OH MY GOD ANOTHER LIST: The Fourth-Hottest Hit of the Nineties

The fourth hottest hit of the nineties reminds us of olden times, when smart women were allowed on modern rock radio.

4. Fiona Apple, Criminal (1997, #21)

My favorite female vocalist of the nineties, Fiona Apple hit the Billboard Hot 100 for the only time with the third single from her debut album Tidal. Torchy and heartbroken, Apple won an MTV award for Best New Artist, beating out competition like Meredith Brooks and the Wallflowers. At the awards ceremony she unironically quoted Maya Angelou and then told everybody that the world was bullshit. Two weeks later, her label released a new single. Accompanied by a Mark Romanek video allegedly inspired by Gregg Araki movies, many people just saw it as the super-skinny Apple parading around in her underwear and cavorting in a bathtub with an anonymous guy. An anonymous guy who had really hot legs, for the record.

If you didn’t like her to begin with, I can see how the timing of the awards and the Criminal video would have made her seem kind of annoying, but at the time I don’t think I actually noticed, teenaged boy that I was. Apple herself was only twenty, but she looked more like a wounded fifteen, with pigtails, a tiny frame, and sad, smoky eyes.

Almost six minutes long, Criminal is the closest Tidal gets to rocking out. Its narrator is a bad, bad girl, asking for penance from God (or
someone) for being careless with a delicate man. We don’t really know what that means, but from the way she’s singing it sounds pretty bad.
She doesn’t want to keep fucking things up but she knows she’s going to anyway. The hopelessness of seeing self-destruction before it happens is one of the saddest feelings of all, and it’s made for a number of great songs–Cat Power’s Good Woman is another one that springs to mind right away. But the less Fiona tells God (or us, the listener) the more likely we are to relate, and she knows that; maybe that’s why she stops singing a whole minute-and-a-half before the song ends, leaving us with a long sad haze of carnival rhythms while we try to figure out why it is that she’d want to drive her man away.

Further listening:

Aimee Mann, Amateur
My favorite production of Apple collaborator Jon Brion, who played the keyboards on Criminal (but didn’t actually produce Tidal)

Fiona Apple, Sally’s Song
Fiona Apple, Please Send Me Someone To Love
Two soundtrack songs, one from The Nightmare Before Christmas 3-D and one from Pleasantville, one of the worst movies ever.

Cat Power, Good Woman
Another take on the Criminal storyline.

Fiona Apple, Paper Bag (video)
Fiona Apple, Fast As You Can (video)

When you’re pretty and talented and your boyfriend is an awesome director like Paul Thomas Anderson, your videos get a lot better. Paper Bag is amazingly wonderful. Also, as we learn from the Fast As You Can video, “New Wave-inspired” is a lot more fun than “Gregg Araki-inspired.”

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