Fiona Apple’s Bolt Cutters as Violent, Vulnerable Poetry
CONTENT WARNINGS: mentions of sexual assault
I spent one lost quarantine night reading Fiona Apple reviews, interviews, and yes, tabloid stories on her ex-boyfriends, falling asleep minutes before 5 AM, thinking, strangely, of the time I learned the word “enigma” after reading Wuthering Heights in seventh grade and wouldn’t stop using it everywhere.
What did I know about Fiona Apple before Fetch the Bolt Cutters? I can’t remember. Now, I could tell you about her complicated rise to fame in the 90s, how she is paradoxically too reclusive and too candid, how she released her new album after urging from her mentee-slash-friend, King Princess. I could tell you how she earnestly befriends the writers who interview her, texting them selfies and snippets of songs. I could tell you exactly how I felt when I listened to Fetch the Bolt Cutters for the first time like I was discovering a new limb—the violence and joy and pain of new growth and self-realization.
The album’s eighth track, “Ladies,” is triumphant and vaguely reminiscent of a line from the Anne Carson translation of Euripides’s The Bakkhai (Dionysus urges, “Okay ladies, up we get, / no more crouching, / no more sobbing.”) It’s a joyous celebration of womanhood and solidarity—when Apple croons “ladies, ladies, ladies, ladies! Ladies, ladies, ladies, ladies,” I feel recognized! It’s a toast to ladies! I am a lady! But even so, her songs contain the tension of female relationships in a world governed by men; in the last thirty seconds, Apple resignedly growls “yet another woman to whom I won’t get through.” In “Newspaper,” she addresses a woman dating a man who sexually assaulted her, singing: “I wonder what lies he’s telling you about me / to make sure that we’ll never be friends.”
Women are at the forefront of Fiona’s new album. In my personal favorite, “Shameika,” Apple chronicles the middle school memory of an interaction she had with a female classmate. “Shameika said I had potential,” Apple sings gleefully, before noting, “back then I didn’t know what potential meant.” She effortlessly captures the flare of girlhood: how big every single thing that happens in the school day seems, the importance of the approval of a cool girl, and the hazy, wild nostalgia that comes from looking back.
Apple also reckons with the #MeToo era. In the explosive bridge of “For Her,” moved by the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings in 2018 and her rape at age twelve, Apple shouts: “Well good morning, good morning / You raped me in the same bed / your daughter was born in.” The whole song is incredibly raw, shifting in tone several times before ending on an eerie, many-layered choir of Apple’s voice. In “Relay,” Apple chants: “I resent you for being raised right / I resent you for being tall, / I resent you for never getting any opposition at all,” somehow embodying all the female rage and unreasonable anger I have towards white men.
Vendettas aside, Fiona Apple is a poet. Her songs are generous and glorious and violent: the wordplay in “I would beg to disagree / but begging disagrees with me” is crisp and audacious. It tells us she is taking no prisoners. “I spread like strawberries, I climb like peas and beans” is delightful and formidably poignant. In “Cosmonauts,” Apple’s lilting voice quirks around “you and I will be like a couple of cosmonauts / except with way more gravity than when we started off.” How one can encapsulate the airiness of love, the grit of trauma, and the sharpness of liberation in one album, I do not know. Apple rhymes mine with itself and it is gorgeous: “there’s a dress in the closet / don’t get rid of it, you’d look good in it / I didn’t fit in it, it was never mine / it belonged to the ex-wife of another ex of mine / she left it behind with a note, one line, it said / “I don’t know if I’m coming across, but I’m really trying” / She was very kind.” Apple, as a songwriter, tackles every line with a fierceness of a woman who has known the world. “Tony told me he’d describe me as pissed off, funny, and warm. / Sebastian said, I’m a ‘good man in a storm.’”
This brings us to the titular “Fetch the Bolt Cutters,” named for the line a woman detective delivers on Netflix series The Fall after discovering an abused girl locked in a room. The song is chaotic and percussive—model Cara Delevigne contributes a “meow” about two minutes in. Coming out of a cacophonous, garbled repetition of “I will,” Apple sings in the chorus: “Fetch the bolt cutters, I’ve been in here too long.” The song devolves into sighs and breathy whispers and the urgent barking of dogs, as if they have just been made aware of something terribly wrong.
But the trauma is not the end. In an interview with NPR, Apple described the bolt cutters as a “tool of liberation,” for anybody who needs to set themselves free. A little on the nose, of course, but the beauty of Fiona Apple is that she is not subtle. Apple’s voice soars. It rocks back and forth. It shakes and growls and attacks. Can a voice be more than a voice? If so, Fiona Apple’s is. Fetch the Bolt Cutters is an uncompromising reckoning with gendered violence and trauma. The bolt cutters have been fetched. We can be free.
by KELLY HUI