Type?
Fiona Apple
Type?
Last edited by silke; 05-30-2019 at 03:09 AM. Reason: updated links
TiNe, LII, INTj, etc.
"I feel like I should be making a sarcastic comment right now, but you're just so cute!" - Shego, Kim Possible
eww
WHAT? Fiona Apple is HOT!
ENFP - Ethical Subtype.
In touch with semireality.
Yeah, I guess. I just find her to be disgusting.Originally Posted by NeonMonk
I'm gonna disagree and say Ethical-sensory Extratim.
EIE? I disagree, I think she's HOT.
Heheh.
ENFP - Ethical Subtype.
In touch with semireality.
But her eyes remind me of an ISFJ. =/
ENFP - Ethical Subtype.
In touch with semireality.
You dare challenge my VI.
You want us to say "INTj", XcaliburGirl. So I'll go ahead and say it: She's INTj.Not necessarily. She doesn't seem INTj to me, but I'm sometimes bad at typing identicals. Rocky, I really don't think she's an ESE either. I like her stuff when I'm feeling moody.
Strangely enough, Implied's posts remind me of Fiona Apple...don't know why. Maybe they're the same type. Hmm...
TiNe, LII, INTj, etc.
"I feel like I should be making a sarcastic comment right now, but you're just so cute!" - Shego, Kim Possible
Esfj. Listen to her song "Criminal" and compare it to Britney Spears' "Oops I Did it Again" - the two songs are about the same thing, but from a very different psychological perspective.
I love Fiona Apple. I love that song Criminal, too.
Entp
ILE
ah i had thought she was SLI.
i remember xcaliburgirl (i think) thinking we were similar or something. i doubt we're the same type though, at least not without reading/knowing much about her.
Last edited by implied; 04-14-2008 at 09:57 AM.
6w5 sx
model Φ: -+0
sloan - rcuei
IEI
Same, ILI was always what came to mind. Oh and I love her music.
Looking for an Archnemesis. Willing applicants contact via PM.
ENFp - Fi 7w6 sp/sx
The Ineffable IEI
The Einstein ENTp
johari nohari
http://www.mypersonality.info/ssmall/
Some Beta introvert, probably INFp.
She talks about enjoying the highest highs and lowest lows, which is the epitome of Beta. (Betas lack tempo)
IEI-Ni
And likely social-first - So/Sp would be my guess.
Fiona: "In my head my agenda was, that everyone was now going to know me and understand me and be my friend and I was going to be able to walk into a room and not feel so shy because everyone was going to know what kind of person I was and how I was feeling inside... but instead of becoming very understood and accepted that I became so wildly misunderstood and unaccepted that it really screwed with my head...I'm a very very sensitive person, you can't knock me down with a feather anymore but you can still make me cry pretty easy, but I was miserable...I'm not an extremely social creature and I certainly wasn't one then..."
^ Her on-stage performing aside, it sounds like in her personal life she strives for social recognition and full transparency of who she is as a person, and that she got some serious blues when her needs for social acknowledgement and acceptance were not met.
updated typing: Ni-IEI so/sp 4w5
Last edited by silke; 12-21-2017 at 07:08 PM.
IEI-Ni
fuck, I don't know. She looks very Ni and I don't like anything about her. I agree with So/sp. Vaguely Fe/Ti > Fi/Te.
"The way I feel about music is that there is no right and wrong. Only true and false."
"I'm not a control freak."
And if I'm being honest, I don't think I have an ex-boyfriend who would have something mean to say about me.
"When you're surrounded by all these people, it can be even lonelier than when you're by yourself. You can be in a huge crowd, but if you don't feel like you can trust anybody or talk to anybody, you feel like you're really alone."
As a person who performs on stage, it's good to be emotionally open. If you mess with someone when they are in that state, it's like you're messing with an animal when it's eating.
Her music sort of repulses me. I don't know why. Maybe it is her energy.
Edit: I have similar repulsion to Edie Brickell and Alanis Morissette but I can take those two in very small miniscule doses.
Last edited by Aylen; 02-01-2015 at 05:31 PM.
“My typology is . . . not in any sense to stick labels on people at first sight. It is not a physiognomy and not an anthropological system, but a critical psychology dealing with the organization and delimitation of psychic processes that can be shown to be typical.” —C.G. Jung
I've never been able to get my head round Fiona Apple either, I don't know why, I thought I should have liked her, maybe the same way I always thought I should like dinner parties.
IEI-Fe 4w5 so/sx
Reality is a canvas Ni imposes its imagination/inner world upon.
NiFe converts inner worlds into new modes of expression....NiTe converts inner worlds into new modes of thought.
I thought Sx/Sp
-Most of he songs of hers I've listened to are about relationships. Entire songs directed towards specific men, speaking directly to them, even naming songs after them. Talks about stalking/watching them. A lot of the lyrics are really cutting, harsh and straight-to-the-point. No filter.
-Really isolated. Disappears for years. Does things and admits openly to things that people consider self-destructive, bizarre, etc. and seems confused as to why people would react negatively, or just doesn't care. There's no 'health' impulse. She just rides it all out.
I wish I had better reasoning behind it, but I just don't see Social-instinct in her.
Last edited by suedehead; 11-12-2014 at 01:55 PM.
she VIs so/sp and there's scarcely any kind of intensity in her music. I gather her lyrics about relationships could come from her being an I_F type as well.
Omg what happened to her? I've always thought she was so last also, but that may be her 4-ness.
Not sure why this woman can't be LSE
Introverted, Ni all over da place. I always took her for either Ni-IEI with a heavy Ni emphasis, or Ni-ILI.
Just-for-fun fake logic:
I say F.A. could be Ni-IEI or Ni-ILI.
Limitless says he is like Fiona Apple.
I and others said Limitless reminds us somewhat of Jinxi.
The types most offered for Jinxi were Ni-IEI and Ni-ILI.
Therefore, Socionics is real.
That was Alomoes. http://www.the16types.info/vbulletin...=1#post1069882
They joined around the same time though.
“My typology is . . . not in any sense to stick labels on people at first sight. It is not a physiognomy and not an anthropological system, but a critical psychology dealing with the organization and delimitation of psychic processes that can be shown to be typical.” —C.G. Jung
Well, only two of us agreed on Jinxi, then. (I.e., you were talking about someone else.)
I was talking about the same person. I just didn't know them by that name until they were banned.
http://www.the16types.info/vbulletin...as-been-banned
“My typology is . . . not in any sense to stick labels on people at first sight. It is not a physiognomy and not an anthropological system, but a critical psychology dealing with the organization and delimitation of psychic processes that can be shown to be typical.” —C.G. Jung
"I was told so many times when I was a kid, 'I can't be friends with you, you're too intense, you're too sad all the time.' I really thought that when I made the first album that everyone would understand me, all the people who weren't my friends would become my friends."
"The worst pain in the world is shame. I spend a lot of time trying to not do anything bad to anyone, but you can't live your life and not hurt people."
:/ Not currently in my enneagram swing at all but I see plenty of potential E4 from her but not sure if I see Beta NF. Like some have mentioned the fact that she's a four can make her seem more Beta or associated with Beta than she may really be due to the intensity, drama, moodiness, etc, people associate with beta NF. So far she seemsego to me. Anyone know of any potential famous musician E4 delta NFs to compare?
could it be her wing type rather than her main type?
That would be a good question for the enneagram forum if you'd like to make one.I was wondering the same thingMaybe some enneagram fanatic could offer a suggestion, or at least explain the differences between 4w3 vs 3w4 and 5w4 (What they are like, what they are like when unhealthy, why they act the way they would)?
I won't write out her interviews in all the gory detail as you can read them for yourself. Suffice it to say that all of the mirror types are quite distinct. For one, they are a part of completely different benefit and supervision chains; for another, they don't overlap on multiple Reinin dichotomies: http://wikisocion.org/en/index.php?t...omies#Overview
How someone can see common traits between Limitless and Alomoes beyond rudimentary Socio-lines ....I don't know. It's too much of a mental challenge. This boy and Jinxi, trifling_whatever.
Limitless is a clear IEI-Fe which takes him away from any ILI/IEI ambiguity.
I really do not see her as EIE... Ni dom, a bit dry...
IEI imo.
“I could liken you to a werewolf the way you left me for dead, but I admit that I provided a full moon / And I could liken you to a shark the way you bit off my head, but then again I was waving around a bleeding open wound / But you were such a super guy ‘til the second you get a whiff of me / We're like a wishing well and a bolt of electricity / But we can still support each other / All we gotta do’s avoid each other / Nothing wrong when a song ends in a minor key . . . The lava of a volcano / Shot up hot from under the sea / One thing leads to another / And you made an island of me . . . . I could liken you to a lot of things, but I always come around / 'Cause in the end I'm a sensible girl / I know the fiction of the fix . . . . We're like a wishing well and a bolt of electricity / But we could still support each other / All we gotta do’s avoid each other / Nothing wrong when a song ends in a minor key . . .”
“Oh, the periphery / They throw good parties there / Those peripheral idiots / Always have a bite to bare / Bear it if you can / If you really want to / Go to the periphery / Have them celebrate your name / Have them forge you a pedigree and then you'll be left to run the races lame / But if you want, if you think it's worth it — go now, with me / ‘Cause I don't appreciate people who don't appreciate / All that loving must've been lacking something if I got bored trying to figure you out / You let me down / I don't even like you anymore at all / Oh, the periphery / I lost another one there / He found a prettier girl than me / With a more even-tempered air / And if he wants her, he should get her / ‘Cause I think he thinks she's worth it / And maybe they'll move from the periphery / Buy themselves their own plot of land . . . I'll just be hoping he makes a good family man / And if he finds himself yearning for his throne on the silly side / There’s nothing wrong as long as he's learning / Besides, you can take it up with his brethren or with his bride / Just not with me / ‘Cause I don't appreciate people who don't appreciate / All that loving must've been lacking something if I got bored trying to figure you out . . . You let me down / I don't even like you anymore at all / Oh, the periphery . . . Stay away . . . Away, away / Stay away, away . . .”
“I was staring out the window the whole time he was talking to me / It was a filthy pane of glass / I couldn't get a clear view / And as he went on and on, it wasn't the outside world I could see / Just the filthy pane that I was looking through / So I had to break the window / It just had to be / Better that I break the window than him or her or me . . . . Better that I break the window than forget what I had to say / Or miss what I should see // Because the fact being that whatever's in front of me is coloring my view / So I can't see what I'm seeing; in fact, I only see what I'm looking through // So again I done the right thing / I was never worried about that / The answer's always been in clear view / But even when the window’s clean, I still can't see for the fact that when it’s clean it's so clear I can't tell what I'm looking through . . . .”
“I'm undecided about you again / Mightn't be right that you're not here / It's double-sided ‘cause I ruined it all / But also saved myself by never believing you, dear / Everything good, I deem too good to be true / Everything else is just a bore / Everything I have to look forward to has a pretty painful and very imposing before . . . . I have too been playing with fifty-two cards / Just ‘cause I play so far from my vest / Whatever I've got, I've got no reason to guard / What could I do but spend my best . . . . And after waiting, fighting patiently on my knees / All the other stuff tired itself out first and not me / And in its wake appeared the touch and call of a different breed / One who set to get me wise, and got me there and then got me // And what a thing to know what could be instead / Oh, what a blessed curse to see / Took the agenda from its place on my bed / Made a merry paramour of me / O' Sailor, why'd you do it? / What'd you do that for? / Saying there's nothing to it and then let me go by the boards / O' sailor, why'd you do it? / What'd you do that for? / Giving me eyes to view it as it goes by the boards . . .”
Robert Christgau:
http://www.robertchristgau.com/get_a...me=Fiona+Apple
“Extraordinary Machine [Clean Slate/Epic, 2005]
Instead of delivering the music a sharp-tongued breakup record by an empowered young female would imply—if not folk-rock plain and simple, then emotional piano-woman pop—Apple adapts Broadway show tune to confessional mode. Although Mike Elizondo adds momentum, Jon Brion's colors still predominate, and the melodic and structural contours are all Apple's. Ira Gershwin she's not; Betty Comden she's not either. But she wouldn't be half as inspiring if they were what she was aiming for. A-
The Idler Wheel Is Wiser Than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Ever Do [Epic, 2012]
A funny thing will happen once you've figured out that the title is the stupidest thing about an album that's damn catchy after all. It'll sound like a piano record—a defiantly primitivist, raucously avant-garde lounge singer's piano record, with a really nutty drummer: he'll-bang-on-anything (and-get-her-to-pitch-in) producer Charley Drayton. There are few arpeggios, and not much tone color and such. She just executes simple figures and hammers thick chords, including a few boogie-woogies just to make a point. She also sings—words, yes, but more decisively, sounds. Not background music. But you could sure call it mood music. A-”
http://www.robertchristgau.com/xg/bn/2012-07.php
‘Hearing Her Pain
As the synthesizer displaced the electric guitar over the past two decades, there was a parallel development in acoustic music: the folkie ingenue strumming nylon strings gave way to the pop polymath tickling ivorine keys. All in their early thirties, the four major successes in a line traceable to Laura Nyro are Regina Spektor, Nellie McKay, Norah Jones, and Fiona Apple. The first two are obviously minor leaguers compared to Jones and her megaplatinum 2002 Come Away with Me or topic-at-hand Apple, who released the most acclaimed album of 2012 in June. But all are songful New York-identified originals with a fan base, and only McKay, whose 2010 Home Sweet Mobile Home gestured futilely at middlebrow convention after four quirky-to-kooky keepers, is without a current release. Apple and McKay have Broadway roots, the Russian-born Spektor was a classical prodigy, and Jones studied jazz piano in college. None has more than a peripheral relationship to rock and roll as it's normally conceived, and only Jones, whose fondness for country music surfaced with a spooky Hank Williams cover back when, has shown any interest in all the folkish musics on life support gathered under the rubric of Americana.
Ragtime piano did as much to transform 20th-century pop as blues guitar, but the piano these women care about is the one in the parlor rather than the barrelhouse, its discipline harmonic rather than rhythmic. Hence they often come up short on groove even when they hire out their production, as Spektor and Apple have, to Dr. Dre graduate Mike Elizondo. The upside is their melodic facility. In an era when the indelible tune is the province of R&B hit-paraders, Nashville neo-to-pseudo-traditionalists, and old-timers who trust the mettle of blues-based forms that will never dominate pop again, all these piano players have shown a knack for writing songs that are pleasurable up front and intelligent long term. And though I've never been a parlor kind of guy, they've enriched my life as a listener and a critic.
Granted, I find Jones too subtle even if or because she's the nicest person ever to go double-decaplatinum, and after half a dozen tries can neither confirm nor deny credible rumors that her quiet . . . Little Broken Hearts vents the anger to which I'm sure she's entitled. Although McKay is an animal rights crank, which is to say not my type, she's also a stand-up comedian, which is to say bésame mucho--a spunky, sprightly eccentric who has a history of stirring things up just because she can. Although spunky and sprightly right up to her new What We Saw from the Cheap Seats, Spektor is such a committed humanist that should her pop career flounder you can imagine her touring senior residences, where the ones about returning the oldie's wallet and masterpieces imprisoned in their own timelessness would win her a quick callback. Which leaves us with our topic at hand, who is certainly the most brilliant of these very talented women and almost as certainly the hardest to like.
This is not to suggest she's hard to fall in love with. Fiona Apple has had femme fatale written all over her since she debuted in 1996 at 18 with the determinedly bathetic Tidal, which—in a now-vanished record-biz epoch still brimming with dreams of precious metal and aesthetically complicated celebrity—went triple platinum behind a Grammy-winning single about doing a good man wrong and a video featuring the teenager in her underwear. Having beaten her three competitors to the post by five years, however, Apple has since been outdistanced by all of them: The Idler Wheel (we'll get to the full title later) is only her fourth album, and comes seven years after Extraordinary Machine. How this could be is indicated by the recording history of Extraordinary Machine, in which--with the aforementioned epoch on its last legs--Apple rejected the orchestrated iteration produced by the estimable Jon Brion and insisted on re-recording with the estimable Elizondo. Some prefer one version, some the other; they're different, sure, but since this is her shapeliest set of songs either way, few find the differential as stark as Apple does. She's a diva, a perfectionist, a pain in the ass. And this determines the kind of respect she gets--as a musician, and as a star in whom listeners invest their fantasies and ambitions.
The music is why we're here. Vocally Apple has more size and texture and character and drama than her fellow piano women. Her melodies and arrangements are always forceful and never predictable. The fascination she exerts, however, extends well beyond these aesthetic niceties and doesn't necessarily begin with them. Post-MTV, you'd figure all these women must work harder at their looks than Laura Nyro. But where the blonde McKay and brunette Jones are prom-queen pretty and the curly-headed Spektor retains some homegirl, Apple has always been an exotic, her enormous eyes depthless and her oval face evolving from knowing gamine to sultry analysand as the years piled on their pain. For her many female admirers, her beauty is presumably ancillary—when Jessica Hopper calls Apple "the martyr-saint, crucifying herself so that we might live drama-free," she's praising a soul sister who exposes sides of herself Hopper herself has chosen not to indulge. With men, however, the attraction has often seemed more fraught — imbued with a sexually charged preference for intensity over reliability, sparked by the kind of let-me-take-you-away-from-all-this fantasy men know in their hearts is doomed and secretly prefer that way. One achievement of The Idler Wheel is that it's quashed such fantasies. No longer is she seen as a tortured beauty. In 2012 she's strictly a tortured artist.
This is progress, no doubt about it. But I don't know how an emotionally engaged male heterosexual Fiona fan could have conceptualized her any way but romantically. There are 33 songs total on Tidal, the 2001 album with the 90-word title known as When the Pawn, and the two versions of Extraordinary Machine. Tidal's typically disconsolate "Sullen Girl" ponders depression per se, Extraordinary Machine's startlingly cheerful "Waltz" begins "If you don't have a song to sing / You're OK," and every one of the 31 others obsesses on disconnects with men. For her first decade, then, Apple's "crippling doubt" and "mirror-upon-mirror confessionalism," "her pains, her insecurities," "her neuroses," her "icky little feelings," "her emotions . . . too messy for the relatively staid language of most pop music”—to cherry-pick The Idler Wheel's raft of raves—all had the secret word "romantic" attached. She spent three albums elaborating her own dialect of pop music's lingua franca. In principle, love songs are OK with me, although I prefer a broader emotional palette than Apple's and have often noted that happy ones are harder to get right. But there are other things to write about, and I don't just mean partying hearty and returning people's wallets. Friendship, for instance. Mortality. Your mother. God and so forth. The pit bull you took in off the street. The little club you play occasionally. Hell, even art as such. You can have messy emotions about any of these things.
That the three albums share a lingua franca doesn't mean they're interchangeable. The bestselling Tidal is sodden juvenilia by me, When the Pawn deep and dark and palpably disturbed, Extraordinary Machine a stab at sociable sanity—Elizondo was clearly brought in to smooth out the songs, not hype up the beats. And on The Idler Wheel Apple has definitely gotten on top of her disconnects--verbally, anyway. She spends less time blaming the guy or lacerating herself. The "companion" of the lead "Every Single Night" is explicitly her own "brain" even if that companion percolates heat in her belly, and "Daredevil" right after looks askance at her own risk-taking. But "Daredevil" also addresses a presumably male other, and so it goes once again: every song after the first is about love lost, failed, or otherwise flawed. Midway through comes the oft-quoted theme statement "How can I ask anyone to love me / When all I do is beg to be left alone," and I can just imagine horny fantasists thinking, If she's going to put it that way, maybe I really should settle for Jennifer down the hall. It's a game-changing line with several parallels on The Idler Wheel, which is longer on the kindness and self-knowledge barely glimpsed in Apple's younger songs: "Valentine" with its "I root for you"; "Jonathan" with its "I like watching you live"; "Werewolf," where she admits flaunting the scent of blood; "Anything We Want," where she imagines a future consummation. Also noteworthy is a finale called "Hot Knife." Many have observed that the entire song is a crude, eccentric sexual metaphor. No one has indicated when Apple has been so pro-sex before, because she hasn't.
My close readings constitute a scoop of sorts--the huzzahs for Apple's "self-conscious self-absorption and gritty self-loathing" rarely mention countervailing tendencies. One reason is probably that, however much Apple's tortured image is valued for enhancing her blessed artistic integrity, nobody truly believes she's much of a lyricist. That full title: The Idler Wheel Is Wiser than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More than Ropes Will Ever Do. To find out what an idler wheel is, read some other review, or Google it. I'll merely point out that "the driver of the screw" is otherwise known as a screwdriver and that most English speakers would just say "ropes ever will." Only then it wouldn't scan, or rhyme, that stuff. Apple does this sort of thing a lot — horrible lines like "Adagio breezes fill my skin with sudden red" or "Whose reality I knew, was a hopeless to be had" or "And last night's phrases / Sick with lack of basis." The Idler Wheel improves on this tendency. Because silly is good, I even kind of like the "orotund mutt" / "moribund slut" rhyme others mock, although not the "white doves' feathers"-"hot piss" metaphor others find scintillating—much less its next line: "Every time you address me." ("Address"? Really? Who talks like that?) But remember—lyrics aren't why we're here. Music is.
This is not a hooky album. Even compared to the earlier work it's not a hooky album. If like me you're skeptical about Fiona Apple in particular and pop avant-gardism in general, you could play it four or five times without hearing a single song whole. If you're like me, however, by then you'd admire producer-drummer Charley Drayton's junkyard percussion, which colors this music more decisively than Apple's piano, which is deployed sonically and rhythmically, including several boogie-woogie figures. And soon thereafter, if you're like me, the whole thing will come together in a whoosh — the kind of formally risky pop that, when it happens to work, provides pleasures almost as bracing and enduring as "Over the Rainbow," "She Loves You," or "I Want It That Way."
Because it's jagged on top and melodically facile deep underneath, the music too discourages vicarious romanticism. It impels any interested bystander to hear Fiona Apple as a tortured artist rather than somebody to love. Yet as a pop polymath whose artistic integrity is working hidden variations on teen ballad and Broadway heartsong, maybe she's finally become so accomplished that she's less tortured than she and everyone else thinks — on her way to more lovable, even. No matter how much she begs to be left alone, maybe the respect she's clearly earned means she deserves what she also can't stop begging for, else she'd be writing songs about God and her pit bull. I mean somebody to love. Just not anyone I know, please. Because speculate as we might, one thing is certain: Fiona Apple is always going to be a pain in the ass.’
Barnes & Noble Review, July 19, 2012
Robert Christgau:
http://www.robertchristgau.com/get_a...me=Fiona+Apple
“Extraordinary Machine [Clean Slate/Epic, 2005]
Instead of delivering the music a sharp-tongued breakup record by an empowered young female would imply—if not folk-rock plain and simple, then emotional piano-woman pop—Apple adapts Broadway show tune to confessional mode. Although Mike Elizondo adds momentum, Jon Brion's colors still predominate, and the melodic and structural contours are all Apple's. Ira Gershwin she's not; Betty Comden she's not either. But she wouldn't be half as inspiring if they were what she was aiming for. A-
The Idler Wheel Is Wiser Than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Ever Do [Epic, 2012]
A funny thing will happen once you've figured out that the title is the stupidest thing about an album that's damn catchy after all. It'll sound like a piano record—a defiantly primitivist, raucously avant-garde lounge singer's piano record, with a really nutty drummer: he'll-bang-on-anything (and-get-her-to-pitch-in) producer Charley Drayton. There are few arpeggios, and not much tone color and such. She just executes simple figures and hammers thick chords, including a few boogie-woogies just to make a point. She also sings—words, yes, but more decisively, sounds. Not background music. But you could sure call it mood music. A-”
http://www.robertchristgau.com/xg/bn/2012-07.php
‘Hearing Her Pain
As the synthesizer displaced the electric guitar over the past two decades, there was a parallel development in acoustic music: the folkie ingenue strumming nylon strings gave way to the pop polymath tickling ivorine keys. All in their early thirties, the four major successes in a line traceable to Laura Nyro are Regina Spektor, Nellie McKay, Norah Jones, and Fiona Apple. The first two are obviously minor leaguers compared to Jones and her megaplatinum 2002 Come Away with Me or topic-at-hand Apple, who released the most acclaimed album of 2012 in June. But all are songful New York-identified originals with a fan base, and only McKay, whose 2010 Home Sweet Mobile Home gestured futilely at middlebrow convention after four quirky-to-kooky keepers, is without a current release. Apple and McKay have Broadway roots, the Russian-born Spektor was a classical prodigy, and Jones studied jazz piano in college. None has more than a peripheral relationship to rock and roll as it's normally conceived, and only Jones, whose fondness for country music surfaced with a spooky Hank Williams cover back when, has shown any interest in all the folkish musics on life support gathered under the rubric of Americana.
Ragtime piano did as much to transform 20th-century pop as blues guitar, but the piano these women care about is the one in the parlor rather than the barrelhouse, its discipline harmonic rather than rhythmic. Hence they often come up short on groove even when they hire out their production, as Spektor and Apple have, to Dr. Dre graduate Mike Elizondo. The upside is their melodic facility. In an era when the indelible tune is the province of R&B hit-paraders, Nashville neo-to-pseudo-traditionalists, and old-timers who trust the mettle of blues-based forms that will never dominate pop again, all these piano players have shown a knack for writing songs that are pleasurable up front and intelligent long term. And though I've never been a parlor kind of guy, they've enriched my life as a listener and a critic.
Granted, I find Jones too subtle even if or because she's the nicest person ever to go double-decaplatinum, and after half a dozen tries can neither confirm nor deny credible rumors that her quiet . . . Little Broken Hearts vents the anger to which I'm sure she's entitled. Although McKay is an animal rights crank, which is to say not my type, she's also a stand-up comedian, which is to say bésame mucho--a spunky, sprightly eccentric who has a history of stirring things up just because she can. Although spunky and sprightly right up to her new What We Saw from the Cheap Seats, Spektor is such a committed humanist that should her pop career flounder you can imagine her touring senior residences, where the ones about returning the oldie's wallet and masterpieces imprisoned in their own timelessness would win her a quick callback. Which leaves us with our topic at hand, who is certainly the most brilliant of these very talented women and almost as certainly the hardest to like.
This is not to suggest she's hard to fall in love with. Fiona Apple has had femme fatale written all over her since she debuted in 1996 at 18 with the determinedly bathetic Tidal, which—in a now-vanished record-biz epoch still brimming with dreams of precious metal and aesthetically complicated celebrity—went triple platinum behind a Grammy-winning single about doing a good man wrong and a video featuring the teenager in her underwear. Having beaten her three competitors to the post by five years, however, Apple has since been outdistanced by all of them: The Idler Wheel (we'll get to the full title later) is only her fourth album, and comes seven years after Extraordinary Machine. How this could be is indicated by the recording history of Extraordinary Machine, in which--with the aforementioned epoch on its last legs--Apple rejected the orchestrated iteration produced by the estimable Jon Brion and insisted on re-recording with the estimable Elizondo. Some prefer one version, some the other; they're different, sure, but since this is her shapeliest set of songs either way, few find the differential as stark as Apple does. She's a diva, a perfectionist, a pain in the ass. And this determines the kind of respect she gets--as a musician, and as a star in whom listeners invest their fantasies and ambitions.
The music is why we're here. Vocally Apple has more size and texture and character and drama than her fellow piano women. Her melodies and arrangements are always forceful and never predictable. The fascination she exerts, however, extends well beyond these aesthetic niceties and doesn't necessarily begin with them. Post-MTV, you'd figure all these women must work harder at their looks than Laura Nyro. But where the blonde McKay and brunette Jones are prom-queen pretty and the curly-headed Spektor retains some homegirl, Apple has always been an exotic, her enormous eyes depthless and her oval face evolving from knowing gamine to sultry analysand as the years piled on their pain. For her many female admirers, her beauty is presumably ancillary—when Jessica Hopper calls Apple "the martyr-saint, crucifying herself so that we might live drama-free," she's praising a soul sister who exposes sides of herself Hopper herself has chosen not to indulge. With men, however, the attraction has often seemed more fraught — imbued with a sexually charged preference for intensity over reliability, sparked by the kind of let-me-take-you-away-from-all-this fantasy men know in their hearts is doomed and secretly prefer that way. One achievement of The Idler Wheel is that it's quashed such fantasies. No longer is she seen as a tortured beauty. In 2012 she's strictly a tortured artist.
This is progress, no doubt about it. But I don't know how an emotionally engaged male heterosexual Fiona fan could have conceptualized her any way but romantically. There are 33 songs total on Tidal, the 2001 album with the 90-word title known as When the Pawn, and the two versions of Extraordinary Machine. Tidal's typically disconsolate "Sullen Girl" ponders depression per se, Extraordinary Machine's startlingly cheerful "Waltz" begins "If you don't have a song to sing / You're OK," and every one of the 31 others obsesses on disconnects with men. For her first decade, then, Apple's "crippling doubt" and "mirror-upon-mirror confessionalism," "her pains, her insecurities," "her neuroses," her "icky little feelings," "her emotions . . . too messy for the relatively staid language of most pop music”—to cherry-pick The Idler Wheel's raft of raves—all had the secret word "romantic" attached. She spent three albums elaborating her own dialect of pop music's lingua franca. In principle, love songs are OK with me, although I prefer a broader emotional palette than Apple's and have often noted that happy ones are harder to get right. But there are other things to write about, and I don't just mean partying hearty and returning people's wallets. Friendship, for instance. Mortality. Your mother. God and so forth. The pit bull you took in off the street. The little club you play occasionally. Hell, even art as such. You can have messy emotions about any of these things.
That the three albums share a lingua franca doesn't mean they're interchangeable. The bestselling Tidal is sodden juvenilia by me, When the Pawn deep and dark and palpably disturbed, Extraordinary Machine a stab at sociable sanity—Elizondo was clearly brought in to smooth out the songs, not hype up the beats. And on The Idler Wheel Apple has definitely gotten on top of her disconnects--verbally, anyway. She spends less time blaming the guy or lacerating herself. The "companion" of the lead "Every Single Night" is explicitly her own "brain" even if that companion percolates heat in her belly, and "Daredevil" right after looks askance at her own risk-taking. But "Daredevil" also addresses a presumably male other, and so it goes once again: every song after the first is about love lost, failed, or otherwise flawed. Midway through comes the oft-quoted theme statement "How can I ask anyone to love me / When all I do is beg to be left alone," and I can just imagine horny fantasists thinking, If she's going to put it that way, maybe I really should settle for Jennifer down the hall. It's a game-changing line with several parallels on The Idler Wheel, which is longer on the kindness and self-knowledge barely glimpsed in Apple's younger songs: "Valentine" with its "I root for you"; "Jonathan" with its "I like watching you live"; "Werewolf," where she admits flaunting the scent of blood; "Anything We Want," where she imagines a future consummation. Also noteworthy is a finale called "Hot Knife." Many have observed that the entire song is a crude, eccentric sexual metaphor. No one has indicated when Apple has been so pro-sex before, because she hasn't.
My close readings constitute a scoop of sorts--the huzzahs for Apple's "self-conscious self-absorption and gritty self-loathing" rarely mention countervailing tendencies. One reason is probably that, however much Apple's tortured image is valued for enhancing her blessed artistic integrity, nobody truly believes she's much of a lyricist. That full title: The Idler Wheel Is Wiser than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More than Ropes Will Ever Do. To find out what an idler wheel is, read some other review, or Google it. I'll merely point out that "the driver of the screw" is otherwise known as a screwdriver and that most English speakers would just say "ropes ever will." Only then it wouldn't scan, or rhyme, that stuff. Apple does this sort of thing a lot — horrible lines like "Adagio breezes fill my skin with sudden red" or "Whose reality I knew, was a hopeless to be had" or "And last night's phrases / Sick with lack of basis." The Idler Wheel improves on this tendency. Because silly is good, I even kind of like the "orotund mutt" / "moribund slut" rhyme others mock, although not the "white doves' feathers"-"hot piss" metaphor others find scintillating—much less its next line: "Every time you address me." ("Address"? Really? Who talks like that?) But remember—lyrics aren't why we're here. Music is.
This is not a hooky album. Even compared to the earlier work it's not a hooky album. If like me you're skeptical about Fiona Apple in particular and pop avant-gardism in general, you could play it four or five times without hearing a single song whole. If you're like me, however, by then you'd admire producer-drummer Charley Drayton's junkyard percussion, which colors this music more decisively than Apple's piano, which is deployed sonically and rhythmically, including several boogie-woogie figures. And soon thereafter, if you're like me, the whole thing will come together in a whoosh — the kind of formally risky pop that, when it happens to work, provides pleasures almost as bracing and enduring as "Over the Rainbow," "She Loves You," or "I Want It That Way."
Because it's jagged on top and melodically facile deep underneath, the music too discourages vicarious romanticism. It impels any interested bystander to hear Fiona Apple as a tortured artist rather than somebody to love. Yet as a pop polymath whose artistic integrity is working hidden variations on teen ballad and Broadway heartsong, maybe she's finally become so accomplished that she's less tortured than she and everyone else thinks — on her way to more lovable, even. No matter how much she begs to be left alone, maybe the respect she's clearly earned means she deserves what she also can't stop begging for, else she'd be writing songs about God and her pit bull. I mean somebody to love. Just not anyone I know, please. Because speculate as we might, one thing is certain: Fiona Apple is always going to be a pain in the ass.’
Barnes & Noble Review, July 19, 2012
I think Fiona Apple may have BPD, which makes her exceptionally more difficult to type.
She comes off very Ne heavy, though.
If it's between EII and IEI, she's probably 4w5 sx/sp.
I'm curious why people think she's a Ni dom???
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