Two decades after the Fiona Apple single “Criminal” was released, one Brooklyn-based musician has debuted her own tribute to the singer-songwriter’s influence on female musicians. There is, however, one notable difference: the shot-for-shot remake of the song’s music video—once lauded as brilliant as it was controversial—comes with a queer, main-textual twist.
The vid for “Hooking Up With Girls,” the first track off of the self-titled album for It Was Romance—the stage name for multi-instrumentalist/writer/comedian Lane Moore—is a blend of contemporary identity politics and 90s aesthetic sensibility. While the song’s narrator and subject might both be queer women—as its title suggests—the correlation between “Hooking Up With Girls” and Apple’s “Criminal” is obvious in its universality: being in a relationship that is bad for both parties, while simultaneously being unable to break away.
Even with the new interpretation of the original material, Moore’s work serves as an acute homage to the award-winning 1997 video directed by Mark Romanek.
“I directed the video and co-produced it and was really meticulous in how much I wanted it to match [Fiona Apple’s ‘Criminal’],” Moore said in an interview with Billboard. According to the singer-songwriter, the project came with a precise and detail-oriented production process, including an extensive search to find a location that matched the house featured in the original, as well as locating props, such as stuffed animals and 90s-era cameras, to elevate the authenticity of the video’s look.
Notably, the project primarily features people of color and LGBT people in an effort to widen the scope of what representation for both groups can evolve to be—sooner rather than later—in mainstream media.
“Apart from being wonderfully 90s tribute eye-candy, I directed the video and it was made by people of color and LGBT people,” Moore told Billboard.
“It’s badass,” she added.
Full disclosure: Lane Moore was once a Jezebel editor/staff member, but has not written for the site since 2012.