Either/Or

by Elif Batuman

Riley made me a tape of her Fiona Apple album. I initially mistrusted Fiona Apple, because of her belligerent, model-like beauty, because she was my age but sang in a scornful way about her ex-boyfriends, and because the lyrics sounded like she had been forced to use vocabulary words. But after I had listened to the album all the way through a few times, the janky grammar and word choices began to seem legitimate and necessary, and I understood that it was possible to look like that—glaring and tousled, with your limbs all in some artful pile—and also be good at something. Fiona Apple’s album made me more immediately depressed than any other music I remembered hearing. The most depressing songs were the ones with meandering arbitrary piano, that went from meandering to decisive and then back again. How did she know when to do that? The one that started “Days like this, I don’t know what to do with myself” made me feel certain that I had spent my whole life not knowing what to do with myself—all day, and all night. “I wander the halls . . .” That was exactly it: not the streets, like a flâneur, but the halls. Oh, I knew just which halls.

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