Fiona Apple is an American singer-songwriter who has been extremely successful since she took to the scene in 1996. Her music falls under the alternative pop genre, and she takes inspiration from jazz and particularly classic 70s music. Her rise to fame struck when she released her debut album, Tidal, at the age of 18 years old, and was awarded with an MTV Video Music Award for her song, Criminal, where she made her memorable “the world is bullsh*t” acceptance speech. The music video sparked a lot of controversy as the young, rising to fame singer was seen performing very sensually in her underwear for majority of the video, although it resulted in her debut album making the Top Ten and earning herself a Grammy for Best Female Rock Performance.
She later released four more albums; When The Pawn… in 1999, followed by, Extraordinary Machine in 2005, in 2012 the long-titled, The Idler Wheel Is Wiser Than The Driver Of The Screw And Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do, and more recently, Fetch The Bolt Cutters in 2020. All of her following albums received Grammy Award nominations, in which her most recent album, Fetch The Bottle Cutters, won Best Alternative Music Album.
In the 1997 cover for Spin Magazine, Apple dominates the page with an intense stare to the readers. The singer’s name is directly under the magazine’s logo where they say that “she’s been a bad, bad girl”, in reference to the opening line of her most popular single Criminal – “I’ve been a bad, bad girl”. The high saturation of the photograph highlights her blue eyes and makeup that she is wearing, highlighting her beauty; this can be contrasted to the copy at the bottom of the cover, which names women who are “kicking pop culture in its big, fat, lazy butt”. Apple’s stereotypical, ‘beautiful’ features contrast to not just her own, but a list of other women in the music industry’s work.
Criminal is the fourth track on Apple’s debut album, Tidal. She describes the song as “a description of feeling bad for getting something so easily by using your sexuality”, in which she feels almost like a “criminal”. When the music video for the song released, it was one of the most controversial videos to hit MTV at the time, as throughout we see 18-year-old Apple stripping down to her underwear whilst surrounded by young bodies in a basement.
In the music video, she places herself in a vulnerable position to the viewers as she exposes herself by wearing revealing clothing and eventually removes it until she is just in her underwear. In this scene, Apple is stood alone in a kitchen almost naked and covering up her chest and turning to face the camera. Her facial expressions show confusion, fear, loneliness and most definitely vulnerability, and these emotions are further shown through the lighting and positioning of the scene. The kitchen is dark, and the only light shown is on the singer, spotlighting her almost naked body. Although, she isn’t in the centre of the shot and is to the very far right of it. All these can present the idea that she is distanced from everyone else and wants the audience to look at her in these ways, the same way she would want a man to look at her.
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