T A B L E__T A L K

Which bands do you want to see live, but can't? Wallow in self-pity in Table Talk

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R E C E N T L Y

You Am I
Hourly Daily
Sire
(12/15/97)

Flaming Lips
Zaireeka
Warner Bros.
(12/12/97)

X
Beyond and Back: The X Anthology
Elektra
(12/11/97)

Various Artists
Paint It, Blue: Songs of the Rolling Stones
House of Blues
(12/10/97)

Bush
Deconstructed (Techno remixes of album material)
Trauma/Interscope
(12/09/97)

BROWSE THE
MUSIC ARCHIVES

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V O W E L L

Sound Salvation
By Sarah Vowell
Survey says ...
Give the people what they want
(12/12/97)

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F E A T U R E

Paint it black
By David Bowman
A prayer for His Holy Hipness, Johnny Cash
(12/05/97)

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"Please Do Not Disturb"
Juliana Hatfield -->

Performing Sunday at San Francisco's Warfield, Apple, who recently turned 20, unsuccintly revealed all the contradictions in her girl-woman persona. Performing her debut album, "Tidal," in its entirety, plus a few covers, she was alternately alluring in a grown-up way and cutely flirtatious in a girlish way. Her literally huge voice, filling the hall with its thrilling, strange depth and impressive range, was the voice of a grown woman: confident, world-weary and wise. But she herself is so tiny -- a mere waif in a sweat shirt and fashion sneakers -- that you have to wonder how much of her popularity is due to the public's fascination with such a BIG voice coming out of such a little, frail body.

"I'm in a bit of a mood tonight," she told the audience at the top of the show, later elaborating that "the significance of my being in a mood tonight is mostly for the people who were at sound check and waiting outside. I'm sorry. I just couldn't deal." Her speaking voice, her motions and her dress were all age-appropriate, as was her stage patter. Flapping her hands around awkwardly, she introduced "Pale September" by saying, "This is a song about a guy that I wasn't friends with for a while, but now we're friends again."

But Apple's writing, which is exceptional much of the time, deals with issues of sexual betrayal ("Criminal"), desire ("The First Taste") and abandonment ("Sullen Girl") that you'd expect from a woman of the big, bad world. In her songs she's cocky, fully aware of her potency and her power over the opposite sex. "I'll let you run away," she proposes on "Slow Like Honey," "but your heart will not oblige you. You'll remember me like a melody, yeah, I'll haunt the world inside you."

There's an undeniable whiff of depression in Apple, one that the audience -- mostly baby-yuppies and Fi-wannabes -- were deeply tuned-in to, screaming wildly at every turn. She comes off as deeply wounded, an image she cultivates in interviews and the "help me/fuck me" stare she wears, and her commitment to shining light in her darkest corners invites cynics to dismissively sneer, "She's wallowing." But more accurately -- and more in tune with what artists have done historically -- she uses her art to express the mess of depressed feelings that she's got no other way to unravel and understand. "Days like this, I don't know what to do with myself," she sang on "Sullen Girl." "All day, and all night, I wander the halls along the walls and under my breath I say to myself, 'I need fuel to take flight.'" It wasn't just her voice or her lyrics that were so impressive, but the way she captured the inexorable inertia of melancholy.

Apple's combination of "come hither" and "I'm so vulnerable" annoys a lot of people, especially female critics, myself included. It seems that we would prefer as our spokesmodel someone a little less conflicted, a little less needy and a little less pretty. It's hard to make a feminist case for Apple, because she satisfies so many postmodern male desires: She's smart, creative, beautiful, skinny, tough-but-vulnerable, wide-eyed, a little bluesy, seductive. She looks like daddy's little girl, sounds like a rough-and-ready mama and writes like Anne Sexton. How can someone who serves the patriarchy so efficiently possibly be a force for good?

The irony of abandoning Apple as a symbol of feminist progress is that she does something that feminists have always clamored for: On "Tidal," as during Sunday's performance, Apple expressed, uncensored, her experience as a young woman. And in many, many ways, she presents an amazingly accurate snapshot for straight middle-class female teen life -- specifically, the unstoppable itch to attract male attention and the simultaneous wish to express yourself outside the constraints of what boys, and society, expect. OK, so she's not feminists' ideal role model. But as Courtney Love used to say, "I'm not the final product. I'm just a step in the feminist evolution."

As I watched the scores of adoring fans screaming for Apple to "Tell it like it is!" at the Warfield, I decided I wouldn't want my (hypothetical) daughter to worship Fiona Apple. Not necessarily because of the woman-child she represents, but because her music just isn't interesting enough to be worshipped -- yet. Without her singing, her songs spin their wheels and meander into oarless jams, and I wouldn't want to have to listen to it as much as a worshipping kid would play it. But as a role model, or a validator of girls' experience, I'd prefer Apple over, say, Celine Dion -- at least Apple follows her own recipe. I just hope she grows up to be Diane Keaton, not Mia Farrow.
SALON | Dec. 16, 1997