“Bad Apple”, the eerie, beguiling new song by the folk duo Bad Flamingo, is not a country song. Country, even at its most minimal, is rarely as spidery in its structure, or as oblique in its lyrics, as “Bad Apple”. But there are a lot of commonalities between the work of Bad Flamingo and that of a certain country artist gaining acclaim in underground circles: namely, Orville Peck, a masked-and-anonymous singing cowboy from Toronto whose music has gotten even the country-averse on board.
Like Peck, the members of Bad Flamingo wear domino masks in all their publicity photos, and choose to keep their real names private (in a particularly funny touch, their website credits their respective instruments to “the one on the left” and “the one on the right”). Both artists also belong to certain demographics that are either marginalized (both members of Bad Flamingo are women) or ignored (Peck is a gay man) in this sort of music. Most importantly, both artists make quality music that strikes a particular emotional chord.
“Bad Apple” starts simply enough that it’s hard to tell where it’s going. A lone banjo begins, plinking and plunking, before the hushed vocals come in. “Can I come sit on your porch steps?” the singer asks, an innocent sentiment turned uneasy thanks to the sparseness of the music. We immediately get the feeling that our narrator is doing something she’s not supposed to be doing, something that she finds frightening yet enticing.
The next lines reinforce that: “Can I come play inside your barbed wire fence?/Are you keeping them out, or are they keeping you in?” The barbed wire imagery, and the question that follows it, further sets the scene and lets us know what’s going on. Whether the barbed wire surrounds something mundane (a farm) or sinister (a prison), the person the singer’s addressing is clearly dangerous, and any normal girl would turn heel and get out of there.
Then, the chorus comes in, and we realize that our narrator is no normal girl. Over a rolling guitar arpeggio and some Spaghetti Western whistling, she sings: “Bad apple, spoil me through.” Our narrator wants this “bad apple” not despite his rottenness, but because of it, and she wants to join him. The song evokes that sort of outlaw-couple cool with its ominous instrumentation and its sense of doomed romanticism; they’ll rot together, whether they’re on the run, locked in prison, or six feet under the ground.
Going back to the Orville Peck comparison, Bad Flamingo similarly shape traditional folk and western imagery around their identities; while Peck challenges the heteronormativity of a traditional Western romance, Bad Flamingo offers a distaff take on the outlaw narrative. “Bad Apple” may be addressed to a man, but the man is largely a cipher; the song’s real focus is on the narrator’s desire, her lust for danger, her eagerness to be corrupted. That’s a common figure in these sorts of stories, but there’s no leering here: perhaps what the narrator wants most is the freedom of an untethered life with the person she loves. What does she care if it rots her?
