for a while there, I looked over my shoulder every time I walked out the door. Writing the song, Possession was very therapeutic. Her stalker actually sued her for using his ideas and her song before he killed himself. When Sarah mentions people saying this same kind of thing, she means fans, male fans overwhelmingly, who wrote to her about their fixation with her, romantic, sexual, spiritual, etc.

Guys insisting to her that they knew her, the real her, that they got her, that getting her meant that now she belonged to them, ergo possession. So these are love letters in the mind of the letter writer, though in reality they're unwelcome and unsettling and threatening to Sarah. And so as therapy, she writes a beautiful song inspired by the imagery in these letters. She writes what could easily be construed as a love song if you didn't know the backstory or just didn't know any better. Which, of course, I didn't know any better the first time I heard this song. I first heard possession on alternative rock radio as an angsty teen in the early 90s. A lot of my musical memories from this era are just me riding shotgun driving around the suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio, with my mom. She'd pick me up from school.

Often we'd go to my grandma's house a half hour away, have dinner, and then we'd drive home at night. The industrial strength melancholy of a gunmetal gray Cleveland sunset. You merely adopted the gray. I was born in it. my bare forehead leaning against the cold passenger side window glass as I listen to the radio and think my profound melancholy thoughts. Don't worry about it. You want no part of that cartoon thought bubble. Trust me. I wish someone would slow dance with me to poison something to believe in. That's as profound or as coherent as my thoughts got. But so possession by Sarah McLaughlin

is one of maybe a half dozen alt rock radio songs that entranced me in this very specific way. It had this mega-reverbed, extra emo, four-dimensional, alone-in-a-drift in the gorgeous, yawning vacuum of deep space feel to me. Maybe it's the organ in this song. Maybe it's the planetary gravitational pull of that baseline. Be-do, be-do. Maybe the quite striking lyrical image voices trapped in yearning somehow penetrated my nuclear fallout shelter-thick 15-year-old skull.

I don't know. This song made me sad and made my sadness seem both infinite and terrifically important. And this effect was magnified, driving around various Midwestern suburbs when we drive past newer housing developments. Just built or half-built suburban homes made me extra sad. The intoxicating aroma of fresh lumber, the moon colony isolation, and maybe desolation of a house with nobody any yet. Dirt lawn, no cars around. eerie and dark other than maybe one humming streetlight. Anybody else out there get a super dismal empty feeling driving through half-finished suburban

neighborhoods? No? Yeah, I didn't think so. But possession magnified that feeling in me, that empty, trapped, yearning feeling. So did any song off Depeche Mode's violator? Enjoy the silence or policy of truth. I definitely can't articulate this well enough. But I'm totally serious when I say that one of the most intense psychological experience,

experiences I ever had with a random song off the radio as a teenager was the time we were driving through a half-built neighborhood and a remix of the song, A Forest by the Cure, came on the radio. I cannot explain exactly what happened in my brain, but I'll never forget it. Part of the appeal to me now, honestly, is that I don't think I can articulate this well enough. I can try and give you this feeling, but you still can't have it. I imagine that notion is less appealing if you're a songwriter. Sarah McLaughlin can write her lovely evocative songs about whatever she wants and talk about them however she wants.

But once her songs are out in the world, once she set them free, and once they've been seized by a force as malevolent and all-consuming as teenage boys listening to the radio, she is no control over who listens. And no control over what random-ass feelings her songs dredge up in those, listeners, no control over what those people do about those feelings, and no control over what those people think of her or demand of her as a result. Possession is not, as far as I know, a song about being careless with a delicate man. But then again, who am I to say? And regardless,

try telling a delicate man that. Do we talk about one other Sarah McLaughlin song with discomforting associations. Do you mind? This one is kind of her fault. Of course. You're thinking about those dogs, ain't you? Quit it. Don't. Don't think about those sad dogs. The ASPCA ads. Looking all forlorn and whatnot as Sarah McLaughlin sings the forlorn piano ballad angel forlornly. You're just trying to watch the fast and the furious Tokyo drift on cable at 1.30 in the morning, minding your own business and here come the sad dogs the endless morose stampede of sad dogs each one of those ads is like ten minutes long the song angel is only four and a half minutes long sad dogs somehow disrupt the flow of linear time in junior high i had romantic relationships that didn't last as long as one of

those as pca ads quit thinking about the dogs those dogs are all fine Thanks to Sarah McLaughlin and the mystical curative powers of her piano ballad angel from her 1997 album servicing. Each and every one of those dogs got adopted and made a full mental and physical recovery. Their new owners take them to the dog park for two and a half hours every day. Those dogs only eat gourmet dog food from boutique food trucks that specialize in dog food. I just assume those exist. Keto-friendly gourmet food truck dog food. That's that no owners.

These dogs have transcended the need for humans entirely. All those dogs from the ASPCA ads are now happy and healthy and living their best lives together in a loft in Portland, Oregon. They are all high-powered influencer dogs. It's one of those TikTok houses you might have read about online, a TikTok dog house, if you will, all doing viral choreographed dog dances to Shoup by Salt and Pepper. The dogs are doing great. Thank you for your concern.

I said, stop thinking about the dogs. Would it help if you had some other image to associate with this song? Did you know Angel is about Jonathan Melvoin, the keyboard player who died of a heroin overdose while on tour with smashing pumpkins? In 1996, Sarah McLaughlin did a Q&A for Quora. Yeah, in 2014, and somebody asked her about it. She read about Jonathan Melvoin in Rolling Stone while woodsheding in a cabin in Montreal. She said, the story shook me because though I have never done hard drugs like that,

I felt a flood of empathy for him and that feeling of being lost, lonely, and desperately searching for some kind of release. End quote. I didn't know that. That was a terrible story. Jonathan Melvoin dying. I'm sorry. I'm trying to cheer you up here. Let me try again. Okay, try this. I played Angel at an open mic night in college. For a while, I played in an informal open mic night duo with my friend Carly. Carly was a star soccer player. She had a beautiful voice. So I'd play guitar, piano, and maybe sing harmony or whatever.

But mostly I'd just let Carly cook. The whole soccer team would show up. Carly was a lesbian. We'd do strong enough by Cheryl Crow. And she'd sing, are you strong enough to be my man? The whole soccer team would crack up. It was hilarious. So we do Angel, right?

And Carly sings it beautifully, and it's pretty easy to play on piano. But the last solid 30 seconds of the song is just piano. There's a long, moody outro. And Carly's done singing, but I'm up there determined to ring every ounce of pathos from the two piano chords that comprise the outro to Angel. And linear time is once again disrupted. And now it's just three hours of me going in super slow motion. And I must have looked fucking ridiculous. And the thought bubble above my head reads, finally a chance to convey what a deep and soulful person I am.

And meanwhile, the soccer team is openly snickering and everyone else is like, get this jerk off out of here. There. Try that image. Who's going to adopt me? I said Sarah McLaughlin was Canadian, right? She is born and raised in Nova Scotia. I said she started the Lilith Fair, right? She did.

Traveling Summer Music Festival, all female artists ran for three years in the late 90s, inspired a lot of dumbass stand-up comedy. Huge success grossed $52 million, 10 million of which went to charity. first year was 1997, Sarah McLaughlin, and a rotating crew of headliners, including Cheryl Crow, Tracy Chapman, Jewel, Paula Cole, Suzanne Vega, the Indigo Girls, the Cardigans, Emmylou Harris, Natalie Merchant, Lisa Loeb, and Fiona Apple. 19-year-old piano playing, jazz-inflected, hip-hop conversant, polarizing as an understatement, viciously quotable, weary beyond her years, alt-rock star, phenom, Fiona Apple, I don't care to even imagine her fan mail. This issue of songs as therapy and songs as weaponry. Songs you write that are then used to attack you,

songs do you then write to defend yourself against the attacks triggered by your earlier songs? This problem of mistaken intent, of misunderstanding, of misappropriation. The first way Fiona Apple tried to fight back against it all was by singing searingly unmistakable words as forcefully as forcefully as possible. I tell you how I feel, but you don't care. I say tell me the truth, but you don't dare.

These are the first words out of Fiona Apple's mouth on her debut album, title, released in 1996. Listen as this brutally frigid wind blows from across the Great Divide. Don't let the screen door hit you in the Great Divide. My name is Rob Harvilla. This is 60 songs that explain the 90s. We'll get to criminal when Fiona Apple says. it's okay to get to criminal.

You said love is a hell you cannot bear and I say give me my back and then go there for all I care. Fiona Apple McCaffey, Maghart was born in New York City in 1977. Her father, an actor and her mother, a singer, met while performing in the Broadway musical applause and split up when Fiona was four. When Fiona was seven or eight, she performed at a piano recital playing a composition she'd written herself called the Velvet Waltz, which she'd much later described Rolling Stone by saying, oh my God, it sounds like some kind of gay porn. Fiona struggled in school with bullies and such. Though Shumika said she had potential, Fiona idolized Maya Angelou. She wrote poems. She kept journal.

She wrote songs. She made a three-song demo tape, which she gave to a friend, which the friend gave to a music publicist for whom the friend was babysitting. And the publicist gave it to a guy named Andy Slater, who became Fiona's manager and producer, and also managed and co-produced the Wallflowers. People mispronounce my name as Harvila a lot. And in high school, this kid, Jeff used to sing the wallflower song, Three Marlinas, but he changed the words. So it was one, two, three, three Harvillas. A little backstory for you. Okay, can I tell you about the guy this Fiona Apple song is about Fiona's ex-boyfriend who inspired this song. sleep to dream and many of these saltier songs on title saltier is insulting the earth.

Inspired feels like the wrong word. The guy who provoked this song, the guy who contracted this song as one contracts a fatal penis shriveling virus. His name's Tyson. Tyson and Fiona met while he was rollerblading on the campus of Columbia University. They dated on and off for two and a half years. He moonlights as an acid jazz DJ, or at least he did when Rolling Stone interviewed him for a 1998 Fiona Apple cover story about how she wrote a bunch of super angry breakup songs about him. He said, I remember it being all my fault. Well, 95% my fault. I started seeing this other girl and liking her a little bit. And Fiona said one day, I never want to see you again. And then a year later, and albums out.

Tough break, Tyson. So Tyson proceeds to tell this story about going away to college. And one day he's making out with a young lady, some other young lady, and MTV is on, and the sleep to dream video comes on, in which Fiona Apple is seething in a replica of her old bedroom. And as Tyson describes it kneeling on the ground, looking through the TV, looking straight at me. As she sings words, they remind Tyson of what she said to him the last time they'd spoken. And so forth. Anyway, Tyson had to stop making out with that young lady.

Tough break, Tyson. At the time, even if you weren't privy to any of the proper names or any backstory whatsoever, when you heard Sleep to Dream on the radio or MTV, it was enough to know that you didn't want to be whoever had inspired Fiona Apple to sing, I have never been so insulted in all my life. I have never been so insulted in all my life. I could swallow the sea to wash down all this pride. I have to say, I've spent like 25 years so beguiled by

I have never been so insulted in all my life that I never fully registered. I could swallow the sea to wash down all this pride. That's a great line also. And this unfortunately is a core. component of the Fiona Apple multimedia experience, fixating on the most obvious thing to the exclusion of all even slightly less obvious things. Reading a Fiona Apple magazine profile or newspaper interview was just about the most dangerous thing you could do in the late 90s. Rollerblading on the Brooklyn Queens Expressway was less dangerous. Ideally, when reading these interviews, you'd be wearing a

helmet or a hazmat suit. The New York Times interviewed Fiona in January 1997, about half a year after title came out, the headline is, a message far less pretty than the face. The first two paragraphs read as follows. The pouty B-stung lips, the taut pierced belly exposed by a flouncy shirt, the cascading honey-brown hair,

and those eyes. Is this the next waif supermodel? No. this is the second paragraph. Turn up the volume on MTV loud enough to hear Fiona Apple sing. She may look like a cross between Christy Turlington and Kate Moss, but Ms. Apple, a 19-year-old singer and pianist, has a voice and a message that make her looks irrelevant.

I don't want to belabor this. Tone-placing 25-year-old rock star profiles is obnoxious and of limited utility. But I need to give you some sense of how boldly. shit this world is precisely. People writing about Fiona Apple in 1997, collectively this was just an active broiling Pompeii decimating volcano of yikes. The discourse turns from crudely frivolous to bone-chillingly serious on a dime. For example, the far less pretty than the face message mentioned in that New York Times headline is a reference to the second song on the title album, which is called sullen girl.

Early on, at least one interviewer asked Fiona if this song, too, was about a bad breakup. It is not. Fiona Apple discussed in multiple, in countless magazine and newspaper profiles, the fact that she was raped as a 12-year-old in her New York City apartment building. Often she discussed this at excruciating length.

Her description in that Rolling Stone cover story span six, seven, eight paragraphs of vivid and unsettling detail down to the number of locks on her apartment door. She'd unlocked two of three. What she told Rolling Stone was, I thought that ultimately, no matter what happens, if I lie about this, I don't like what that says. And so now, in every interview, Fiona sat and waited for it to come up, or she didn't wait. She said, I'd be, you want to ask about when I was raped, I was, please don't act like I have got food in my teeth. It's out in the open. It's not something that I'm embarrassed about.

So don't act like it's something that I should be embarrassed about, which I think I was sensitive about because I was embarrassed about it for a long time. What's often singularly great, but occasionally what's truly awful about listening to Fiona Apple's saying is the way a random word can detonate the way the word my. detonates there. The conclusion many early Fiona profiles arrive at, because Fiona says this explicitly, is that she writes her songs less as therapy that as a matter of outright survival. She describes songwriting in that New York Times article by saying, I didn't think of it as a fun thing to do. I thought it was the only thing I could do.

She goes on. She says, when I was raped, I told myself, I'm never going to ask, oh, why me, God, because all I could think was, I'm alive, thank God. But when I found out I was going to tour the world, I went home and asked, why me? Because I didn't want to go out on the road. But I can't stop writing and I can't not make another new album because I've already written new stuff and I have to let it out. What magnifies the awfulness of Sullen Girl is how beautiful this song can be, musically, how elegant and explosive it can be in this eerily drowned slow motion sort of way. The trap in this song is that you can't love it or even tentatively embrace it without it mortally wounding you. The existence,

the blockbuster success of the Lilith Fair starting there in summer 1997 proved that superficially Fiona Apple had a lot of company, a lot of peers when it came to making alternative rock adjacent music that was lush but blunt, mystical but visceral. It's meant to a harrowing degree and vulnerable to a radical and almost unsafe feeling degree. Tori Amos, of course, starting with her debut Little Earthquakes in 1992, deployed her piano like it was an 88 silo nuclear missile launcher, and Tori both sang about and talked about her own sexual assault in language so straightforward that it felt confrontational and shocking, though of course she wasn't trying to be controversial or shocking. She was trying to be honest. She was processing. She was telling you what happened to her.

She was speaking directly to the millions upon millions of people it had also happened to. I did an episode on Tori Amos on Cornflake Girl a while back, and I meant to include Tori's explanation for why she never played Lilith Fair, despite being an archetypal Lilith Fair artist. This explanation came on Tori's own Rolling Stone profile in 1998. Tori said, Well, I would have a good bottle of wine with Sarah any night of the week. But my shows are theater, and I've worked a long time to get them to this point. This isn't just about eating some chicken and hearing a few of your favorite female singers.

You walk into my show, you walk into a world. It's a film every night. I can't impose that on Lilith and vice versa. Well, that wasn't so bad. She goes on. Plus, I'm not into the all-male, all-female thing. The interviewer notes that Tori says this with growing agitation. Where's Dionysus?

Where's Hades? You can't cut out the testosterone. And we need some pansy-ass people, too, like little camp Hermes, even though I'm sure some of those women have more testosterone than Hermes. End quote, holy shit, where's Hades? Tori is the best. even if it's totally subconscious, I suspect Tori's a big part of the reason Fiona's the best. To call Tori's own songwriting process therapeutic, the way Sarah McLaughlin called a song like

possession therapeutic, that feels a little glib if Tori's not saying so directly. But the through line is that Tori's most devout fans and Sarah's most devout fans and Fiona's most about fans, both the parts of those audiences that overlap and the parts that don't. Pretty much every single woman listening to any of these women knows what it's like to look over her shoulder every time she walks out her front door. Armed with that knowledge, sullen girl isn't a song or isn't just a song. It's a defense system. It's a weapon. But it's also a fantastic song.

Dig the pedal steel. Dig the vibraphone. John Bryan on vibraphone. John Brian from the star proved to be a key element of the sumptuous and severe Fiona Apple experience. What set her apart at first from anyone, it made sense for her to tour with in 1997. It was a ferocious swagger that felt both very old and very new as musical reference points. Go. The Rolling Stone story talks about all the changes just to the song Sleep to Dream.

There were three distinct versions, a terrible almost solo version, a terrible almost punk rock version. And finally, the song, as we know and love it now. Andy Slater, Fiona's manager and producer, said he only figured out how she, she should sound, how title as a whole should sound, after he and Fiona went record shopping together. And she bought CDs by the roots, the far side, Miles Davis, Ella Fitzgerald, and Marvin Gay. Fiona once said that the only CD she bought in 1997 was Wu-Tang forever. You got to be careful, no matter who you are, no matter when you are, trying to claim either end of that eclectic musical spectrum, right? The Ella Fitzgerald and or the Wu-Tang. And you got to be careful. You've got to

show, not tell. Even letting your producer-manager tell is dangerous. Ideally, you don't call yourself the gangster Nancy Sinatra. Ideally, you let some corny music critic call you that because you just organically sound like that. But the miracle of title to me is that it can load up on solemn and frightfully intense five-minute piano ballads, but still retain that time warp range, that swagger, that menace. Just Fiona Apple enunciating. Right? Her syllables could cut glass and melt steel. The first single off title, and that's the first time most people heard Fiona's voice on the radio or on MTV, was called shadowboxing. And just try to imagine hearing this person without knowing anything about this person or where she was coming from or what decade she'd been born in.

The way you've no reverence to my concern. Who talks like this? Who sounds like this while talking like this? Did Tyson the rollerblading Asset House DJ have reverence for anything? Here comes another detonating word. The word is burn. Good luck, Tyson. Just because I don't know how far into Fiona Apple's future I'm going to get, I should note briefly that title is my least favorite of her five albums,

which says a hell of a lot more about the great. of her four other albums. What I miss on title that you get later is the clatter, the percussive anarchy, the whiplash, tempo changes, the unpredictability. But there's something singularly rewarding about just hyper-fixating

on the second half of this first record and watching these dense, claustrophobic five-minute piano ballads all slowly break apart into their separate ecosystems. I am partial at the moment to the first taste, which gets a little feistyer eventually, though it's pretty goddamn feisty to begin with. Show of hands.

Who wants to hear Rihanna cover this song? That's one way to put it. But yeah, title ultimately is unbalanced. As Fiona Apple Records go, it's destabilized by one song in a way that no one subsequent Fiona Apple song destabilizes a subsequent Fiona Apple record. All right, Fiona says it's time to talk about criminal. Let's get the video out of the way. I don't recommend re-watching the criminal video now. I just watch it again, and I regret it. I have no particular insight to provide into the criminal video. I suspect that the criminal video, I suspect that the

criminal video has no insight to provide either. As you may recall, it's just Fiona writhing and scowling and sulking and semi-flirting amidst faceless, passed-out heroin-cheek models. This isn't a moral objection or anything. It's just that in 2021, the criminal video plays like the Joker directing an Abercrombie and Fitch ad. And the hell with it. I am exhausted by the rhetorical labyrinth of whether the criminal video is exploiting 19-year-old Fiona Apple or if the criminal video is a shrewd satire of the music press exploiting Fiona Apple. 25 years, almost, of this debate. She told Spin Magazine in a 1997 cover story. The first time I saw the script, it was like Fiona in her underwear in the back of a car, and I was all, what? I mean, I don't walk around the house in my underwear. I can't even stand to see myself in a mirror.

But then the director said, it's tongue and cheek. And I got it. Pro tip. When a director of anything says it's tongue and cheek, bad sign. Oh, you're uncomfortable. You don't like it? Uh, that's on purpose. It's tongue and cheek. Yes. You think it's bad? That's what makes it so good. This is a more obnoxious application of irony to me than Alanis Morissette's ironic. I get that the criminal video was her breakout moment and powered 65 to 95% of the mystique at that time, the mystique of the song and the mystique of Fiona Apple herself when we knew slightly less about her. Mark Romantic directed the video and speaking as a guy who has cried a couple dozen times watching the Johnny Cash hurt video. Speaking as a guy who saw in a theater that movie and Martin Romantic directed, one hour photo from 2002 starring Robin Williams as a creepy one hour photo guy, I got

no objections to Mark Romantic. But the criminal video is gross in a way that is not elevated by the obvious fact that it's trying to be gross. It's vacant in a way that I've never found pretty or provocative. We're especially smart. The sound bite Fiona decided on. It's in the spin story was, I decided if I was going to be exploited,

then I would do the exploiting myself. And even printed on a piece of paper, you can sense how weary she sounded when she said it. I watch this video now and I think about this word waif. Waf as in a stray, an orphan, a thin and sickly young woman, usually an object of pity, albeit pity that's forever on the cusp of curdling and to scorn. Subhead of the Rolling Stone Fiona's story is,

one minute she was a waif, the next, a killer bitch. But maybe she's just a young girl with talent, problems, and an addiction to telling the truth. Yeah, maybe. Even the New York Times asking, is this the next waif supermodel? That word had a particularly ugly and ominous power in the 90s. in the Kate Moss era.

Nirvana's in utero comes out, right? And Kmart and Walmart freak out over the song title, Rape Me on the back. They also freak out at all the fetuses. So Kirk Cobain changes the title to waif me, which doesn't make sense, but also makes perfect fucking sense. Shortly after the excruciating multi-paragraph description

of her sexual assault, Fiona talked to Rolling Stone, also in grueling detail, about the weight she'd lost. And why? She said, I definitely did have an eating disorder. What was really frustrating for me was that everyone thought I was anorexic and I wasn't. I was just really depressed and self-loathing.

She says, 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 for being raped at the point of developing my voluptuousness. I just thought that if you had a body, if you had anything on you that could be grabbed, it would be grabbed. So I did purposely get rid of it. End quote. This is not a revelation that harmonizes terribly well with the criminal video. But more to the point, I think the criminal video has obscured and blunted how shrewd and how smart and how subversive criminal the song is. First of all, the percussive aspect, the way the hi-hat kicks in there and the song itself

kicks into a higher gear the way no other song on title does. This is a crucial step toward the clatter, the feral junk drawer cacophony that's going to power better Fiona Apple albums pretty soon. Well, pretty soon and also decades later. There's a breakbeat aspect to criminal overall, a bluster that brings out the Wu-Tang clan side of her, Fiona Apple having a Wu-Tang clan side is an idea you're invested in. There's a propulsive of this song that's shocking in context, in the context of the record, and in context of the stereotypical and often derisive public perception of what the Lilith Fair was supposed to sound like.

I'd also really, really like to know specifically who she is addressing. This is the moment in the song where you're meant to most clearly feel her age and feel her inexperience relative to Sarah or Tori or whoever. And really it's the moment when she weaponizes her inexperience against you or against whoever she's addressing. but her voice, her singing voice and her poetic voice sounds decades older, decades deeper, decades harder. The chorus to Criminal is great, but give me the bridge. Every word here is detonating. I feel like Fiona Apple knows in this moment that this is the moment and the song, the song that

will elevate her, but also drag her down with waves of tabloid bullshit and winking. debauchery, but that the song will endure. And so, at great personal cost, will she? And so Criminal makes her truly famous and truly polarizing. It peaks on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart at number 21. I love that placement for criminal. Number 21 is perfect. She hits the cover of Spin. That's the I decided if I was going to be exploited that I would do the exploiting myself story. She's leading Spin's girl issue. That's what it's called. called the girl issue. The cover line is she's been a bad, bad girl. And per the cover, this girl issue also includes Alanis, Ani, Gwen, Zena, Chloe, Chelsea, Daria, the WNBA, and many

more. I think that's Zena, Warrior Princess. I don't have time to look it up. This is the disastrous spin story featuring photos from Terry Richardson. And it's the story where she gives a lot of fatalistic tongue-in-cheek quotes like, I'm going to cut another album and I'm going to do good things, help people, and then I'm going to die. And after the article comes out, she's so angry at how misconstrued and sensationalized and ridiculous she's made the sound that she writes a poem about it, which explains why the next album she cuts, released in 1999, is called, when the pawn hits the conflaced, he thinks like a king, what he knows, throws the blows, when he goes to the fight and he'll win the whole

thing for he enters the ring. There's no body to batter when your mind is your might, so when you go solo, you hold your own hand, remember that depth is the greatest of heights. If you know where you stand, then you know where to land and if you fall, it won't matter because you'll know that you're right. Oh, and also she won Best New Artist in a

video at the 1997 MTV Video Music Awards, which is, of course, where she says this. Everybody out there that's watching, everybody that's watching this world, This world is both.

In 2012, Fiona called this my top moment of self-parenting. I guess it's obvious in retrospect that she was talking to herself, coaching herself. Pretty funny at the time, though. Not everybody thought this was funny, which of course only made it funnier. And you shouldn't model your life. 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 and everything. Go with yourself. Go with yourself. And then she did. It always has. Hasn't always been easy. It isn't meant to be.

I've been thinking at a time, I lived in New York City in the late 2000s, and occasionally I do these very strange and semi-glamorous things where I felt like the unglamorous control person at the glamorous function. Like how when you get onion rings at Burger King, they throw in one dinky little fry. But so I went to Brooklyn to watch the writer, the novelist, and essayist Jonathan Ames, box, a boxing match involving Jonathan Ames, who dated Fiona Apple for many years.

So I'm watching Jonathan Ames box against some guy, and the fight is not exactly explosive, but Fiona Apple is there. She is ringside, cheering on Jonathan. And I am by this time a practice New Yorker in that I don't freak out around celebrities. I played cool,

etc. But at one point in the fight Jonathan and the other guy, they do start trading punches in a more rapid fire, actual boxing match type way. And there's a surge of excitement in the crowd. And instinctively, I glance at Fiona Apple at this heightened moment. And there's this fire in her eyes. She's pumping her fist.

She's into it. She's egging them on. She's willing something to happen. And nothing really happens, boxing-wise. But for me, this was the most exciting thing that happened the whole time. That brief moment where she radiated the bridge to criminal type energy. A fleeting instance where you could just tell she was thinking, finally. no more bullshit.

Our guest today is Ringer's senior staff writer Katie Baker, one of my favorite writers and sports fans and humans in the Ringer orbit or in any orbit, for that matter. Katie, welcome. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. Likewise, I've told you this before,

but when I was in college, I had like a piece that you wrote as my Facebook website in my profile. That is very kind. That's a great honor. It was the MIMS thing, right? The Venn diagram. It was. Yep.

I'm a sucker for those infographics, you know. Me too. Me too. I'm trying out podcasting now. We'll see how this goes. I'm sorry I made you rewatch the criminal video. I feel terrible about that. I think we both had a bad time this week rewatching it.

What strikes you now about the criminal video? It kind of reminds me of, you know, on the one hand, I enjoyed re-listening to the music itself, but it kind of reminds me of going back and watching, rewatching the movie Fear, which was kind of in the rotation around the same time. You know, at the time when I first consumed it, I was younger then, and I was younger than the, you know, the main character. So there was a little bit of a coolness and aspiration even to, you know, some of the horrifying images taking place on the screen. And looking back, I'm now, I'm now a mother.

I'm clutching my pearls a little bit, looking at these young women on screen. The aesthetics of it, I just kept thinking were so Terry Richardson-esque. I mean, I know she did a photo shoot with him. Spin, yeah. I love the song. I love listening to it. The video I can, you know, I see why it, you know, struck a chord. There's aspects to it that are fun to watch.

You know, if you watch some of our other music videos, there's no reason to return to those. So it has like a hook to it. What kind of hook, I think, is the issue. A bra hook. What did you make of the video back then, like in the mid-90s? Were you already a Fiona Apple fan? When criminals started building her up as this controversial figure. I think when the album came out, I was 13, I was 14, when the video came out,

because there was sort of a fair amount of a lag between the two. I consumed a lot of music then via constantly having the record. radio on so I could, you know, record a mixtape and constantly watching MTV. So through the videos, you know, I knew Fiona Apple as being, you know, I remember her playing the piano while singing and that sort of stood out, you know, that she really was like musically gifted. And that was the aspect. But yeah, I just sort of remember being, you know, a teen. I just listening to her, I'm sort of mentally placed like in my bedroom with it coming on the radio and then, you know, obviously seeing the video all the time.

Yes. Were you a Tori Amos fan? Because that was sort of the nearest point of comparison at the time for a lot of people, as superficial as it is in some ways, but it did make sense. Like, were you a Tory file in any way? I wasn't like a head, you know, but I was, I liked her music. I went to, I went to an all-girls school and middle school. So, you know, there's sort of an ambient sound that I was going around at the time. And I'd say when it comes to sort of another contemporary of hers who made. isn't as musically similar as Tori Amos, but I loved Alanis Marissette. Of course. And I loved the sort of, you know, not that she was some, you know, Lana Marzette wasn't like a totally subversive thing compared to some of her peers, but to me she was. And so Fiona Apple is kind of in the same realm as that.

Yeah. You were talking about going to an all-girl Catholic school and you mentioned a cuddle puddle. And I very much, I may regret asking this, but I need to know what. a cuddle puddle is. Yeah. Well, yeah, it's, you know, when I think of just the, the landscape of 1996, 1997, I went to, for middle school at all girls Catholic school. And I just remember a lot of girls always kind of laying around on top of one another, like in the like 20 minutes between lunch and having to go back to class. And I think that term, I mean, it's not a, it's not a single sex term or anything like that. I think I later probably heard about the actual phrase in like

an article about Stuytown High School. Oh dear. So you could only imagine, but you know, it kind of is a kind of reminds me of like the criminal video except a lot more like girls and braces, probably as many feet, unfortunately. But yes. Yeah, it doesn't seem it doesn't seem as cuddly that version. Unfortunately. Were you a Lilith fair person at all? Like did you ever go Or did you ever sort of covet the Lilith Fair lifestyle as you understood it at 14 or so? I did. I loved Sarah McLaughman. I think surfacing was out around that time, which like later when Mirabal came out,

I, you know, had a lot of songs from like that tour. And she was a big person that I just would run to the radio to press record. And so, yeah, that kind of whole, you know, at the same time, I was also totally, you know, popped, you know, whatever top 40 was on, I was probably liking it. So, but yeah, I, I love the Lilith Fair. I mean, I never went. I would have loved to have gone. Yeah. You know, I wore Birkenstocks then. I wear Bergenstocks now. You were so close. You were basically there all the time. I'm so out of it again. Yeah, yeah. You described Fiona to me as sort of the perception of her being half Tori Amos and half Britney Spears. And I thought that was a really

fantastic way of looking at it. Like what did what did you see as someone who writes constantly profiles people? Like just what did what did you make of Fiona's press coverage like from the beginning and how it repositioned her? Yeah. I think like almost like time horizon wise and also perception wise she I think everyone agreed that she was a really talented artist and like it was right there in front of you just to I just always think like viscerally to watch someone playing the piano and sing at the same

time is, you know, is really impressive. And so there was that aspect to it. But then, you know, the way she was portrayed was, I think, like, every time there's an article about her or Britney Spears, like, it was contractually obligated to include the words, like, naval and be stung. And, you know, just these sort of constant refrains that would come up. And then also just, like, this aspect of kind of parental worry and fear about, like, what's going on with our daughters and women.

and, you know, what are they watching and look at these, you know, these school girls and pigtails, you know, that's probably a constant all the time in terms of that, like, panic mode. But there was a very 90s kind of pendulum swinging back and forth between, you know, these angry young girls standing up for themselves and, you know, everyone reading Sassy Magazine and then like the backlash of, you know, what are we feeding our daughters? waif, waif was another one that I see all the time for Fiona. And it's just, and it is, as you say, it's sort of, it's set as like concern.

Like we, what's wrong with her, you know, but it's, it's sort of contributing actively to what is probably wrong with her. You know, the way they're writing about her. I, you described, you said that you sort of associated Fiona in this period with your mother's bookshelf. What, what books are these specifically? There are some books that came out a few years before all this in like the sort of early mid-90s, kind of when I was like a tween. And so they very much informed my mom and all her friends and just some titles that might be familiar to, you know, people of my generation. But like, girl interrupted, reviving Ophelia, colon, saving the lives and selves of adolescent girls, you know. It's a strong title.

Yeah. Lizzie Wirtzel's Prozac Nation came out. And so those were kind of, you know, when moms were getting together and trying to, you know, talk about how to cope with having teen daughters, which is obviously, there's, you know, there's a reason for that. But those were a lot of the things that they were reading. And I just felt like that was just this sort of ambient vibe of my mother's car. And so, like, there's certain songs, like, that's why I say, I remember loving criminal, like, you know, when I was alone. because if we were in the car, the very first lyrics, you know, I've been a bad, bad girl. It's just like you start to, everyone sits up a little straighter.

And so, yeah, that's kind of, I just, that's what I think of in that time of my life when it was coming out. And, but like I said, Fiona Apple was a little older than me. So to me, she wasn't this tiny, innocent girl. She was kind of like, oh, that's interesting. An upperclassman now. Perhaps I too one day. She'll be careless with a delicate. man, you know.

Did your mom ever see the video? Now I have this, now I'm having this sort of walking nightmare about my mom walking in and just seeing the video on MTV and just like smashing the television with a sledgehammer. I don't have a specific memory of her seeing the video, but I know I can, I have a more general memory of her kind of walking and taking one look and saying something like, you know, nice face, you know. What's that scowl for? and kind of walking back out. So I'm sure that interaction happened because it happened in other realm. That's a killer mom's statement. Just the economy.

Just all the meaning packed into nice face. That's beautiful. That is elite team mom. My mom could write a mean profile if she wanted to, you know? I guess so. There's your need. Nice face, colon, my afternoon. Why do you think the entire world freaked out over this world?

is bullshit. Like it's just, it's so mild. It's so benign. Like even in retrospect, I guess, but even at the time, like people, why did people react as though she'd ripped up a picture of the Pope? Yeah, it's funny because the message she was getting across was basically, you know, number one, I like Maya Angelou, number two. Be yourself, you know, two things that seem, you know, like they'd have a high approval rating in general. Inarguable, right. Yeah. I just think the combination of she kind of went up and the first thing she said was, you know, I'm not going to be like everyone else and write a prepared speech, which is kind of funny at the VMAs, as if everyone else is, you know, careful.

Yeah, everybody else has a scroll. Opening their folded paper. So, you know, maybe that kind of rubbed people the wrong way and prime them for instinctively resisting everything that followed. But, you know, it is so silly that they reacted that way and that, you know, she then went on Howard Stern, I think possibly even like the next day and just was getting savaged about it from Howard Stern, you know, from it's wild. It's like 20 minutes of him. He sounds really mad. Like I trust you on matters of talk radio in all things. But like is he is he really upset or is it's

just him doing what he does or like did she even lose fart man? Yeah, it's funny because she at one point she's like, would you be happier if I had, you know, come down as fart girl? And I actually think that's the moment where she kind of wins them over. And it's interesting because she holds her own really well in the interview. She does. You can look at the interview on YouTube. And the first minute alone, like, kind of left me reeling.

And, you know, I've, like you said, I've had my share of talk radio in my day. And she holds her own really well. She kind of takes it in a way that makes it seem a little absurd. And then, you know, comes back at them. And, but, I mean, he's like, he's talking about how her bandmates, like, probably want to get with her and just like he's trying everything to sort of put her out of her eyes out of her yeah there's a lot of negging going on like at one point he's like I don't know what you're even trying to say and she says she explains we know what she was trying to say and you know that you know this whole

world is kind of a construct and fake and by this whole world she means like the MTV construct like music world not like the world man you know and anyway so she said that and then he's like like, well, everyone knows that. Like, that's not a profound insight. Everyone sees that. And then she says, well, if everyone sees it, no one says it, which I thought was like a good comeback. But it's just funny. He kind of keeps moving the

goalposts a little bit. Right, right. Yeah, he's mad that she was wearing, I think, Birkenstocks. Yes, right. She was very mad about the shoes. Yes, she was an amazing part where he's mad. She's wearing Birken socks and he says, you should have worn candies. And she says, was that the

brand that Jenny McCarthy is sitting on the toilet? for on the toilet, yes. That's excellent candies-based comeback. Yeah, she really, mosquito trapped in amber of a moment in time there. So anyway, so that, I mean, that interview really made me, I was happy to kind of listen to that full interview because I thought it really put you into what she was like at the time, which is pretty cool and pretty chill. And it showed you what she had to deal with. I hadn't known about this incident you mentioned where like she was on stage. This is in 1997 and somebody yells, take your pants off at her. And she starts yelling at the guy, of course. And it becomes like another media thing. Like as a teenager yourself, what is it like to be a fan of like

even a slightly older, but still a teenage girl who's just having terrible shit yelled at and written about her all the time? I have to imagine all the bullshit affected her fans to some degree as well. Yeah, I mean, to some extent, that's like the experience of being a teenage girl for time eternal. But I do think, especially now so many people are revisiting kind of that 90s, cost, right? I don't know what year, you know, the Ladmags began launching. But like it was, you know, not too far after that. And so there really was this culture of naval gazing, you know, but I do think that.

I do. And it's funny to look back because I'm sure that I, you know, I know that I like was part of the, a lot of it involves not only, you know, playing on mom's fears, but sort of appealing to the teenage girl instinct of catiness and go eat a sandwich and that sort of thing, which, you know, if you're a teen girl that's like self-conscious about your own body, it's very easy to buy into that too. And so just when I think back to just a lot of the treatment of the artists at the time, you know, I see like all sides of it. Like I see the concern, the concern trolling. You know what I mean?

The whole range. Right. You asked me if there's a Fiona Apple reference like in a like in a summertime girls or you get what you give like a like a whimsical pop song like that. And I couldn't think of one, but it does seem to me that Fiona Apple was your favorite rappers, favorite singer for quite a while there. I think Kanye West at some point like said like I want to be the hip hop Fiona Apple. Like do you have any insight into why rappers specifically admired her? Was it sort of the outspokenness? That's interesting.

I also noticed she does, people bring her on to do like collaborations and that sort of thing. I mean, she's probably just, she's really interesting. I mean, her actual music, like when you, the title album, you know, I'm here in Regina Spector. I'm here on Taylor Swift. And that's just in one song alone. Exactly. You know, she talks about Nina Simone as an influence. And so she, her, her app, that's kind of, you know, to circle back to like what's it like to

go back and watch the video. I mean, you hear those opening sounds of the song. And it's, you're in an entire, you know, it's like a time warp, just you're in like a whole new place. And so I think they appreciate that. And then, you know, she just, the, you know, the fact that she really has kind of always been about, like, not being concerned with, I mean, not that she doesn't have like the self-awareness. And also, you know, she's had moments where she talks about, which that she's,

She's not, like, confident. It's not like she's, you know, bush walking around, like, doesn't care. Like, it's almost because she doesn't seem to care. People are trying to poke and prod her to get her to care. And I think that it can be interesting to a lot of people and is interesting. Yeah. I think everyone aspires to be, like, the person who doesn't give a fuck, you know, and, like, nobody is like that all the time.

But I think you're right that Fiona Apple, when she was able to project that, like projected that incredibly well. Yeah. Just just the self-confidence and just not caring what anybody said about her, including to her face. Yeah, she, you know, even now, you know, she kind of in the way she looks back on it, it's not like, you know, some people I think look back on their career when they were really young and almost undermine themselves or they say, oh, actually that this is, you know,

I don't think she does that. I think she sees it as just her progression. And she, even at the time, like, it was important to her to kind of live in front of people in the sense of to show them, like, what she's going through, not that she was trying to be, you know, a personal brand or anything like that. Right. There's no regret. There's no embarrassment.

Yeah. Yeah. You sent me a Fiona Apple profile magazine profile from a few years back now. And you just said, in effect, this writer needs to calm down. And I, I do think that. it is magazine profile subjects. Go Fiona is definitely in the this writer needs to calm down, Hall of Fame.

Like, why do you think she gets such a rise out of people or sort of activates writers like super literary impulses? Yeah, I mean, it's honestly probably a lot of the same things in that like they are, you know, it's like I can be the one to fix her or something. It's like they want to be the one to craft a net. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

And it, you know, and it's funny. like obviously her physicality is an element of her you know of her performances and our memory of her and and that sort of thing but like there was one article that starts with you know i think it has be stung you write in the lead and then the next sentence is like but her looks don't matter at all because she's because she's a talent but you just stutter the works i think you know you mentioned christie turlington and kate moss anyway so yeah there are a lot of going back and looking at old profiles. There's just one after another that, you know, is just kind of tutting at her while also salivating over her. You do kind of get this image of like her at the

party and people trying to get her attention and she's just trying to hang out. Hide in a corner, yeah. I was wondering as a sports writer, is there any athlete equivalent in like in that there talked about or written about in a similar way? I thought of like Kyrie Irving, I might be off base, just as somebody super quotable who's often dismissed as off on his or her own planet. Yeah, it's almost like they have like an alchemy. They start to activate some kind of substance in people. Kyrie's a good one that I guess the distinction with that is that, you know, she's that, yeah, she doesn't think, she never said the Earth was flat at the VMAs. This world is flat. Right. Yeah, that's, that's different. One thing I, that kind of

comes to mind, and this is probably a little esoteric, but there's kind of a certain way that I used to cover hockey. And there's a certain way that like a young Russian player who maybe doesn't even speak English and is, you know, coming over for the first time really upsets it, but also intrigues, like sort of the old guard of many Canadian journalists. And they talk about the enigmatic Russian and it's sort of this trope. And so it kind of reminds me of that. It's like you're taking this person installing her into this new and sort of contrived world in the sense and then getting like then just sort of getting really up in arms when they don't react exactly the way that you would or that you want them to. And so that's kind of one thing that comes to mind. I mean, it's funny. I mean,

in a lot of her music videos, including Criminal, she's doing something and there's a lot going on around her. And it sort of reminds me of just the way she's talked about and covered and what people ascribe to what's going on with her. Like, she's not necessarily doing all the things and thinking all the things that people would want or would do themselves. She's like a Russian hockey player in Canada. You cracked it. You actually figured out.

You didn't even have to hang out with her and write 10,000 words. You fixed her right here on this show. Katie, that's been fantastic. Thanks so much for talking. Thank you, Rob. Thanks very much to our guests this week, Katie Baker. Thanks, thanks as always to our producers, Lonnie and Ronaldo and Justin Sales. Thanks very much to you for listening.

And now, without further ado, here is Fiona Apple with Criminal. We'll see you next week.