New York dolls: II

Many people dismiss Fiona Apple as a crazy bitch. She rants at the 1998 Grammys when she wins Best Female Rock Vocal Performance. She tramps around in the video for “Criminal” in panties and bed linens, then cries that it was a mistake. She storms off stage in New York after bitching about how the music hall sucks. At the Oscars, she claws at her beaux, the wordy freak who wrote and directed the porn-induced Boogie Nights. She’s a vegan.

The problem isn’t that she’s disturbed but that she’s hypersensitive in public, which people can’t handle. They call her nuts and self-absorbed, and this just riles her up more. She fights back in lyrics and in interviews. But that prompts many Americans, who like to think of themselves as the original defenders of scrappy underdogs, to dismiss her all over again. In the meantime, Apple’s peerless jazz-blues-pop music mires in the silly charade. And there she is, under-heard, a legitimate heir to Billie Holiday, Joni Mitchell and Carole King, while she expressively and daringly performs serious music devoid of irony.

It doesn’t matter that Billie Holiday wasn’t a paragon of happy shiny music, by the way. Everyone just thought she was crazy. Well, crazy and high.

Apple merges old-time crooning with new-school aggression. She grew up on early jazz and studied Tin Pan Alley songwriting on her own. She never had to sing cover tunes in smoky bars, not one time. She told me in an interview once that if she hadn’t succeeded so quickly, she would’ve given up on music, become a slacker, hunted a get-rich-quick scheme and founded a charity. Instead, she became that miracle of fairy tales, the artist discovered by one demo tape placed in the right hands. It was, in fact, the only demo tape she ever handed to anyone. So now she is unencumbered by other people’s music, but weighted down by what people say about her.

Through it all, she knits together smoky cobwebs from 1930s-’50s blues and jazz torch songs, ’70s chanteuse earnestness and present-day, clenched-fisted, that-bitch-is-craziness.

Apple, 23, has said that maybe her psychotherapeutic-rich life actually helped form her musical deliverance. The familiar details are dramatic: She is raped at age 12 in the hallway of her mother’s apartment building. Her parents divorce when she’s 4 and they continue to fight, fight, fight. Daddy’s an actor no one knows (he did a little work in an early HBO sitcom, plus Broadway). Her mother acts. School kids call her “Dog.” And teenage Fiona, when not meeting stage types with her parents, sits in her Manhattan bedroom, writing about things like rape.

“Sullen Girl”: “Days like this, I don’t know what to do with myself, all day and all night. I wander the halls along the walls, and under my breath I say to myself, ‘I need fuel to take flight.’ And there’s too much going on. But it’s calm under the waves in the blue of my oblivion. ... Is that why they call me a sullen girl? They don’t know I used to sail the deep and tranquil sea, but he washed me ashore, and he took my pearl, and left an empty shell of me.”

Apple’s regressive melodies are fresh because she didn’t really listen to the contemporary music that most of us grew up on. Among female artists, she was notably not influenced by Alanis Morissette, nor Tori Amos, nor Madonna. But she was a New York girl, so she must have been influenced by society, which was influenced by Alanis and Madonna, at least. Now Apple strives to reinvent the wheel, and not just poke its spokes.

Apple is voice as power, and voice as instrument. She stretches single tones up and down octaves, with and without vibrato, never doing Celine Dion histrionics. Sometimes, Apple trills. She frequently dives in and out of key changes, but she blends them so smoothly she rarely sounds like she’s left the original key. She knows sometimes the most climactic thing she can do is just move up or down a mere half note.

When Apple went into the studio to record her debut, Tidal, as a teenager, she kept telling the producer and the engineer that she wanted her music to be heavy and dark. She didn’t mean Nine Inch Nails. She meant jazzy blues. She played contemplative, major-chord piano. Other musicians accompanied her on anti-pop instruments: the harp; the chamberlain (a pre-digital sampling keyboard); vibraphone. And virtually no guitar, which turned her into a pop rock star who didn’t rock or pop. Every percussion and bass sang more melodically than in other musicians’ work, because the instruments had to go upscale to meet Apple’s fleshy, adult voice, which was aspiring to speak as sensitively as Frank Sinatra’s and Ricky Lee Jones’.

Apple continues to deviate from pop hooks by writing as though Maya Angelou, John Irving and other literati were having some kind of weird group hug in her head. Apple is a therapist telling herself about herself. She’s a grown-up girl, no college to speak of, writing short diary dissertations in stanzas, with big words and intense phrases, telling off lovers and herself. Her sophomore album, When the Pawn ... - a CD title that famously goes on for 87 more words - is altogether wordier than Tidal. Yet Apple - three or four years older - continues to distinguish herself lyrically.

In fact, she seems to be shaping up as something akin to Sting, the Police frontman and former school teacher who taught us with lines like, “You consider me the young apprentice, caught between the Scylla and Charybdis.” (Scylla is a Greek nymph who terrorized sailors; Charybdis is a Sicilian whirlpool.) Like Sting, Apple likes to rhyme within lines, which are enriched by a dense polysyllable or two. But she doesn’t teach us like Sting. She’s learning, and we’re in lit class with her.

“To Your Love”: “My derring-do allows me to dance the rigadoon around you, but by the time I’m close to you, I lose my desideratum and now you. ... So baby, tell me what’s the word? Am I your gal, or should I get out of town? I just need to be reassured.” (The rigadoon was an old twosome dance; “desideratum” is akin to “desire”; “Desideratum” is also a poem by Vada F. Carlson, and the word also once described a mythical Indian’s ascendancy.)

What Apple relishes most is cursing relationships with the wit of Dorothy Parker, but she flexes a frown and a scowl instead of a Parker smirk.

“Love Ridden”: “No, not ‘baby’ anymore. If I need you, I’ll just use your simple name. Only kisses on the cheek from now on, and in a little while, we’ll only have to wave.”

Out of the studio, Apple has been relatively quiet this year. Usually an easy interview, she has declined most promotional interviews for her 2000 tour, even though her shows aren’t selling out. But slow sales may be a good thing, artistically. Many of her latest lyrics sound influenced not just by off-stage lovers, but by her reactions to people’s reactions to her rising star: “Here’s another speech you wish I’d swallow”; “No matter what I try, you’ll beat me with your bitter lies, so call me crazy, hold me down, make me cry”; “I’m gonna make a mistake, I’m gonna do it on purpose ... so I’m gonna fuck it up again.”

But her best work on When the Pawn ... sounds utterly removed from her struggle with society. She peaks beautifully in a complex little finale - typically, it loiters around arpeggios - called “I Know,” in which all her anger has subsided. She sings as a mistress waiting for her man to give up another woman and a celebrity life: “So be it I’m your crowbar, if that’s what I am so far, until you get out of this mess. And I will pretend that I don’t know of your sins until you are ready to confess. But all the time, all the time, I’ll know. And you can use my skin to bury secrets in, and I will settle you down ... I’ll wait by the backstage door ... and if it gets too late for me to wait, for you to find you love me and tell me so, it’s OK.”

When she takes a break from defending herself against the crazy bitch offensive, she can be a real heartbreaker.

Fiona Apple plays the Tabernacle on Thurs., April 20 at 8 p.m. Tickets are $28.50; available through Ticketmaster.