by Matt Barr

Now that that's all out of the way

Blogcritics had a very appreciative review of 1999's When the Pawn... by You Know Who yesterday.

Displaying wit even in her woe, an incisive and often paradoxical Apple survives and lives to tell the tales with poetic, passionate intensity in quirkily unconventional and evocative language. From "To Your Love": "My derring-do allows me to dance the rigadoon / Around you / But by the time I'm close to you, I lose / My desideratum and now you..."

This kind of recklessness also sees Apple's finely-honed songwriting craftsmanship somehow — it's a subtle circumvention at play here — eluding for the most part any pervading insinuation of forced affectation or mope-and-cope shoe-gazing surrender. Apple won't be pinned down and pegged: She can implore that the object of her disaffection not "be down when my demeanor seems to disappoint / It's hard enough even to be civil to myself" ("To Your Love"). But a few songs later, she's almost gleefully acquired "a taste for the well-made mistake," as she rallies and moves on in a refreshingly cavalier and carefree fashion: "I'm gonna fuck it up again / I'm gonna do another detour / Unpave my path."

But no matter how much you may want to cover your tracks, that new path might be as circular as it is scenic, leading you back to square one. In When the Pawn's powerfully propulsive first cut, "On The Bound," the more metaphoric first cut runs deepest in an unflinching tone that seemingly makes up Apple's default tenor: "It's true, I do imbue my blue unto myself / I make it bitter" — and by the last line we've hit rock bottom as an apparent defeatist defines herself abjectly, wearily and warily intoning, "Baby say that it's all gonna be alright / I believe that it isn't."

You're probably wondering if there's a YouTube video of You Know Who (YouKnowWhoTube?) performing one of the aforementioned songs. As a matter of fact!

Browse books from Amazon.com: