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.