Criminal

This song is about Apple making a mistake in a relationship (cheating, perhaps?) and therefore making her a "criminal." Depression and self-loathing were a common theme in Fiona's songwriting at the time. She told Interview magazine: "It's psychologically and chemically impossible for me to be happy."

The video, showing an 18-year-old Fiona Apple stripping down to her underwear and wandering around a basement filled with lots of young bodies, is one of the most controversial ever to hit MTV. Apple has a dissociated look throughout, and the setting is rather seedy, implying it's where immoral acts take place and are sometimes recorded - at one point we see Apple on a TV screen, as if someone is making a video for the "barely legal" market. It was directed by Mark Romanek, whose credits include "Closer" by Nine Inch Nails and "Rain" by Madonna. "We wanted something blatantly erotic," he told Entertainment Weekly. His plan was to have Apple play the part more lively, with some booty shaking, but she did it in her natural melancholy way instead - nobody has asked her to shake booty since. Apple was on board with the concept and remained on good terms with Romanek, but sometimes got uneasy discussing it over and over in interviews. "I decided if I was going to be exploited, then I would do the exploiting myself," became her sound bite. Her most lucid and nuanced explanation came in an interview with MTV shortly after it was released in the summer of 1997, when she said: "I'm treating the audience that is watching this video the same way the character in the song treats a man: Look at me, look how pretty I am. I don't have to give you anything else because look how pretty I am. And look how successful I am, look how much power I can get just by letting this light shine on me in a certain way."

Apple typically works by writing songs that are extensions of her journals, baring her soul for all to hear in a process that can be years in the making. "Criminal" is an outlier: she claims she wrote the song in just 45 minutes to prove she could, and to give her record label (Work, a division of Sony) the hit song they were after. She sprung into action after one of her friends was giving her grief about how she wasn't writing more songs. "The next time you see me, I'm gonna have a new song," she told her. "I can force myself to do the work, but only if someone is right up behind me," Apple explained.