There’s no doubt that the doyens of Britpop got plenty of airplay and sold millions of records, but it was ex-Take That stripper Robbie Williams who rendered the genre’s mischievous, sarcastic, glammy, but also aggressive and obstreperous ethic into something smoother, more radio friendly, more accessible to a broader market. In the US, grunge was subjected to a similar makeover by, amongst others, Alanis Morissette, who took the cranky outsiderdom and scything guitars of Nirvana and Alice in Chains, sanded down the edges, and produced something a bit more approachable, something teenage girls could listen to without having to endure Kurt hating himself and wanting to die. It is in this context that Jagged Little Pill belongs; the successful commercialisation and marketisation of grunge, in a period when the primary figures of the genre were either literally dead (Cobain), functionally dead (Staley), artistically dead (Cornell), or simply braindead (Vedder).
There isn’t much to say about Alanis herself; a white bread child of the Canadian suburbs who tried her hand at dance pop in the early 90s and, having failed to make much of an impact, picked up a guitar and hitched her truck to the tearaway bandwagon of mid-90s rock’n’roll malcontent. A studio darling, basically. But maybe it would be unfair to dismiss her as an opportunistic chancer, given that, as we saw with Pearl Jam, even the godfathers of grunge were to some extent playing the market. Arguably, only Kurt was the real deal, and look where it got him – “dying in the name of light entertainment”, to quote the always on-point Luke Haines.
Alanis is surely most famous for her vengeful and slightly psychotic ex-girlfriend gimmick, and of course, “You Oughta Know” is its most crystalline distillation – the revenge fantasy of the starry-eyed ex-lover who has been kicked to the curb in favour of a new model, and who decides to dish the dirt through the medium of song. She wrings around half an album out of this central idea, which in retrospect looks a little anaemic, given that Taylor Swift has built an entire career on it.
In any case, the sub-Soundgarden tone of “You Oughta Know” perfectly encapsulates Alanis’ cynical tarting up of grunge. The lyrics are riven with veiled threats (“Does she know how you told me you’d hold me until you died? / but you’re still alive”), and an unmistakeable case of main character syndrome (“are you thinking of me when you fuck her?”) To my ears, though, the self-righteous rage sounds eerily calculated. Alanis, one suspects, knew very well that there was a mass market of jilted middle-class women just waiting for someone to sing about their tedious heartache and burgeoning, broody psychosis, so she did what any self-respecting businesswoman would do and wrote a hit song about it.
But that doesn’t matter – art and commerce are intimately linked, after all, and “You Oughta Know” remains a classic of accessible and bad-tempered mid-90s pop-rock. Alanis attempts the same trick, though less effectively, on “Right Through You”, which is apparently aimed at a record executive she became romantically involved with as a teenager, but who then gave her the cold shoulder, both as a lover and an artist (“you took a long hard look at my ass / and then played golf for a while”). The moment of triumph comes at the end, with her return as “a zillionaire” who sticks it to the wayward daddy figure, thereby briefly and satisfyingly tapping into the errant Elektra complexes of millions of middle American women with college degrees and professional aspirations.
However, though the men who dumped Alanis get it in the neck on Jagged Little Pill, the men who actually want to be with her don’t fare much better. When she’s not vowing holy retribution against some cold-hearted asshole who left, she’s chastising and emasculating the cloying man-children who stay. On the jaunty pop-country of “Not the Doctor”, she tells off some drip for his insufferable neediness (“you’re a very big boy now / I don’t want to be your mother”) and tiresome addictions (“mind the empty bottle with the holes along the bottom”). Similarly, the album’s closer, “Wake Up”, tears into a complacent slacker (“you sit and you wait to receive”) who is unresponsive in bed (“no amount of my insistence could make you try tonight”) and inattentive beyond it (“there’s no fundamental excuse for the granted that I’m taken for”).
That said, the gender politics of Jagged Little Pill are not restricted to a mere orgy of First World (and first semester) feminist misandry. Or, at least, one track on the album isn’t. “Head over Feet” is a wholesome and uplifting love song about developing romantic feelings for someone who, for once, is not completely immature and dysfunctional. The sudden chord change in the chorus, from chirpy and upbeat to cataclysmic, at the exact point when Alanis sings “head over feet”, also forecasts a self-reflective grasp of her own tendency to premature idealisation and, thus, to engineering the demise of her relationships when the rose-tinted glasses are inevitably removed. It’s one of few moments on Jagged Little Pill where she not only offers a positive view of men, but also fleetingly accepts her own share of responsibility for the interpersonal catastrophes that are the album’s main subject matter.
Though not its only subject matter, because many of the songs here deal with what a charitable observer (or a cynical record executive) might describe as its progenitor’s ‘philosophy’. This is first visited upon the listener on “All I Really Want”, the self-consciously and self-congratulatorily quirky opener, in which Alanis treats us to some classic mid-90s Elizabeth Wurtzel-style therapy speak (“why are you so petrified of silence?”), shares some of her half-baked views on the state of the nation (“I am frightened by the corrupted ways of this land”), and expresses hope in its certain redemption through nebulous new age woo woo (“I am fascinated by the spiritual man / I am humbled by his humble nature”).
So far, so mid-90s 60s-throwback. Distressingly, she then proceeds to double down on this cringey pontificating with the thoroughly objectionable hit-single “Hand in my Pocket”, which offers a kind of personal manifesto of radical self-acceptance for people whose outlooks are informed largely by the work of Paulo Coelho. “What it all comes down to is that everything’s gonna be fine”, Alanis insists, whereupon the eye-rollingly inevitable mouth organ solo confirms that, lamentably, nothing could be further from the truth.
Alongside this GCSE-level philosophising, Jagged Little Pill also treats us to Alanis’ ‘social commentary’. This proves to be a hit-or-miss enterprise. At points, it’s relatively effective, such as on “Perfect”, a mopey acoustic number buried among the cavalcade of hit singles, and which comprises an unsettling crash course in how people fuck up their children. Written from the perspective of a hyper-critical parent who ceaselessly impugns their offspring that they “must try a little harder” because “that simply wasn’t good enough”, the song uncovers the basic fragile narcissism behind shrewish perfectionism (“If you’re the best, then maybe so am I”). But the reverse side of this perceptive analysis, and the point where Alanis’ reckoning with “the corrupted ways of this land” reaches its limits, is “Forgiven”, which offers a denunciation of the anti-intellectual and sexually repressive brainwashing of the Catholic church. Even in the mid-90s, this was a tired and easy ‘anti-establishment’ target, and it’s undertaken here with all the verve of a suggestible teenager who just found a dog eaten copy of “Thus Spake Zarathustra” in the school library. Yawn.
And yet for all the cod-philosophy and clumsy social commentary, there are two points on Jagged Little Pill where Alanis offers a much more compelling and complicated yin-and-yang of hope and despair. The former is articulated on the funky and quite brilliant “You Learn”, which is, to all intents and purposes, a pop song about exposure therapy, about doing things that scare you for the sake of personal growth. “I recommend biting off more than you can chew to anyone”, she intones, in the manner of a distinguished behavioural therapist, and though she compares this to swallowing a “jagged little pill”, she also maintains that bitter experience ultimately leaves us stronger.
“Ironic”, meanwhile, provides the nihilistic counterpoint to this message of empowerment – that life can suck, that it can be cruel, and that, sometimes, we can’t do a damn thing about it. “Life has a funny way of sneaking up on you when you think everything’s okay and everything’s going right”, Alanis resignedly warns, and when coupled with a plaintive acoustic guitar and some furious choruses, these remarkably dark sentiments make for a 90s pop-rock classic – though the degree to which any of the scenarios described in the lyrics could strictly be considered ironic is, of course, a question for Richard Rorty, or perhaps for one of his underpaid postdocs.
Jagged Little Pill is strewn with hits, plus a handful of sometimes-interesting acoustic numbers, and lyrics which, though frequently cringey, at least have a bit of thought behind them. Alanis Morissette, in my opinion, can be forgiven for the excruciating earnestness and gaucheness which colours much of the album; she was a mere 20 years old when she recorded it, it was her first foray into rock music, and she at least tried to say something, even if it does occasionally make me want to bite my own fist. Most notable from the perspective of rock history, though, is that this multi-million selling album perhaps represents a subtle but hugely consequential cultural and commercial shift, whereby the explosive energy of early-90s guitar music was taken out of the hands of self-destructive mavericks, and rendered more reliably and predictably monetizable. Which, if you ask me, indeed qualifies as ironic.
7/10
Highlights: “You Oughta Know”, “Head Over Feet”, “You Learn”