The Apparently Still Highly-Debated Quality of Jagged Little Pill (1995) by Alanis Morrisette
This piece has been living and breathing inside of me for months now, gestating and twisting to a beautiful fruition. It all started when I was on Twitter on one very average afternoon, and noticed that Jagged Little Pill was trending. Considering I was born a year after it’s release, I don’t remember it’s popularity, and only remember Alanis Morrisette from my dad’s CD collection. I remember sitting in his car and asking him, “Is she the best songwriter of all time?” To which he calmly responded, “Absolutely.” I don’t recall the exact lines of lyrics, but it was such a MOMENT. I was like, this is art. She’s a goddamn genius. Granted, all my mom listened to in my childhood was Top 40-- so your Hooties, your Matchbox 20s, your Michelle Branches and Sheryl Crows.* My dad really delivered the punk-girl culture to me; my first concert which I attended with him was Avril Lavigne! Post-death/Girlfriend era! It was the best night ever.
Back to Alanis: Her 1995 album was trending on Twitter in 2019. I couldn’t believe it. This album was a staple in my dad’s car! I hadn’t listened to it in over ten years. And the reason it was trending: a Jezebel contributor wrote an article about how trash it was. Here’s a few takes:
“Next was “You Oughta Know,” with its halting, haunting opening: “I. Want. You. To. Know. I’m. Hap-py. For. You.” When the electric guitar picked up and she wailed her, “You, you, you oughta know-ohh,” I cringed a little bit. What had once felt enlivening and validating now felt grating and corny. That electric guitar kept on clanging. Are electric guitars usually so... electric? I was finding it hard to think. Hard to be. Hard to exist. In the same room. As this music.”
“It wasn’t even “Ironic,” and its infamous misuse of the word, that ultimately broke me. It was these lyrics: “You live/You learn/You love/You learn/You cry/You learn/You lose/You learn/You bleed/You learn/You scream/You learn.” I screamed. Oh did I. And then I texted my husband a mea culpa: “Jagged Little Pill is actually Very Bad.”
“The nostalgia for Jagged Little Pill is such that it’s soon to become a Broadway musical. This makes both Alanis and the album, which she co-wrote and recorded at the young age of 19, culturally significant—but it doesn’t make it good, timeless music.” -Tracy Clark-Flory, Jezebel (March 2019)
Now, I don’t intend for my piece to be a response or rebuttal against this contributor, honestly because it happened back in March and everyone (besides myself) is over it. However, I have some feelings about it. What this person is claiming isn’t that she got over that part of her life and moved past her relation to Alanis’s music--she claimed that it was just NEVER GOOD TO BEGIN WITH. It’s a pretty bold decision to make about something you once loved and identified with! It’s like re-watching your most beloved cartoon during your childhood and irrationally dismissing it as garbage. For example, mine would be Spongebob. One of my favorite episodes is when Plankton recruits his entire hillbilly family to take over the Krusty Krab and finally get ahold of the secret formula. The jokes in that one I remember being so solid and quotable. I think about it pretty often. I recently rewatched it and laughed my ass off because it triggered something in my younger self, who is still there and always will be, but now I can fathom everything that was going on in the episode without being distracted by the pace or colors like I probably was before. Even now, I still think it’s funny. It’s still one of my favorites.
Spongebob is significant to my life and was very integral to developing my sense of humor. The writer’s taste in music and how she expressed her feelings was developed by Jagged Little Pill. Isn’t that something to respect even a little bit? Why are you going to write-off something you spent time appreciating? Why are you too good or grown-up for it now?
I wasn’t a teenager in the era of Alanis, I couldn’t identify with a vulgar long-haired Canadian while I was shitting my diaper, so my relationship with her music wasn’t much besides my dad playing it once in a while. To refresh my memory after this article came out, I added the album to my phone and listened. At first, it was to understand what she was claiming about each song--if it really was that terrible and unlistenable. I listened, and I could sort-of identify some cringy moments.** I listened again on my own. I decided it’s amazing driving music. I listened again. I could remember many of the lyrics. I listened again and I was officially in my “Alanis Morrisette Phase.” Now I listen often.
I can see both sides of the argument. Tracy from Jezebel says it was once good, but now it’s bad, so maybe it was always bad. She says the music is not “timeless,” and seems to take the lyrics a smidge too literally. I’m not sure what she expected from an angsty teen in the mid-90s. Alanis’s words might not be necessarily profound, but they MEAN something to people. They meant something to her. I can’t fathom discrediting my own feelings like that.
One thing we can learn from this writer is that it’s irresponsible to slap such a dismissive label on an artifact that once held some positive impact on your life. In the first few paragraphs, she tells us that she once WAS Alanis Morrisette, and she was that angsty teen. Alanis, with her violent disdain for her exes and humility for her mistakes, her loud and boistrous confidence in her sex appeal and her inherent avoidance of the rules that she tells us about in Jagged Little Pill, is just as valid and real in 2019 that it was in 1995. Your past can’t change, you can’t dismiss it, you can only look back and acknowledge it, and maybe even learn and grow from it. You can say “Yeah, I really loved it then! It was awesome and shaped who I was when I was 16. But now I don’t have those same emotions and am in a more stable and mature environment, so I can’t relate to it anymore. But it was really important to me once,” Instead of “I was really stupid and reckless back then so I loved stupid and reckless music, but now that I grew up I’m realizing that it actually was just bad music and all of the feelings I had were also stupid and a whole collection of people were stupid.”
I think it’s okay to move on, but you should really just give yourself more credit. You’ve been through it, we’ve all been through it, and most importantly, let’s let people remember this album and other childhood/adolescence things with fond respect. And remember: It’s not that serious. In my 23-year-old adult woman opinion, it’s a really great album. I can’t relate to it but that doesn’t mean it’s trash. Let’s just rock out and cry and hold hands and everything will be fine.
*These last two are their real witch cults.
**BUT THAT’S THE 90s, BABY!
