100 Greatest Songs of the 20’s So Far #71 – Fiona Apple – Kick Me Under The Table

Released: 2020

So much has happened in the last five years that recalling how we felt in the early phase of pandemic lockdown seems like fetching memories from a different century. Questions easily responded to at the time are now trivial, or blurred into meaninglessness. Was music more important, or less? Did we seek escapism through fear, or boredom? And by the way, who can remember what they were listening to?

All of the material we were taking in at the time had been recorded well before there was ever an inkling of having to spend extended periods in isolation, be it physical or mental, so it helped perhaps that Fiona Apple’s Fetch The Boltcutters was both timeless in nature and fired by an energy which was hard to contain, whatever cage it was in.

Under The Table was an oddity that eventually became one of those slow burning masterpieces, gaining a musical half life in the process. A bare bones piano and drum ditty, lyrically it worked on two levels, Apple’s defiant contempt for dinner party guests also ringing a bell for women everywhere stultified by lives circling round two dimensional others. Even if what happened at the beginning of the decade has already become sepia, it remains a technicolour milestone.