“Who is that girl? She’s going to die soon,” my friend Andrea’s grandmother asked, going from one thought to the next about Fiona Apple before either of us had time to respond. It was the summer of 1997, and we were watching the video for “Criminal,” the instantly infamous piece of music video history wherein the teenage Fiona appears in her underwear alongside a number of faceless, similarly famished youths. People could not decide if the video was more outrageous because it was a glorification of child pornography or a glorification of anorexia. In either case, blame was hurled at Fiona herself rather than on the much older music executives who were largely responsible for establishing her brand.
From a marketing standpoint, they made an excellent choice. The perverse brand that rendered the teen Fiona the commissioner of her own exploitation was one that girls of a certain age and disposition were enthralled by. We were the kind of girls who fantasized about looking beautiful at our funerals instead of our weddings. But we were not girls who especially wanted to die. In Fiona we sensed a similar disconnect, a fascination with death that did not translate to finding a sense of solace in its promises. I was too young to imagine Fiona as a friend, so I thought of her as an older sister. Her particular neuroses and heartbrokenness were far enough away from my reality to make them romantic in a way that the very real afflictions of my own households were not. Like Fiona, Lana let death linger in her mind long enough for her to breathe it out of her mouth and let it seep out into the world like smoke, the poison all the more appealing when it was mixed with her overtures on love.
Years after taking my posters of Fiona looking characteristically forlorn off my walls and removing her music from heavy rotation on my playlists, I am still touched from time to time by hearing news of Fiona that indicates something like healing in her life. Even as her music matured into something too sophisticated for my untrained ears and my overactive heart, I consumed stories about her like a consummate fan. Whereas the happiness of former idols like Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins has made me lose interest, I remain invested in Fiona as a person. I wanted her to win, at what game, I am unsure. I did not feel this protective of a female musician again until I was over twenty-five years old, well past the age Fiona was when I drifted from her music.
In February 2011, Lana Del Rey tweeted, “Reputation is what men and women think of us; character is what God and angels know of us.” It is a clever take on the concepts of perception and persona, but it is not hers. The quote comes from the eighteenth-century political theorist Thomas Paine, though Lana did not mention this in the tweet. She was a new face on the music scene, four months away from releasing her self-directed music video debut of the song “Video Games.” The video made her an indie darling for a few fleeting months before it became the primary piece of evidence used against her when information and images surfaced online about Lizzy Grant: a cute, blond, and far less alluring pop singer than Lana. Whoever managed her marketing efforts had effectively killed Lizzy Grant and replaced her with the pouting temptress Lana Del Rey. Audiences felt duped and sought to punish her for their own suspensions of disbelief.
Lana would soon be accused of performing as a false persona that was too meticulously manufactured. Rather than an image that was especially dangerous, as people claimed Fiona’s had been, Lana’s was derided for being artificial and self-indulgent. Lana’s femme fatale looks and her hypernostalgic music videos looked labored and amateurish, how a high school girl who got her hands on some old Hollywood movies and a bustier might adorn herself more than how an adult artist with a legitimate interest in a genre might. Fiona was accused of glamorizing child porn in the Hollywood Hills; Lana was accused of pornifying authentic Hollywood glamour.
Those who accuse these women of fraud in their image craft seem not to have heard of David Bowie’s successful alter ego Ziggy Stardust or even Bob Dylan, the folksy creation of a genius named Robert Allen Zimmerman. There is a tradition of male artists taking on personae that are understood to be part of their art. It is as though there is so much genius within them that it must be split between these mortal men and the characters they create. Women who venture to do the same are ridiculed as fakers and try-hards; their constructed identities are seen as attention-seeking stunts more than new embodiments of the artists themselves. Madonna is perhaps the most successful woman to reinvent herself but never to fully slip into an alter ego, and even she is routinely called an insufferable bitch for it.
But within what is meant to be the exclusive territory of men who invent and inhabit images that add up to more than the sum of their aesthetic and musical parts, there is a trespasser. She has gone undetected for decades, despite having crafted a highly visible and truly magnetic image. Like Lana and Fiona, she is powerfully moved by the wiles of careless men but is motivated, too, by the surveillance of God, who seems to care even as he judges her. That artist is Dolly Parton, a performer so rigorously committed to her craft that she has not publicly broken character once in a career spanning more than forty years. Famously taking her image cues from “the town tramp” of her rural Appalachian origins, Dolly can reliably be found in a wardrobe of formfitting dazzlers that accentuate her large bust and tiny waist and are always topped off with a blond hairdo that is as much a production as her stage shows. The visual of Dolly’s full face of bright makeup, even brighter jewel-toned outfits, and bleached hair appears in sharp contrast to the subdued auburns, deep reds, and earthen tones of Lana and Fiona, of course. But beneath these exteriors are hearts breaking under the cold oscillation between negligence and affection of those whose love they seek.