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My aunt and uncle came to visit me in the hospital and brought the greatest of all possible gifts: a Sony Discman. Sometimes it feels like we are waging constant battles out of sight, fighting villains hitherto invisible. I felt similarly several years ago, when revelation after coiled-up revelation of sexual misconduct kept unfurling in public, and with it a bilious cascade of emotional pain so many women had been processing privately for years. menstrual cramps." I thought of that disbelieving pediatrician, of the pain that so many women are always managing silently even as we're being told it can't be that bad, or at least that it's something improper to speak about in public. appendix tear." I was startled to find that one of the suggested auto-fills was "appendix rupture vs. Recently, curious, I Googled "appendix rupture vs. I do not often revisit that corner of my memory, so even as an adult I never fully understood what made my particular case of appendicitis different and more dangerous than usual. I was 10, staring down 11, which was, as the writer Melissa Febos so aptly and ominously describes it in her latest book of essays, "the time when my childhood became more distinctly a girlhood." This was not just because of my illness, of course. Liquefied but also somehow hardening into something past the point of changing. Everything in my world at that moment felt in transition, careening out of control. Personal history and pop-cultural narrative have always swirled together in my recollection of the past, so one of the only things I know for sure about the humid, late-August night I was rushed to the emergency room for the first time was that it was also the night Princess Diana died. I was an athletic kid, then eagerly preparing for another season of soccer, but in the weeks that followed I grew wan and weak.
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Because the way that certain music comes to hold a central place in our lives isn't just a reflection of how we develop our taste, but how we come to our perspective on the world.
Fiona apple tidal series#
For 2021, we're digging into our own relationships to the records we love, asking: How do we know as listeners when a piece of music is important to us? How do we break free of institutional pressures on our taste while still taking the lessons of history into account? What does it mean to make a truly personal canon? The essays in this series will excavate our unique relationships with the albums we love, from unimpeachable classics by major stars to subcultural gamechangers and personal revelations. Up until now we have focused on overturning conventional, patriarchal best-of lists and histories of popular music. NPR Music's Turning the Tables is a project envisioned to challenge sexist and exclusionary conversations about musical greatness. Photo Illustration by Estefania Mitre/NPR Getty Images Courtesy of Columbia Records
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When she first heard Fiona Apple's album 1996 Tidal, writer Lindsay Zoladz says the record stood out to her for how it "validated experience of pain."
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