The Caged Bird Sings

When Fiona Apple pulls into a new town -- some place where she has never been before but where tonight there is a theater with her name on it, and an audience waiting to suck in her pushy, poignant songs of disaffection and self-reliance -- she takes a peculiar pleasure in picking up a copy of the local newspaper and reading its short, skewed, action-packed summary of her life and credentials. "Fiona, who said something bad at the MTV awards," she offers, by way of example, "who was in therapy as a child, who was ugly but now is pretty . . ."

Something like that. Maybe more: Fiona, who has sold 2 millions copies of her Tidal album, whose "Criminal" video shows her flouncing in her underwear, who told the MTV audience, "This world is bullshit," who was raped at the age of twelve, who is crazy keen about Maya Angelou, who was discovered when a friend of hers baby-sat for a music publicist and passed on a tape, who told a magazine, "I'm going to do good things, help people, and then I'm going to die," who is too thin, whose parents split up when she was young, who never smiles, who is only twenty and dates magician David Blaine, whose life was ruined when they started calling her "Dog" at school . . .

Much of this is true. Some is sort of true. Some is false. But in the busy, greedy, impatient '90s, we become whatever may be written about us in one or two perky paragraphs, and hers might lead one to believe that Fiona Apple is either a precocious, calculating prodigy or an unbalanced, ungrateful freak. That is the great sucker punch of modern celebrity: It draws in the Fiona Apples of this world with that most wonderful of all promises -- to be understood -- and yet humans are still to invent a quicker, more-efficient method of being misunderstood by the greatest possible number of people than Becoming Famous in America. Fiona Apple has been discovering this for herself.