1/10/2024 0 Comments Fiona apple tidal cdPersonal history and pop-cultural narrative have always swirled together in my recollection of the past, so one of the only things I know for sure about the humid, late-August night I was rushed to the emergency room for the first time was that it was also the night Princess Diana died. I was an athletic kid, then eagerly preparing for another season of soccer, but in the weeks that followed I grew wan and weak. Because the way that certain music comes to hold a central place in our lives isn't just a reflection of how we develop our taste, but how we come to our perspective on the world. For 2021, we're digging into our own relationships to the records we love, asking: How do we know as listeners when a piece of music is important to us? How do we break free of institutional pressures on our taste while still taking the lessons of history into account? What does it mean to make a truly personal canon? The essays in this series will excavate our unique relationships with the albums we love, from unimpeachable classics by major stars to subcultural gamechangers and personal revelations. Up until now we have focused on overturning conventional, patriarchal best-of lists and histories of popular music. NPR Music's Turning the Tables is a project envisioned to challenge sexist and exclusionary conversations about musical greatness. Photo Illustration by Estefania Mitre/NPR Getty Images Courtesy of Columbia Records As to her speech at the MTV awards, she says she got into this line of work to say whatever it is she wanted to say, and that’s what she’s gonna do.When she first heard Fiona Apple's album 1996 Tidal, writer Lindsay Zoladz says the record stood out to her for how it "validated experience of pain." Listening to her spar with Howard Stern in 1997, you want to root for her not just because she’s getting bullied by a guy more than twice her age, but because she’s brave enough to fight back. But for all its finesse, the lingering mood of Tidal is bitter and resolute: She’s going to bare her heart no matter how much it hurts. She’d grown up with classical piano and jazz standards-worlds where technical proficiency can often outweigh raw feeling. While Billie Holiday-a childhood influence-transformed her pain with laughter, Apple wields hers like a blade: Discreet, but it’ll cut you. If she takes pride in her powers of seduction, it’s only because it’s one of the few she’s allowed to exercise (“Criminal”). She sounds older than she is (“Shadowboxer”), but points out that sexual abuse has a way of making you grow up fast (“The Child Is Gone”). A rap fan who’s said the only album she bought in 1997 was Wu-Tang Forever, Apple knows how to make herself ten feet tall (“Sleep to Dream”) while also expressing how small society has made her feel (“Sullen Girl”). And for them, it is serious.Īt the time, albums like Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill and No Doubt’s Tragic Kingdom (and events like the all-female Lilith Fair tour) had brought a feminist edge to the mainstream. Everyone knows entertainment is bullshit-why take it so seriously? Apple holds her ground: Maybe middle-aged guys like you know that, she says, but middle-aged guys aren’t taking cues from MTV on how to look and act-teenage girls are. What’s the problem, Stern asks her: You’re young, you’re pretty, your first album-1996’s Tidal-is selling like crazy, and yet, you’re still angry. A few days after accepting her Best New Artist award at the 1997 MTV Video Music Awards by calling the entertainment industry “bullshit,” a then 19-year-old Fiona Apple sat for an interview with the shock-radio personality Howard Stern.
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