Go with yourself.” Later on her website, Fiona clarified that the VMAs made her feel like a “sell-out”: “I had successfully created the illusion that I was perfect and pretty and rich. You shouldn’t model your life about what you think that we think is cool and what we’re wearing and what we’re saying and everything. “Everybody out there that’s watching this world-this world is bullshit. You could picture him tweeting all of this. “Maya Angelou said that we as human beings at our best can only create opportunities,” she said from the stage, “and I’m gonna use this opportunity the way I wanna use it.” It is not hard to imagine Kanye taking notes. When the video for “Sleep to Dream” won an MTV Video Music Award in 1997, Fiona gave that speech that ought to have been considered heroic, like a banner drop atop popular culture. They also both embody whole sets of principles for living. They are eccentrics who offend square America and still remain Great American Songwriters. “You’re possibly my favorite.” One Sunday morning in 2010, Kanye tweeted a mixtape that included “Sleep to Dream,” noting how the line “I have never been so insulted in all my life!” was “one of favorite opening lines to a song.” (It is not the opening line, but that’s OK.)įiona and Kanye are both classic rebel spirits infiltrating pop music. “I thought you don’t go to sleep to dream? ” In the same interview, they talk about collaborating in L.A. She asked, “Do you have a lot of dreams at night when you sleep? I have a lot of dreams.” Yes, he does (god dreams). Later, in 2005, Fiona chopped it up with Kanye for Interview. That’s why you gotta be the type of artist where they have to deal with you.” They’re so corporate, they make it seem so free, but there’s all these politics you gotta deal with. Like, fuck the industry, man, fuck all this. Before The College Dropout came out in 2004, a 25-year-old Kanye told one magazine, “I like to take things a little too far, but hey, what’s too far? That’s like the people I respect the most, like Mariah Carey and Fiona Apple, anybody that wilds out and really says the truth. We live our lives with the conviction that our personal connection runs deepest. I could put this on and become invincible.Īccordingly, disciples of Fiona Apple do not fuck around.
Fiona is a wordsmith but more like a designer of armor through turns of phrase. “It was a huge release for me, just banging on it.” There are other instruments, like a shadowy vibraphone, on “Sleep to Dream,” but all I hear is rhythm and rhyme. (It’s worth noting that the only CD she supposedly purchased in all of 1997 was Wu-Tang Forever.) It is also as elemental, tough, and pissed as any punk song, but where punk is grounded in the notion of “us against the world,” “Sleep to Dream” is “me against the world.” “The piano is percussive, you hit it,” Fiona once said. It is made of words and Fiona’s flow is pure fire. “Sleep to Dream” stares you dead in the eye. This was a young feminist awakening of tectonic proportions.
When I downloaded “Sleep to Dream” on Kazaa nearly a decade after its release, Fiona performed an act of insurrectionism upon my teenage life. That her lyrics are sublime truths for kids who feel trapped in their towns and bodies and minds. That her music is legitimately transcendent. I’m not sure if this is what Whitman meant when he wrote “dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem”-or what Emerson meant when he wrote that great art comes with “good-humored inflexibility”-but that’s how I’ve always felt about Fiona.
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