Da Bing Boy wrote:future of work is going to be hilarious, actually
The audience at Radio City received her warmly, cheering at the “way I want to use it” line, applauding her profanity and her directive to “go with yourself,” chuckling at her pointed statement that “no one else did” produce the album. Her stern tone prompted host Chris Rock to crack, “Let’s hear it for Fiona X!”
Outside Radio City, the response was harsher. Critics called her a humorless scold, a self-important twit, even a hypocrite (for calling out the corruption of the business on one hand and rolling around in her underwear for the “Criminal” video on the other). In a November 1997 op-ed, NY Rock writer Otto Luck called it “one of the most ridiculous soliloquies ever to be witnessed at an MTV Awards event (which is pretty amazing in light of the competition she has).” The comedian Janeane Garafalo recorded a scathing parody of it for Denis Leary’s Lock and Load album. (“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.”) Cracked called her “oh-so-lame ‘be yourself’ speech, complete with a vague Maya Angelou quote” one of the most absurd moments in VMA history.
That night, she spoke for barely more than a minute, but the backlash to what she said, and how she said it, seemed to reverberate for months—years, even, up to the present day, for those who took that as their permanent impression of Fiona Apple and held onto it. Even before her VMA speech (or, as it was commonly yet rather inaccurately characterized, her “meltdown”), the same adjectives were popping up in articles about her: they said she was angry, they said she was fragile, they called her damaged, difficult, moody, crazy. A typical Spin profile that fall compared her onstage demeanor to that of “a sexy, temperamental teenager, the kind of arty, ravished girl you knew in junior high who wrote poems in all lower-case letters.”
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