Fiona Apple releases a Trump protest chant
ON SATURDAY, hundreds of thousands of women are expected to march in Washington after Donald Trump is sworn in as the 45th president of the United States. This past Tuesday, the singer-songwriter Fiona Apple gave those preparing to protest a signature chant.
The chant is on a new one-minute track called Tiny Hands, that repeats 10 words recorded by Apple on a phone:
“We don’t want your tiny hands/ anywhere near our underpants.”
The track includes a sample of Trump’s comments from a 2005 leaked Access Hollywood recording with Billy Bush in which he brags of grabbing of women’s body parts whenever he wanted.
The track was produced by the composer Michael Whalen, who released the song on SoundCloud, where some commenters did not think that the chant went far enough.
“A reference to male rhetoric?” said one SoundCloud critic, arguing that Apple should have included more substantive complaints. “If that’s the worst we can complain about him, then maybe we should have all voted for him.”
Whalen responded that Apple’s goal had simply been to create a chant for the march.
A spokeswoman for Trump did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.
Online, the song met with a scattering of criticisms from Trump’s supporters, who pointed out that those who normally denounce bullying were embracing derogatory and demeaning language about the future president.
Apple, who began her music career in the 1990s, has become something of a recluse. A New York Magazine article from 2012 labelled Apple a “musical hermit”. But her albums continue to be critically acclaimed. Her last LP, released that year, received a high aggregate score, 89, on the website Metacritic, and was her best-reviewed full-length effort to date.
Apple’s new song is not the first time that Trump’s comments from the incendiary recording have been repurposed by his opponents. A group of knitters united online to form “The Pussyhat Project”, dedicated to creat- ing 1.1 million hats for protesters to wear at the march Saturday.
Tiny Hands is also not the indie singer’s first protest song aimed at Trump. Last year, Apple released a Christmas tune on Tumblr that made such ferocious use of a double entendre that its title can’t be published in the New York Times.
Apple has spoken publicly about being sexually assaulted at the age of 12 and has a history of airing her perspective on serious matters in her music. Accepting an MTV award for best new artist in 1997, she railed against the artificiality of the music industry, referred to Maya Angelou as an inspiration and implored her fans to think for themselves.
Other artists, however, are celebrating Trump’s imminent assumption of the presidency. A relatively obscure US poet, Joseph Charles MacKenzie, wrote a poem praising the president-elect and his Scottish heritage. The poem refers to Trump as “the Domhnall”, the Scottish form of his first name. It reads in part: When crippling corruption polluted our nation
And plunged our economy into stagnation,
As self-righteous rogues took the opulent office
And plump politicians reneged on Hands. their promise,
The forgotten continued to form a great crowd
That defended the Domhnall, the best of MacLeod! Tiny