The Caged Bird Sings

In my hotel room in Las Vegas, I ask her whether she has heard this Janeane Garofalo sketch from Denis Leary's new album, Lock 'N Load.

"No. What did she say? This is really going to make me upset, because I really like Janeane Garofalo, and I knew that she hated me . . . That girl was at the MTV awards and she was giving me a really weird vibe and really avoiding me."

I play her the track, titled "A Reading From the Book of Apple." It begins by perfectly echoing Apple's MTV speech, then it heads off: You shouldn't model your life about what you think that we think is cool . . . Even though I have an eating disorder and I have somehow sold out to the patriarchy in this culture that says that lean is better. Even though I have done that, and have done a video wherein I wear underwear so that you young girls out there can covet, and feel bad about what you have and how thin you're not. The point is, I have done it, I am lean. That's why I did succeed sooner than maybe other musicians that maybe were better songwriters . . . I don't know . . . better lyricists . . . better vocalists . . . I can't say that. But I do know this: This world is bullshit . . . did I say this world is bullshit? 'Cause it is. And my boyfriend can make you disappear. He can pull something out of your ear and say things like, "We have not met before, have we?" Go with yourself.

To begin with, after I click off the tape recorder, Apple is composed: "She is absolutely right, about the video and what it says to girls, but she's looking at my message at the beginning, and she's not waiting for the end. Because . . ." It's then she cracks. Big tears dollop down her face. I feel awful, fetch tissues. She begins talking some more. "Since that video was made, I've gained about twenty pounds on purpose . . ." -- Fiona says she is currently 110 pounds, and has varied between 95 and 125 pounds -- "so that people can see me like that. I know what I'm doing. Bitch. I'm going to get bigger and bigger, and the girls are going to see that I don't care and that I feel better like that. Of course I have an eating disorder. Every girl in fucking America has an eating disorder. Janeane Garofalo has an eating disorder and that's why she's upset. Every girl has an eating disorder because of videos like that. Exactly. Yes. But that's exactly what the video is about. When I say, 'I've been a bad bad girl, I've been careless with a delicate man' -- well, in a way I've been careless with a delicate audience, and I've gotten success that way, and I've lived in my ego that way, and I feel bad about it. And that's what the song's about, and therefore, that's what the video looks like."

Fiona talks about Courtney Love: "In a way I'm trying to do exactly the opposite of what she's done. Start out being lean and the absolute perfect marketing package, and slowly, I get more power, becoming more of myself and exhibit the happiness that comes from that . . . I mean, my plan is to gain enough weight that I can really be considered voluptuous, and do my 'First Taste' video. And I am preparing myself for what is going to happen. Because soon they will be saying that I'm fat. And it will hurt me."

We say goodbye, but Fiona calls me a few hours later. "First of all," she says, "I think it's good that she said that . . . Because people who may have been wrongly influenced by me can be better influenced by her for saying that. I guess. But . . ." It's a big but. She's furious that Garofalo didn't say anything to her when they were in the same room. "I wrote this little poem for her," she says. The poem begins as a pastiche of "Shadowboxer": "Once voluptuous, now so lean/What a pretty marketing scheme . . . " Then it turns on Garofalo. The final four lines are:

Well, I best be off now to primp and preen
But before I go, here's an end to your mean
I may be a paradox of gestures and genes
But you are a cowardly bitch, Janeane

A few days later, I track down Janeane Garofalo. "Oh," she says. "OK. All I can say is, yep, I did it. I have to take full responsibility, but in the end I'm not pleased that a young woman's feelings were hurt by it." She recorded it almost immediately after the awards: "It was one of those deals where you don't think about it." She says that the "lean" stuff was "just my own jealousy and envy," and that she actually likes Apple's record, lyrics included. "That's just me being a dick," she says. But she totally denies that she avoided Apple, or had a problem with her, the day after the awards: She says she was looking after a dog and a five-year-old kid. "Denis and I were just screwing around," she says. "In thirteen years of doing stand-up, I have discovered time and time again, people get hurt a lot when you think you're just doing comedy."

Fiona Apple has curious, intense faith in the truth. In her music, she believes that if she is honest, what she creates cannot be without worth. In her life, she believes truth is the safest refuge. These are dangerous, high-risk beliefs.

"I have problems," she says, "but everybody's got problems, and I sometimes honestly have felt in my life that people have used me as a way to make themselves feel better, because I'm a very good subject to save. And sometimes I think: 'I'm not that bad off; it's really you that's making me feel like shit.'"

She's been thinking about this stuff. The first new lyric she wrote since finishing her album -- for a song called "Limp" -- begins:

You want to make me sick, you want to lick my wounds, don't you baby?
You want the badge of honor when you save my hide
But you're the one in the way of the day of doom, baby
If you need my shame to reclaim your pride

It's another wise, high-risk warning, as applicable to the world as to those around her. If she shares her troubles, it is to normalize them, not to offer them up as public melodrama. There is a long way to go in the Fiona Apple story. She will make more mistakes and suffer more woes. She will make strange and brave records, though they will not always seem to be the right kind of brave or the right kind of strange. Maybe she'll be thin, and maybe she'll be fat, and maybe neither of these will help make her what she wants to be. Maybe she'll realize that it's easier just to cut her hair off . . . and then she'll see that that doesn't work either.

And she'll be glad, in a way, of your attention. But, if you feel anything for Fiona Apple, think twice before adopting her as the person you worry about.

There is a rectangular tattoo at the center of Fiona Apple's lower back. The upper half says KIN, the word David Blaine and she use to describe their relationship. Below, it says FHW. There were two phrases that Fiona would write everywhere at school. One was To Be Free. The other -- FHW -- was Fiona Has Wings.

Fiona Apple used to have this day-dream fantasy. She will walk into school chapel and there will be these lumps beneath her clothes, just beginning to show. She'll stride down the center aisle and kneel in front of the altar, and all of her clothes will peel off. Her wings will show themselves. She will look at everybody -- all those people who had teased her, or laughed at her, or talked behind her back about how weird she was -- and then she will rise up and fly out of the building. And as she sweeps into the sky, free and triumphant, she will hear them all whispering. Many voices, but all saying the same three words; at last acknowledging, with their amazed chatter, what she always knew, and they never believed.

Fiona has wings . . . Fiona has wings . . . Fiona has . . .

[From Issue 778 — January 22, 1998]