Fiona Apple, Acceptance Speeches, Bullsh*t
Graphic by Julia Norkus
By Gabriella Collin
I don’t keep up with award shows. Oscar snubs, Grammy awards, does anyone even care if they win an MTV award? Every so often, compilations of heartfelt acceptance speeches will pop up on my recommended feed. Teary-eyed men and women, thanking their mothers while “Mia & Sebastian’s Theme” plays softly in the background. Yes, they tug at the heartstrings, because it’s so humanizing to see Hollywood favorites breakdown at the thought of their parents.
I certainly don’t keep up with acceptance speeches either, many of which are blanket statements, claiming that these awards are bigger than all of us; that there are so many people who deserve a trophy that hasn’t been engraved yet. I try to recognize the heartfelt and the sincere, such as Lily Gladstone’s acceptance speech for Best Female Actor in a Motion Picture, and Ayo Edebiri’s speech for Best Television Female Actor in a Musical/Comedy, both from the Golden Globes. While these are both still fresh in my mind, better examples are few and far in-between. There’s a chance that all of this, the pomp and circumstance of awards and academy nominations, to quote Fiona Apple McAfee-Maggart, is bullshit.
In 1996, a 19-year-old Fiona Apple released her debut album, Tidal — ten tracks, written and composed by the young musician after being broken up with her then-boyfriend. The album went double platinum, and track four, “Criminal,” has since been streamed over 95 million times. A year prior, Alanis Morrissette had released Jagged Little Pill, which had set the stage for a new flavor of alternative music. Fiona Apple hit the scene with three singles off of Tidal, “Sleep to Dream,” “Shadowboxer” and “Criminal.” Within seconds of the first track, “Sleep to Dream,” Apple established herself as beyond alternative. Algorithm-generated playlists have tried to nail down this sound as Dark Indie, Art Pop, Baroque Pop, but each subgenre of a subgenre fails to encapsulate her entire sound.
Fiona Apple’s music is everywhere. Each of her albums since Tidal’s release takes on a distinct life of its own, and no two projects sound the same. Her lyricism is distinct; she is routinely compared to artists such as Taylor Swift and Norah Jones, but easily outclasses them with her rich storytelling and brutally honest delivery. She blends spoken word with fully belted-out lyrics, and is able to dig into the lower registers to deliver deep, cutting lyrics.
“Criminal,” receiving mounting attention and acclaim by the day, resulted in a music video directed by Mark Romanek, who produced the video for Nine Inch Nails’ “Closer.” The premise of “Criminal” is that Fiona has ruined a good relationship. The iconic opening lines, “I’ve been a bad, bad girl,” are historic within her career. “Criminal” is sung in a sensual manner, but the lyrics juxtapose the sexuality of the song as Apple is begging for forgiveness, for her sins to be absolved.
“What I need is a good defense
'Cause I'm feelin' like a criminal
And I need to be redeemed
To the one I've sinned against
Because he's all I ever knew of love”
When the music video was released, however, every level of criticism was being launched against Fiona. The New Yorker famously called the video “heroine chic” as well as polluted with “overtones of child porn.” If you haven’t seen it, in a nutshell, the video acts out the story of the song. The accusations of Apple being an “underfed Calvin Klein model” are due to the revealing nature of the video. As the song progresses, she sheds more of her clothes, and is in “scandalizing” positions with men and women. During the pitching of the video for “Criminal,” Apple was nearly mortified. In an interview the following year, Fiona would go on to say, “I've gone through stages where I hate my body so much that I won't even wear shorts and a bra in my house because if I pass a mirror that's the end of my day. So it was a personal mission to do that video. To get up in front of all those gorgeous girls and strut my stuff. To convince myself, ‘You've got something else going on here.’”
Throughout her career, Fiona Apple has been vocal in owning her sexuality. Not in a “girlboss,” white feminism chic, “be a slut because of the Barbie Movie” kind of way, but rather, “This is mine, and no one else’s.” She says in that same interview, “Even though I know I'm exploiting my sexuality in a certain way, it's fun! It boosts my ego. Which is exactly what the song is about.” Heavily scrutinized in the public eye since she was barely 18, Apple has had to deal with repeated questions about her sexual expression and past sexual assault. As a child, she was raped, and this fact was used as ammunition by journalists attempting to psychoanalyze the “twisted mind” of a 19-year-old girl. In a longform piece written by SPIN magazine, Apple was interviewed over the course of several days, and reveals that, “She likes to act all freaky and possessed around reporters, so they won't ask the same dumb questions, like ‘How does such a big voice come out of such a tiny girl?’ and ‘I heard you were raped, what was that like?.’”
When Fiona Apple won the MTV Video Music Award for Best New Artist in 1997, she took the stage and admitted she didn’t prepare a speech. In fact, she was glad she didn’t, and in a moment of “self-parenting” as Apple later calls it, delivers a historic acceptance speech.
“I didn't prepare a speech and I'm sorry but I'm glad I didn't because I'm not gonna do this like everybody else does it. 'Cause everybody that I should be thanking — I'm really sorry, but I have to use this time. See, Maya Angelou said that we, as human beings, at our best, can only create opportunities. And I'm gonna use this opportunity the way that I want to use it.
So, what I want to say is: everybody out there that's watching, everybody that's watching this world? This world is bullshit. And you shouldn’t model your life [after] what you think that we think is cool and what we’re wearing and what we’re saying and everything. Go with yourself. Go with yourself.”
For an artist like Fiona Apple, a surface level award from the likes of MTV is the worst-case scenario. Her biggest fear, as Rolling Stone calls it, is “verging on becoming a sell-out and popular for the wrong reasons.” In the video of her speech, the audience cheers when Fiona is named, but once she jumps into her anti-industry speech, silence falls over the crowd. The silence is very, very loud. A young artist, only 20, winning an award for being a new artist swiftly eviscerated all of the pomp and circumstance of the award. As Jerry Seinfeld put it in his acceptance speech for HBO’s Comedian Award, “The whole feeling in this room of reverence and honoring is the exact opposite of everything I have wanted my life to be about.”
Fiona Apple’s aim is to demystify the music industry. In the aftermath of the Megan Thee Stallion vs Nicki Minaj beef, when toxic fan culture once again rears its ugly head, I think about her words a lot. The only time the audience broke out into applause during Fiona Apple’s speech was when she first said that “this world is bullshit” She had to quiet the audience and say it again, and the deafening silence took over.
This wouldn’t be the first time Fiona Apple would speak out like this. In the same interview from SPIN magazine, Apple clarifies that making music is not a “place” artists “go to;” “It's about a place you get out of.” She continues, “I'm underwater most of the time, and music is like a tube to the surface that I can breathe through. It's my air hole up to the world. If I didn't have the music I'd be under water; dead.”
Fiona Apple has been candid about her mental health, and has been grilled her entire career for being “angry.” When all of her music was taken off of Tik Tok, many speculated it was because “Fiona Apple saw that people on TikTok were appropriating her music for their shallow, reductive aesthetics that do nothing but fetishize female pain.” The background to ‘Outfits of the Day,’ white boys with curly hair and sad eyes mouthing along to “Paper Bag,” smaller artists using her name to promote their music… all are the antithesis of Fiona Apple’s music and image. Don’t believe me? Look at the opening stanzas of her song “Periphery:”
“Have them celebrate your name
Have them forge you a pedigree and then you'll be
Left to run the races, lame
Run it if you want
If you think it’s worth it
But not with me”
In an interview with NPR over the release of Fetch the Bolt Cutters (2020), Apple said, “Fetch your tool of liberation. Set yourself free." And with her MTV speech, it’s clear that’s been her mission since day one. Fiona Apple proves that positions of privilege can be used to the benefit of others. She vocalized — within moments — her disdain for the award she received, and used the time how she wanted to. But her warning is often overlooked. When young artists lament over the difficulties of being in the music industry, I wonder if they’ve watched her speech before. And if they had, I wonder if they would still be making music. After all, at our best, we can only create opportunity.