Fiona Apple
When the Pawn

To be beautiful, it is beautiful. To be damned, it is damned. A damnation not so gentle, surely angelic, fragile, extremely fragile, like an autumn leaf that has fallen, dry, its veins in full view, flowing and spreading over the piano, expanding in the voice, soaking in ink. When talking about Fiona Apple, one needs to be cautious, because it’s easy to make blunders if you don’t know what you’re talking about. We all remember her face on our TV screens during the MTV Music Awards in '97, with her raw and angry tirade against the world's hypocrisy. If you don’t remember it, it’s simply because you didn’t know the name of that very young girl who had already achieved one of the world's most important musical accolades. A female icon of the '90s, Fiona Apple is a truly wonderful painting full of colors, abstract figures, discontinuous lines, and primary colors. Watercolor stains that dissolve into the light and dark of existence. And then a vortex of restlessness, broken phrases, love phrases inexorably overwhelmed by a great desire for redemption compared to a troubled inner situation, a mirror reflection of a different late '90s female pop, which mostly presented itself full of little vocals and many suggestive songs, plastic productions and much work still to be done, located in a not yet well-defined spot in the universe between country, blues, pop, space, and American high schools. However, if Apple is simply linked to what she said at the MTV Awards, you risk a significant misunderstanding, as behind her frank way of expressing her personal revolt against the world a bit like a brat with a pretty face, hides the fragile poetry of one of the most powerful artists of our time. The words sounded a bit like this, in an Avril Lavigne way:

“This world is bullshit, and you shouldn’t model your life on what we think is cool, and what we’re wearing and what we’re saying”. On a deeper rereading, it's right to recognize that the greatest thing to acknowledge in Fiona, besides her talent with a capital T, is the courage to delve into things, dissecting them, without putting a filter between feelings and that sheet of paper. Fiona is all there, there are no hidden compartments. Moreover, she absolutely didn’t need to expose herself so much, already being the great talent who at only 17 came out with a sexually-themed song (Criminal); over the years, Fiona has proven to be so much more, truly having much more to say, and in her search, she has never given herself a break, destroying the hopes of many to follow that intrinsic need to categorize her, otherwise, they would have certainly gone into a crisis. In the end, it is Apple who sends everyone into a crisis, and she continues to do so even today, with Fetch the bolt cutters, released last year. Here, we consider one of her historic albums, her second, When the Pawn of '99: the 10 tracks still make big numbers, with a soft, jazzy, lived-in, visceral, varied, engaging, pressing, rhythmic sound. She is concrete and puts aside all the ideas critics at the time had made of her, although surely it is true that it is she herself who entangles in her pieces, in her twisted lyrics, in her own image from which she constantly tries to escape fast as she can. There are many self-declarations of madness in the songs, like in the tribal rhythms of Fast as you can or in Paper Bag, pieces with beautiful passages as well as a frame of a kaleidoscopic and variegated inner world in which it is easy to get lost. It is a manic creativity that transpires from pieces like To Your Love or The Way Things are, and we have heartbreaking love ballads like Love Ridden or at the end with I know, interspersed with the outburst of anger and energy of Get gone.

Pain, suffering, the struggle against herself and her instinct for self-destruction are the fil rouge that ties all Apple’s works together, hard pieces to digest, which cannot serve as background to a romantic dinner nor to anything else where music is not the focus. This music must be lived and listened to, just as she does when she brings out her scratched, trembling, deep voice, a voice that takes the stage, in the foreground of nothing and no one, totalizing. Her ability to blend blues, soul, pop, in an innovative compositional key with no precedents makes her unique in the female singer-songwriter landscape, the true one, the one that realizes and founds a new artistic identity: that of a woman who lives tremendously, who feels things to the bone and who needs to spit them out and do it well, in a sophisticated, masterful, magnetic and wonderful way.