The 1990s File Feature
Criminal
Criminal: Fiona Apple's Provocation That the 1990s Deserved An Album That Announced Itself The summer of 1997 belonged, in large part, to Fiona Apple. Her de…
01 The Story
Criminal: Fiona Apple's Provocation That the 1990s Deserved
An Album That Announced Itself
The summer of 1997 belonged, in large part, to Fiona Apple. Her debut album, Tidal, had been released the previous year but was still building momentum through word of mouth and critical acclaim when Criminal broke through as the track that converted curiosity into genuine commercial attention. Apple was nineteen years old when the album was recorded, and the combination of extraordinary vocal range, literary lyrical instinct, and willingness to inhabit emotional extremes without flinching gave Tidal a character that was unlike anything else on the radio in 1996 or 1997.
The Sound of Deliberate Unsettlement
Criminal was produced by Jon Brion, who became one of Apple's key creative collaborators across her early career. The track opens with a piano figure that feels both intimate and slightly off-kilter, establishing an unease that the vocal performance then deepens. Apple's voice on this recording is a remarkable instrument: low, smoky in its lower register, capable of sudden sharpness in the higher notes, and above all, communicating an emotional directness that bypasses the conventional defenses a listener brings to pop music.
The arrangement is sparse by the standards of 1997 radio, which was dominated by more lushly produced R&B and the anthemic rock of the post-grunge era. That sparseness was a strategic choice that made the song sound different from nearly everything else being played alongside it, and different in a way that felt significant rather than merely eccentric.
The Chart Story and the Award That Overshadowed It
Criminal debuted on the Hot 100 at number 28 on October 4, 1997, holding that position for three consecutive weeks before climbing as the Grammy nominations cycle began to draw attention to the album. It peaked at number 21 on November 29, 1997, spending 20 weeks on the chart in total. Those numbers represent genuine commercial traction for an artist whose work was substantially more complex and less radio-friendly than most of her chart contemporaries.
The Grammy Award for Best Female Rock Vocal Performance at the 1998 ceremony brought the song renewed attention and confirmed that the critical establishment, often slow to recognize artists of Apple's unconventional type, had concluded that Criminal was exceptional. The award remains the most prominent institutional recognition of an artist who has spent her career productively indifferent to institutional approval.
The Music Video and the Cultural Controversy
The music video for Criminal became one of the most discussed visual productions of 1997, generating controversy about its imagery that extended the song's presence in public conversation well beyond what radio play alone would have sustained. The video's provocative aesthetic choices, directed by Mark Romanek, were simultaneously criticized and defended in mainstream media at a volume unusual for an alternative pop artist without a major hit to her name. That debate, whatever one thinks of its specific terms, functioned as publicity that money could not have bought.
Apple herself was vocal about the discomfort the attention created, and her resistance to conventional celebrity machinery became part of her public identity in a way that only reinforced the authenticity that the music projected.
An Album That Has Only Grown
Tidal has aged extraordinarily well. The qualities that made Criminal distinctive in 1997, its emotional rawness, its musical sophistication, its refusal to simplify, have become more rather than less valuable in retrospect. The 54 million YouTube views the song has accumulated speak to an ongoing audience that includes both people who were there in 1997 and younger listeners who have discovered Apple through streaming and been unable to stop listening. Her subsequent albums have maintained and deepened the artistic ambitions that Criminal first demonstrated, making Tidal look even better in the context of the career it launched.
Put it on and prepare to feel slightly guilty about how good it sounds.
"Criminal" — Fiona Apple's singular moment on the 1990s charts.
02 Song Meaning
Criminal: Guilt, Desire, and the Honesty of Self-Indictment
The Accusation Turned Inward
Most pop songs that deal with romantic wrongdoing place the narrator in the position of the wronged party, the one whose heart has been broken, whose trust has been violated. Criminal does something far less comfortable: it places Fiona Apple's narrator squarely in the position of the person who has done the harm. The song is a self-indictment, an admission of selfishness and cruelty in romantic situations that asks nothing of the listener except that they witness the confession honestly.
The Psychology of Self-Aware Wrongdoing
What makes "Criminal" psychologically complex is that the narrator knows what she has done and does not excuse it. She does not plead extenuating circumstances or diminished responsibility. The admission is direct and unornamented, and the emotional register of the vocal performance conveys genuine guilt rather than the performing of guilt for sympathetic effect. This is a harder emotional space to inhabit convincingly, because the audience's sympathy cannot be taken for granted; it must be earned through the honesty and precision of the rendering.
Apple was nineteen when she wrote this lyric, and the emotional maturity it demonstrates, the capacity for clear-eyed self-examination without the self-pity that makes such examination easier, is extraordinary at any age. The song emerged from a period of genuine emotional reckoning in her adolescence, and the rawness of that reckoning is present in every line.
Female Desire and the 1990s
The song arrived at a culturally significant moment for representations of female desire and female wrongdoing in pop music. The 1990s had produced a number of female artists who pushed against the good-girl constraints that pop music traditionally imposed, but few had done so with Apple's directness or her willingness to locate the wrongdoing in herself rather than in the men who surrounded her. Criminal placed a young woman in the position of moral agent rather than romantic object or victim, and the discomfort that position generated in some quarters was itself revealing about the expectations audiences brought to female pop artists.
The song did not ask to be liked or forgiven. It asked to be heard, and that demand was something genuinely new in the pop landscape of its moment.
The Sound as Confession
Jon Brion's production serves the lyric by refusing to comfort. The piano is slightly anxious, the arrangement does not resolve cleanly, and the overall sonic atmosphere maintains a tension that mirrors the emotional state of the narrator. The music does not tell you how to feel about what the narrator is confessing; it simply places you in the room with the confession and lets you work out your response. This restraint is harder to achieve than it looks, and the execution here is close to perfect.
The song endures because self-knowledge, honestly rendered, does not expire. Guilt and desire and the complicated terrain between them are permanent features of human experience, and Apple mapped them with a precision that remains useful decades after the fact.
"Criminal" — Fiona Apple's singular moment on the 1990s charts.
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