All the Rage #2

All right, I'll admit it: I'm a man. A normal, hormonal, and often horny young man who's just starting to slip away from his teenage years. As such, I'm attracted to half-naked women. In a BIG way. I am not ashamed about this; it is a fact of my life. When I'm changing the channels on the cable box at home and I come across anything involving near-nudity (or even better, FULL nudity), I leave the channel on. Always.

So then, why does Fiona Apple cavorting in panties and a bra on MTV disturb and arouse me at the same time?

Actually, that's not true. It arouses me more than disturbs me, but then I've always been into the whole "hot teenage girl" thing, perhaps as a result of the implied and direct rejections from many "hot teenage girls" when I was a teenager myself. Like most adult emotions, it probably springs from a lack of poon tang in my younger years. But this "disturbed" part just DISTURBS me.

In general, Fiona Apple disturbs me. Why should she disturb you? Because her story and her presence in the pop universe is sad and destructive. Either she's the most annoying young person (and being only 20, she is clearly still a young person in spite of her tremendous fame) since the Olsen twins or she is being eaten alive by her new role as Current Big Thing.

Let's examine the first possibility, the "annoyingly self-possessed teenager" theory. There's a very telling and insightful comment made by John Weir in his feature article on Fiona in the November issue of SPIN. At one point he describes Fiona as "the kind of arty, ravished girl you knew in junior high who wrote poems in all lower-case letters."

What a striking image. It fits so perfectly. She's the girl who wore all black and worked lights on the high school theater shows, and when the director would offer a suggestion she'd storm out of the auditorium in tears claiming that she was sick of it all and that no one appreciated her. She's the girl in all black writing phone numbers on her hand and waiting in line for Morrisey tickets. To paraphrase Ben Folds, if you found her old I.D. she'd be dressed up like the Cure.

The "lone annoying teen" theory explains a great deal. It covers her self-absorption, her swinging moods, her drama-queen style. But it doesn't explain her obsession with death, or her complete misunderstanding of how she is accepted by the media. Let's return to the Weir article in SPIN, and a quote uncomfortably plastered in large type near the top of a page: "I know I'm going to die young. I'm going to cut another album, and I'm going to do good things, help people, and then I'm going to die."

WOW. Boy, she sounds like the average twenty-year-old, don't she? That ranks up there with most twenty-year-olds' concerns: dating, continuing education, IMPENDING DEATH. If these are her neuroses at age twenty, I'd hate to meet her at age forty. Then again, if she pulls a Janis Joplin, which it almost seems as though she's looking FORWARD to doing, she'll be dead before thirty and we'll have a few tortured, young albums full of unrealized potential.

It's easy to see how the second theory seems to fit much better, the "young and sick mind being further twisted by fame" theory on Fiona. For further support, one needs look no further than Fiona's frequent mention of the rape to which she was a victim at age 12. Apparently this story has made the rounds of celebrity feature stories in the media; it's mentioned in an October 1997 feature in Interview magazine, in an October article in Alternative Press, and in the November Spin article, among others. No one, not Fiona or her parents or her manager or even her therapist, is doing anything to keep her from dragging it into every media situation she can find, or to stop the media from coaxing it out of her in every context they can find. It's a case where the blame must be shared; one can hardly blame a twenty-year-old unaccustomed to the fame game, and one can't truly point a finger at the scandal-hungry media. No, this is a sheep knowingly heading off for slaughter at the Altar of Pop, where Maya Angelou will offer a final prayer while hungry eyes and the leeches in the press suck every last drop of salvageable life from the public carcass of Fiona Apple.

So does she just need to grow up a bit, maybe go to a few school dances? Or does she need to be physically ripped from the public stage and locked away until her severe emotional problems have been resolved? That's not for me to decide. But I know that if I cared about Fiona Apple, I'd plot her escape from fame as soon as possible. Leading her to be torn apart by a lifestyle she can't properly deal with should leave her loved ones feeling like the real criminals.