Tidal by Fiona Apple
Tidal is the debut studio album by American singer-songwriter Fiona Apple, released in the United States on July 23, 1996, by Work Records and Columbia Records (Sony Music). It peaked at number 15 on the U.S. Billboard 200 and up to October 2005 had sold 2.7 million copies in the U.S. according to Nielsen SoundScan. It was certified gold by the RIAA in December 1996, platinum in July 1997, two times platinum the following October and three times platinum in April 1999. Tidal produced six singles: "Shadowboxer", "Slow Like Honey", "Sleep to Dream", "The First Taste", "Criminal" and "Never Is a Promise". "Criminal", the album's most popular single, won a 1998 Grammy Award for "Best Female Rock Vocal Performance" and was named the single of 1997 in a poll of Rolling Stone readers. The music video for "The First Taste" never aired in the U.S. The 2005 album I've Got My Own Hell to Raise by Bettye Lavette is titled after a lyric in "Sleep to Dream", and includes a cover of that song. In 2008, Entertainment Weekly named Tidal the 20th Best Album of the last 25 years (1983–2008). In 2010, Rolling Stone placed it among the greatest albums of the 1990s, at number 83. A year later, Slant Magazine placed it at number 74.
A few days after accepting her Best New Artist award at the 1997 MTV Video Music Awards by calling the entertainment industry “bullshit,” a then 19-year-old Fiona Apple sat for an interview with the shock-radio personality Howard Stern. What’s the problem, Stern asks her: You’re young, you’re pretty, your first album—1996’s <i>Tidal</i>—is selling like crazy, and yet, you’re still angry. Everyone knows entertainment is bullshit—why take it so seriously? Apple holds her ground: Maybe middle-aged guys like you know that, she says, but middle-aged guys aren’t taking cues from MTV on how to look and act—teenage girls are. And for them, it <i>is</i> serious.<br /> At the time, albums like Alanis Morissette’s <i>Jagged Little Pill</i> and No Doubt’s <i>Tragic Kingdom</i> (and events like the all-female Lilith Fair tour) had brought a feminist edge to the mainstream. But <i>Tidal</i> is both angrier and subtler. A rap fan who’s said the only album she bought in 1997 was <i>Wu-Tang Forever</i>, Apple knows how to make herself ten feet tall (“Sleep to Dream”) while also expressing how small society has made her feel (“Sullen Girl”). She sounds older than she is (“Shadowboxer”), but points out that sexual abuse has a way of making you grow up fast (“The Child Is Gone”). If she takes pride in her powers of seduction, it’s only because it’s one of the few she’s allowed to exercise (“Criminal”). While Billie Holiday—a childhood influence—transformed her pain with laughter, Apple wields hers like a blade: Discreet, but it’ll cut you.<br /> She’d grown up with classical piano and jazz standards—worlds where technical proficiency can often outweigh raw feeling. But for all its finesse, the lingering mood of <i>Tidal</i> is bitter and resolute: She’s going to bare her heart no matter how much it hurts. Listening to her spar with Howard Stern in 1997, you want to root for her not just because she’s getting bullied by a guy more than twice her age, but because she’s brave enough to fight back. As to her speech at the MTV awards, she says she got into this line of work to say whatever it is she wanted to say, and that’s what she’s gonna do. So how was she any different from him?
