After the grunge, a little glamour. Ain’t nothing but a ‘g’ thing.
When I take everything here and put it all between covers in a few months, the requisite author photo will give you a good idea of my expertise on the subject of glamour. Which, in brief, amounts to 1) seeing a lot of documentaries on the fashion industry over the years (my long-standing explanation: “I want to understand”), and 2) George Costanza getting caught by his mother while…perusing an issue of Glamour magazine. (Elaine: “Glamour?”–Seinfeld’s genius resides in the inflection she puts on the word.) Glamour and pop music are inseparable, of course, as something to aspire to and something to position yourself against, and if you pull off the latter well enough (Kurt Cobain, Patti Smith), you look really cool, and that’s kind of glamorous.
I suppose the most glamorous pop star today would be Beyoncé; my impression is that the other most obvious candidate, Taylor Swift, is supposed to be highly relatable to her fans, and that’s a half-step in the other direction. Ariana Grande, Lil Nas X, Lana Del Rey…I’m really out of my element here, especially as I have no idea where that line is between classical, ‘40s-movie-star glamour and the kind of runway glamour that makes you (makes me, anyway) think “Seriously?” (An esoteric distinction that would be well illustrated by a couple of mid-‘70s Cher photos side-by-side.) Then there’s another amorphous line where I’m reduced to guesswork: actual glamour vs. ironic appropriation. If Neil Young puts on a tuxedo for his next video, my assumption would be that he’d do so with a wink. But when Val Halen donned immaculately tailored red suits for a few seconds of their “Hot for Teacher” video in 1984, I’m quite sure that David Lee Roth thought he looked pretty spectacular. I could be wrong on both counts there, I don’t know. But I want to understand.
The videos for “Paper Bag” and “1234”–which move us back into this century for the first time in a while–are steeped in glamour. Glamorous clothes, of course, but also the glamour of elaborately choreographed dance that harkens back to Hollywood musicals of the ‘30s. Not, I don’t think, what you’d intuitively expect of two artists who more naturally belong to the Carole King/Joni Mitchell singer-songwriter end of the pop spectrum. Which would be what? I can’t really say, especially seeing as I came to Fiona Apple and Feist through these two videos–I’d be trying to construct some kind of reverse time-travel hypothetical. Not Busby Berkely, though, I know that much for sure.
Both videos come with back stories. The first time I saw “Paper Bag” was at Toronto’s Royal Cinema seven years ago,* part of the pre-show for a screening of Boogie Nights, which itself was part of a Paul Thomas Anderson retrospective. Two things I distinctly remember: a fantastic in-house trailer that had been put together for the retrospective, and, of course, the realization that this strikingly unusual video I was watching was directed by Anderson. Not sure if there were MTV-type credits in the corner to let me know who and what I was seeing–forever playing catch-up, I had never heard Fiona Apple to that point, just seen her name all over Pazz & Jop for a number of years.** I may have had to piece the who and the what together when I got home.
I was having a sweet fix of a daydream of a boy
Whose reality I knew was a-hopeless to be had
Something I’ve pushed back on before is Greil Marcus’s contention that artists know things that we (meaning the rest of us who aren’t artists) don’t. We do know them, I’ve argued, that’s why we connect with the art; we just don’t know how to express them. An idea I’ll fully endorse, though, is that women know things I don’t know. In fact, I sometimes think they know everything, and they especially know me.*** And that, I think, without wading too deep into the lyrics, is what “Paper Bag” is about: Fiona Apple shrugging her shoulders and having to accept that the object of her desire (in this specific instance, and maybe for the rest of her life) is essentially a little boy. Apple and Anderson visualize this disconnect–a resignation I’d describe as dreamy, cheerful bemusement–with a glittering flight of fancy: as Apple (dressed to the nines in a slinky red evening gown) sits at a barstool explaining her dilemma to us, an expanding chorus line of adolescent boys–decked out in immaculately tailored three-piece suits, they look like they wandered out of Bugsy Malone****–gradually appears in back of her, and before long, like any Hollywood musical of the ‘30s, all is made right. I don’t have the language or expertise to describe the art of dance any more than I do the world of fashion, but Apple and her supporting cast glide around the bar with all the grace and intuition of (who else?) Astaire and Rogers. The video plays off the double meaning of “boy”: daydream of a boy in the figurative, idiomatic sense versus I thought he was a man, but he was just a little boy in the more mundane sense of never having grown up emotionally. She gets down off her barstool, meets the man-boy halfway, and they dance–beautifully.
I’ve given a reductive version of the song. Apple does anything but give herself a pass: “Cause’ I know I’m a mess he don’t wanna clean up.” So before and after we get the storybook dance, the video begins on the image of a solitary suitcase, and it ends with Apple clutching that suitcase as she says goodbye to one of her little-boy men (enigmatically smiling as she takes one last look and the very bluish image fades to black). As a song–yet one more barrier I had to cross for this to make its way into this blog–“Paper Bag” is far outside my comfort zone. It’s a torch song: I could imagine Amy Winehouse or Ricki Lee Jones singing it, two artists I have little interest in. But somehow it gets to me. I’ll play it four or five times in a row in the car, swept away by the way Apple stretches out “I want him so bad,” calmed by the muted horns that colour the background. If anything, it brings to mind a Mother Earth song I love, “Down So Low,” six minutes of Tracy Nelson pulling out all the vocal stops in a bluesy manner that usually leaves me cold. I ended up buying the Fiona Apple album “Paper Bag” is found on, When the Pawn… (her second), and also Tidal, her debut. For me, nothing on either comes close to “Paper Bag.”
If, rightly or wrongly, the “Paper Bag” video didn’t jibe with my preconceived notions about Fiona Apple the first time I saw it, it also messed with my sense of Paul Thomas Anderson at the time. I don’t want to veer too far in that direction, especially not knowing how much of the video’s conception is attributable to Anderson, how much to Apple, and how much was truly collaborative. I do notice that the Anderson series at the Royal in 2017 was timed to coincide with the release of Phantom Thread that December, which turned out to be a) fashion-related and b) probably my least favourite PTA film (my list of favourites would go Boogie Nights at the top, There Will Be Blood next, and then, if I’m allowed to stray, the “Paper Bag” video). Nothing computes.
If “Paper Bag,” navigating all those blind spots of mine, is the most unlikely video to have landed on this blog, Feist’s “1234” might be the most famous. Fame always interests me because it can be measured in so many ways, some quantifiable and some not, but ultimately it’s going to be a subjective determination. With a video, the most obvious measure in 2024 would be to look at YouTube views; I’d be surprised if “1234” has as many views as Lauryn Hill’s “Doo Wop” or Rihanna’s “Cheers” or even Green Day’s “Walking Contradiction” (not to mention the Beatles’ “Paperback Writer,” simply by virtue of it being the Beatles)–I’ll check that.***** You could go back to when these videos were new and in rotation on MTV and MuchMusic (and equivalents around the world), and come to some determination based on their airplay and popularity then; again, I doubt “1234” would be at the top. Greatest Videos Ever Made lists–find as many of those as you can, weight them appropriately, and come up with one master ranking, like the They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They list of the top 1000 films ever made. Making lots of greatest-ever lists is a measure of fame, or at the very least ensures fame in due course.
“1234”’s fame instead came in through the side door. The single was released on September 5, 2007 and sold modestly at first: 2,000 downloads per week according to a Reuters piece about what happened next. Apple****** had concurrently released its third version of the iPod Nano in early September, and–becoming synonymous with the iPod*******–chose “1234” for their next high-profile commercial. This wasn’t the super-charged, rainbow-coloured, dramatically silhouetted U2 and Jet commercials that were used to market earlier iterations of the iPod, though; the Nano sits in the middle of the frame against a blank background, a hand–various hands, from above, below, and to the side–reaches in to replace it with a different-coloured Nano (so a little bit of the rainbow effect), with the “1234” video playing on the device the whole time. Relative to the entire screen, the video isn’t much more than postage-stamp size, and Feist herself is never identified. Near the end, a tagline: “A little video for everyone.” How many people saw that commercial? No idea, but the iPod series of commercials were a cultural phenomenon. And, according to the Reuters piece, the effect on “1234”’s sales was immediate: by the end of September, it had jumped to 73,000 downloads per week.
So…I don’t know; those YouTube figures are more drastic than I expected. In any event, what the Nano commercial couldn’t even come close to capturing is the very large-scale splendour of Bibo Bergeron and Patrick Daughters’ original video. Which, as with the “Paper Bag” clip, takes a little while to materialize. “1234” opens on a medium-long shot of a school gymnasium, Feist barely visible at the bottom-centre of the frame. She walks towards the camera, blue and sparkly in lamé (the glamour quotient here is provided by Feist; the rest of the dancers are dressed colourfully but casually), and we hear the soft-strum opening of the song; Feist reorients her body 90-degrees to the left as she sings the opening lines, and when she gets to “Old teenage hopes are alive at your door,” the camera pulls back and dancers appear. Lots and lots of them, in all directions; within two or three seconds, the camera having pulled back a few more feet, Feist is sharing the screen with 30 or 40 other people.******** The dancing starts off just like a country line dance–Brooks & Dunn, Thelma and Louise, etc.– but set to a whimsical, nursery-rhymish pop song rather than the rhythms of country-swing. A lot of hands are waving in the air like they just don’t care, and when you focus on an individual dancer, I swear sometimes they’re just making stuff up on the spot–improvising, I believe it’s called. Feist remains the centre of attention: she’s always at or near the centre of the frame, and her blue lamé is a sharp contrast to everyone else’s attire.
When one of the dancers swoops Feist up into his arms at the one-minute mark, the camera pulls not back but up. The other dancers, now arranged in a spiral pattern, freeze, and he carries Feist through the gaps and deposits her in the middle. The camera, looking down from above, begins to rotate clockwise; Feist, her arms extended like she’s brandishing a gun, rotates counterclockwise; the dancers fall to the ground in sequence, like a formation of dominoes. The net effect is nothing short of kaleidoscopic. When the camera returns to ground level, Feist reemerges in back of everyone else; having paid tribute to “Achy Breaky Heart,” the dancers now converge and we’re looking at a Pearl Jam-like mosh pit, with Feist supported aloft and passed back to the front. More acrobatic camerawork, more geometric patterning of bodies (including a living trampoline), ending with the dancers somehow completely disappearing behind Feist, either a remarkably impressive bit of blocking or some CGI sleight-of-hand. Feist, alone again, brings everything to a close with her hands making a little conductor-like flourish as the song ends. A bravura display of timing, space, and crowd management, and I haven’t even mentioned the kicker, which you probably took notice of somewhere along the way but may have been so caught up in all that was happening that you didn’t: the entire video consists of one single shot, like the famous Copacabana entrance in Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas.*********
I don’t really know what “1234” is about, only that I think it’s every bit as great as Len Barry’s “1, 2, 3” (1965), and that I’d give both the nod over the 1910 Fruitgum Company’s “1, 2, 3, Red Light” (1968). It does end with a sentiment very much in line with “Paper Bag”:
Oh, for the teenage boys
They’re breaking your heart
For the teenage boys
They’re breaking your heart
Two videos that fantasize and transform romantic disappointment into large-ensemble choreography wherein every last step works out exactly as planned. Again, that’s the formula for the classic Hollywood musical. Each video ends with the heroine once again all alone–not part of the formula–but Feist and Fiona Apple seem perfectly okay with that.
*Pinned down the date by checking the Royal’s Facebook page—it does not, in 2024 (I moved out of the city in 2019), seem to be a movie theatre anymore.
**And that wasn’t enough to make me investigate? No–I can be very incurious when my intuition has already decided, for whatever reason, “Not for me.”
***I guess the one statement subsumes the other: Fiona Apple the woman knows things I don’t, but Fiona Apple the artist doesn’t, so therefore she does–know things I don’t, that is.
****Alan Parker’s gimmicky spoof of various classic Hollywood genres–the gangster film, especially–that split critics in 1976. I’ve never seen it, probably kept away by Pauline Kael’s spirited excoriation.
*****As of June 23, 2024: “Cheers,” 186 million views; “Doo Wop,” 185 million; “Paperback Writer,” 43 million; “Walking Contradiction,” 10 million; “1234,” just under a million views for the original video uploaded 17 years ago. Two newer and cleaner versions (one HD, the other “AI upscale,” whatever the hell that means) have been uploaded the past couple of years, with about 100,000 views between them.
******”Too many Apples” my editor friend Cam insists–I’m talking about the giant tech company now, not Fiona and not the Beatles’ record label.
*******How synonymous? I’ve never owned either a Nano or any kind of iPod, but I do watch TV and was very aware of the commercials.
********We’re still inside the flash-mob/lip-dub era; “1234”’s video very much comes out of that.
.*********Or Russian Ark (2002), where Alexander Sokurov was able to extend the single-shot concept to an astounding 87 minutes (three false starts and a successful fourth take). Alfred Hitchcock tried to give the appearance of having filmed Rope (1948) in a single shot, but–because of the technical limitations he was working within–windows and various other buffers were used to link sequences together that were shot separately.
we don't want to know 