Alanis in Chains
June 12, 2015 6:28 AM Subscribe

Ottawa, June 1990. Alanis, 16, licence in hand, car on the brain, has signed her first record deal. She is now using her MCA money to buy a white Volkswagen Cabriolet. There’s a catch, though. She can’t get the vanity plate she wants, her manager won’t let her. “Why not?” she whines. “First of all, you’re 16,” Klovan says, “and you’re Canada’s pop princess.” So when Alanis drives to the studio, her virgin-coloured “Barbie” car displays a generic mix of numbers and letters instead of singing out the one word she wants it to: RAUNCH.

--Alanis Morissette, before the making of Jagged Little Pill.
posted by almostmanda (163 comments total) 25 users marked this as a favorite

For convenience: Too Hot - Alanis Morissette
posted by almostmanda at 6:31 AM on June 12, 2015 [2 favorites]

Wow, I had no idea that she was a pop star before she made Jagged Little Pill. This article was really interesting, and pretty sad - especially this part:
Career pressure had led her to develop an eating disorder between the ages of 14 and 18. “I recall being called to a meeting at the recording studio,” she said, “and the person said, ‘I know I called you to redo vocals, but I actually wanted to talk to you about your weight. You can’t be successful if you’re fat.’”

I can't imagine.

I also remember listening to her JLP tape (tape!) so much that I wore the sucker out. Hard to believe that was 20 years ago.

Thanks for the post.
posted by sockermom at 6:50 AM on June 12, 2015 [1 favorite]

Alanis Morissette’s first hometown gig for Jagged Little Pill was held in the spring of 1995 at Zaphod Beeblebrox

Man, to have been at that show. I spent so much time at Zaphod's just before that.

Wow, I had no idea that she was a pop star before she made Jagged Little Pill.

I assume you're not Canadian? Anyway, yeah. For those who watched How I Met Your Mother Alanis is basically the inspiration for the whole Robin Sparkles flash-back sub-plot. The episode where she becomes "Robin Daggers" is basically this article. Well, satirized.

I mean, you oughta know.
posted by GuyZero at 6:54 AM on June 12, 2015 [38 favorites]

wow, I did not even know that she had had some Debbie Gibson-esque prehistory
posted by thelonius at 6:56 AM on June 12, 2015

This is really great, thank you! It explains a lot about how she sang with such amazing anger. I owned this CD and listened to You Oughta Know probably four times a day when I was like twelve and thirteen and I also felt very, very angry at a lot of things, including the fact that I was being judged for my body and very sexualized by older men and also that I wasn't supposed to be a slut who actually gave in to my own desires because I shouldn't really own my own body and that song really, cliched as it is, spoke to me. She obviously went through more than I did, and certainly more than I had at that point, but it also reflected a lot of things for a lot of young women. Thanks for posting this!

Also, the footnotes (side notes?) are fantastic.
posted by Mrs. Pterodactyl at 6:57 AM on June 12, 2015 [8 favorites]

One Week One Band is looking at Jagged Little Pill this week. Annie Zaleski also wrote about the album recently.

At first I found the headline for Zaleski's article a little bold and provocative, but then I remembered the material involving the Catholic church, as well as her condemnation of the A&R rep who abused her and threw her away. Alanis isn't my thing, but she gets written off as just an angry girl in a bad relationship when there was clearly more going on.
posted by pxe2000 at 6:58 AM on June 12, 2015 [1 favorite]

"Morissette was a palatable grunge package who filled a hole for emo sorority girls who knew what it was like to be sad but laughing, brave but chickenshit. With more than 33 million copies sold as of 2009, Jagged Little Pill is one of the best-selling albums of all time. It topped the international charts and won Album of the Year at the Grammys."

Who knew there were so many emo sorority girls?
posted by three blind mice at 7:06 AM on June 12, 2015 [11 favorites]

I don't know.
*ducks*
posted by Mezentian at 7:11 AM on June 12, 2015 [10 favorites]

SLIME
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 7:13 AM on June 12, 2015 [13 favorites]

Being slimed by feckless fecal fear mongering?

You can't buy that for a Barth Burger.
posted by Mezentian at 7:15 AM on June 12, 2015 [10 favorites]

You Oughta Know probably four times a day when I was like twelve and thirteen and I also felt very, very angry at a lot of things,

Even without those experiences or really any experiences like Alanis Morisette's at all, "You Oughta Know" is still a perfect song. The pain, and anger and confusion comes through so completely; you listen to it and genuinely wonder how it's possible that Dave Coulier is still alive. It's easy to forget in a time when it's a karaoke standard, but it's a phenomenal song.
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 7:16 AM on June 12, 2015 [11 favorites]

and genuinely wonder how it's possible that Dave Coulier is still alive.

I have two words:
Fuller.
House.
posted by Mezentian at 7:18 AM on June 12, 2015

D'aaaiiiIIIII heard that!
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 7:18 AM on June 12, 2015 [7 favorites]

I work with someone whose last name is Barth, and I am very very good all day long and don't even let the giggles out loud.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 7:19 AM on June 12, 2015 [5 favorites]

I guess you're Hobo Humpin slobo babe.

Sorry, between this and Montage Of Heck, tonight, I am pretty much in Portland.
posted by Mezentian at 7:24 AM on June 12, 2015

Even without those experiences or really any experiences like Alanis Morisette's at all, "You Oughta Know" is still a perfect song.

Fun fact: Flea's bass is out of tune for the entire song. This may actually enhance its cathartic quality, but YMMV.
posted by Xavier Xavier at 7:25 AM on June 12, 2015 [3 favorites]

Yeah the Popstar thing really made it hard for me to take Jagged Little Pill at face value. It was shocking to me that it took off like it did. The 90s were a cynical time for me, and I took it as manufactured to appeal to the grunge generation.

Anyways I figured You Ought To Know was about DJ Dusty for years.
posted by Hoopo at 7:26 AM on June 12, 2015 [1 favorite]

you listen to it and genuinely wonder how it's possible that Dave Coulier is still alive.

Yes! The pain and anger and frustration and bewilderment in that is SO REAL! You told me you'd hold me until you die, 'til you die, but you're still alive -- HOW CAN THIS BE? I believed you! I loved and trusted you and I can't even process that I was betrayed, I'm still just angry and confused. You're not holding me so you must be dead -- but you're not. You're still alive?

Also, totally right that it's NOT fair to deny her of the cross she bears. Sorry if you're embarrassed, asshole, but you can't act like I'm the unreasonable one here when you've done this to me. It almost feels like a very healthy response to being gaslit; he used her and abandoned her and then tries to be like "it's not a big deal, calm down, you're overreacting" as if because she's young and female her feelings aren't valid? Fuck that noise! You scream at him Alanis, scream at him for all of us who have been hurt and told we're wrong to express our suffering for what's been done to us.
posted by Mrs. Pterodactyl at 7:32 AM on June 12, 2015 [36 favorites]

As much as I loved the huge radio singles off that album, it was the darker songs off it that I still love the most. Particularly Forgiven and Perfect. I was a little too young at the time to have some of the more adult experiences she was talking about (though like a lot of people, I had my own stuff going on), but I understood entirely the feelings she was expressing - the sensations of being trapped, dismissed, disbelieved. Being female and young, and the ways that could turn poisonous.

It was so different to everything else I was being exposed to on the radio, so bluntly unapologetic about how this stuff she was singing about was such bullshit, and she wasn't making any bones about being pissed off about it. It sort of gave me permission to be the same, and had a fair bit to do with me not feeling quite as much like being Nice and Liked were the biggest goals I should be reaching for.

I'm very appreciative of that, and the way it led to me having a bit of backbone where I might otherwise have folded when I was still a young, unsure teenager.

Also, the songs are still killer.
posted by pseudonymph at 7:35 AM on June 12, 2015 [8 favorites]

Hands Clean is my favorite Alanis song, and it was very bizarre when it was a hit that was being played on the radio and in bars. If you're not parsing the lyrics closely it sounds like a generic breakup song, and IME many people still think that's what is it. It's kind of a cipher of someone's potential past sexual abuse--anyone who has experienced that immediately recognizes the grooming language for what it is. My boyfriend was shocked when I pointed it out to him.
posted by almostmanda at 7:37 AM on June 12, 2015 [16 favorites]

She's a local (Canadian) girl who made it big, after all.

But has she been on Degrassi? (Apparently)

CONCLUSION: MADE GOOD.
posted by Mezentian at 7:37 AM on June 12, 2015 [3 favorites]

I graduated from high school (in Canada) in '96. These days, I occasionally do karaoke. I promise you, if you take a Canadian woman from my generation, plug You Oughta Know into the karaoke machine, and hand her the mic, shit will get real.
posted by dry white toast at 7:37 AM on June 12, 2015 [32 favorites]

I'm about the same age as Alanis (sorry... I just know her by her first name) and Jagged Little Pill was never taken seriously.

Now that I'm in my forties I think we were all a little too hard on her. She's a local (Canadian) girl who made it big, after all.

Do you think maybe she was never taken seriously because she was a young woman (whose fans were young women) and in general young women are not taken seriously?

Also, if you think "She's a local girl who made it big" is the only reason to show her any respect, I'd like to ask you to reconsider why you never thought she deserved any in the first place.
posted by Mrs. Pterodactyl at 7:38 AM on June 12, 2015 [23 favorites]

JLP is still a powerful record. Anecdotally, I was utterly shocked to hear my copy of JLP blasting from my daughter's bedroom one day. We're talking about a girl whose taste in music was pretty much the christian-rock group du jour, and Shania Twain. This is a girl who would never think to say "fuck" or any other swear word. JLP, though, really stuck its hooks in her.

Kids can surprise you, though. I once just sort of sung to myself "Oh, make me over..." and my daughter sung back "I'm all I wanna be. A walking study, in demonology..." That was a proud little moment for me.
posted by Thorzdad at 7:41 AM on June 12, 2015 [17 favorites]

I remember first hearing "You Oughta Know" on the radio and being astounded. "Man, this woman is PISSED!"

Anyway, I like Alannis, and I think Jagged Little Pill holds up as well or better as most of the albums that came out in '95.
posted by Chrysostom at 7:42 AM on June 12, 2015 [2 favorites]

I'm about the same age as Alanis (sorry... I just know her by her first name) and Jagged Little Pill was never taken seriously.

Your Canada was clearly not my Canada. I even have a niece named after her.
posted by srboisvert at 7:47 AM on June 12, 2015 [4 favorites]

Do you think maybe she was never taken seriously because she was a young woman (whose fans were young women) and in general young women are not taken seriously?

I think it has more to do with her teenybopper pop roots. That was her brand, and in the era of grunge and industrial music back then nobody is going to admit to like Alanis. As well, Jagged Little Pill, while filled with great pop hooks was produced a little too slickly... almost as many slick pop hooks as Nevermind.

Anyway, back in the early 90's there were a number of popular female acts - PJ Harvey, Bikini Kill, Sleater-Kinney, Sonic Youth with Kim Deal, Juliana Hatfield, Bjork, Babes in Toyland...

It's not a huge list and obviously rock is very much male-dominated, but I think her lack of credibility back then was more to do with her teen idol roots. It's a brand she couldn't escape (eg, still think of her as Alanis).
posted by Nevin at 7:47 AM on June 12, 2015 [6 favorites]

Your Canada was clearly not my Canada.

UVic was like that. No frats at UVic, so that may be part of it...

And I also spent a lot of time at CFUV. I was an indie-rock nerd.
posted by Nevin at 7:48 AM on June 12, 2015

Do you think maybe she was never taken seriously because she was a young woman (whose fans were young women) and in general young women are not taken seriously?

I think it has more to do with her teenybopper pop roots.

I don't think this is the rebuttal you believe it to be.
posted by Mrs. Pterodactyl at 7:49 AM on June 12, 2015 [30 favorites]

So while I'm not in her core demographic -- I expect that painfully sincere 80s metal filled the same niche for me -- I totally get that that niche needs filling and that for some folks she filled it admirably. Which is to say that I don't intend any disrespect towards her or folks what really liked JLP, only to highlight the towering perfection of her later career.

Anyway, suppose she wasn't quite herself. Suppose she had had a normal life and career as an accountant or something until, oh, 2010 or so, at which point she was somehow offered a chance to go back in time to any point in her life and start over from that point. She could have gone back and, say, actually filmed Stephen Harper eating live kittens like we totally know he does or otherwise made some serious change in our world.

Alls I am saying is that if she had decided to go back to when she was 10 or so and embark on an entertainment career, establishing the life and career that we're familiar with, solely as an extended windup to the punchline of her version of My Humps, she would have chosen wisely. Because... damn.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 7:50 AM on June 12, 2015 [4 favorites]

Jagged Little Pill is the sane person's reaction to the insanity of taking a real complicated imperfect human being and turning them into an object to be sold. Her 'teeniebopper roots' were absolutely the crucible that forged the album. It's the same cry as Splendid's from Fury Road. WE ARE NOT THINGS. In a popular culture that almost invariably treats women as objects, is it a surprise that it was such a huge hit?
posted by leotrotsky at 7:53 AM on June 12, 2015 [11 favorites]

I'm about the same age as Alanis (sorry... I just know her by her first name) and Jagged Little Pill was never taken seriously.

I'm only five years younger than her, and you and I have had incredibly different experiences. JLP was taken super seriously in my high school, and still when running across it in CD/iTunes collections of friends, it's almost the only 'high school album' that not a single person is embarrassed to have. Case in point, just last week I was hanging out with a friend, was flipping through his iTunes...

"what the fuck is Big Shiny Tunes 3 doing here?"
"Don't judge me. I digitized everything when I got rid of my CDs and I hate deleting."
"MuchDance?"
"Fuck off."
"JAGGED LITTLE PILL OMG"
"YES. PRESS PLAY."
(I pressed play)
(We rocked out)

And looking at it, 1995 wasn't a bad year for music.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 7:54 AM on June 12, 2015 [12 favorites]

'I'm about the same age as Alanis (sorry... I just know her by her first name) and Jagged Little Pill was never taken seriously.

Now that I'm in my forties I think we were all a little too hard on her. She's a local (Canadian) girl who made it big, after all.'

'Anyway, back in the early 90's there were a number of popular female acts - PJ Harvey, Bikini Kill, Sleater-Kinney, Sonic Youth with Kim Deal, Juliana Hatfield, Bjork, Babes in Toyland...'

You know where I wasn't hearing most of these? On commercial radio in Australia, which was more or less all I had access to (beyond the local TV music shows) in my section of Australia. You know who I was hearing? Alanis.

I suggest to you that you are universalising your experience, in a way that might be blinding you a little.
posted by pseudonymph at 7:57 AM on June 12, 2015 [8 favorites]

I can't remember the last time I listened to "You Oughta Know," so I just popped it on, and ... man. That is some performance, and a killer production. So dry and close and raw. The rest of it's got more than a little whiff of the 90s to it, but man, those vocals.
posted by uncleozzy at 7:59 AM on June 12, 2015 [2 favorites]

Yeah, I couldn't get past "Too Hot" etc. I'm younger than Alanis (and Nevin but not fffm), but that song was a choice that reflected a wish to be famous that exceeded a wish to make good music. Thoroughly untrustworthy, especially in the grunge era.
posted by cotton dress sock at 7:59 AM on June 12, 2015

still really like "hands in my pocket" - i think it's the best expression of a certain period in any young adult's life i've ever heard
posted by pyramid termite at 8:01 AM on June 12, 2015 [3 favorites]

There was a girl I went to grade school with who, in that interregnum summer between grades 8 and 9, went from an average, un-notable person to this Goth'ed out teenager. To me it happened overnight. And it took a long time before whenever I looked at her I didn't start by thinking "what happened to her?" (not that anything was wrong with her, but at that age I found it hard to understand anything to do with fashion. whatever)

For a certain slice of the Canadian population who were actually aware of Alanis as pop starlet I think it's nearly impossible to look at her and not wonder the same thing - the dichotomy is seemingly unreconcilable. And of course, it isn't, she's just a normal person who changed as she grew up but unlike most of us she write a record about it.

I'm actually kind of amazed how many people here still have strong feelings about this album. I never would have guessed.
posted by GuyZero at 8:01 AM on June 12, 2015 [3 favorites]

Anyway, back in the early 90's there were a number of popular female acts - PJ Harvey, Bikini Kill, Sleater-Kinney, Sonic Youth with Kim Deal, Juliana Hatfield, Bjork, Babes in Toyland...

I think the question is "taken seriously by whom", because each of those groups/artists was taken seriously by a different group, and with the exception of Bjork, none was really mainstream. (Kim Deal was part of Sonic Youth - sort of mainstream - but Sonic Youth wasn't positioned as a female-dominated band).

Bikini Kill, Sleater-Kinney (who were later and very much heirs to riot grrrl), Juliana Hatfield, L7, etc - those were all "taken seriously" in alternative or punk or minor label circles, most of which were difficult to access for the younger girls that Alanis Morissette probably spoke to most strongly. To get a Bikini Kill record, for example, you either had to have access to an independent record store which stocked small label punk or you had to have access to your own bank account so you could write a check and order by mail. (I mean, unless your parents would order that stuff for you - mine certainly never would have, although I was old enough to have my own bank account by then.) Girls who lived in the city and/or had a lot of independence as young teens, sure - but not most girls.

Alanis Morisette also wasn't taken seriously in the way that Bikini Kill or Babes in Toyland or the others were because her famous songs were simply not as interesting or ambitious as theirs, even though they were very competent. She worked in a pretty standard slightly-left-of-radio-rock idiom, she has a good but not wildly unusual voice (unlike, say, PJ Harvey or Bjork), her songs just...weren't as subtle or weird or creative or - god knows - political. I'm not saying that they can't carry a lot of weight and meaning (probably the most meaningful music I listened to as a young teen was Midnight Oil, after all) but they are really very different from the small label stuff that was coming out at the time.

A better comparison might be Liz Phair, who was taken a bit more seriously because of all the cussing but was - IMO - not as interesting or rewarding. I think that's where you really see that there's some cultural discrimination; Liz Phair was transgressive because she said "blowjob" a lot and was (at least in the stuff that I was reading and hearing at the time) basically more alluring for a male audience for that reason.
posted by Frowner at 8:02 AM on June 12, 2015 [24 favorites]

I think one of the problems I had with taking JLP and Alanis seriously was the fact that it seemed a little watered down after hearing, say, Rid of Me or Live Through This or Pussy Whipped. But if you didn't have access to those records, or if they were a little too unpolished or grotesque for you, it was good that Alanis was out there as well.
posted by pxe2000 at 8:02 AM on June 12, 2015 [1 favorite]

I'm not sure how much her pop career was choice and how much of it was "hey we have a cute girl here who can sing, how do we milk her for money?"

It's kind of interesting to compare Alanis with Britney Spears. Very similar initial career trajectories.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 8:02 AM on June 12, 2015

I hated Ironic. It seemed out of step with the marvelous guitar riffs that scream hate and despair in You Oughta Know, and what I can only assume is her native Canuck accent coming out as she negotiates the trickier parts of the vocals, maintaining a forceful spite through them. What a song!
posted by Slap*Happy at 8:02 AM on June 12, 2015 [1 favorite]

It's kind of interesting to compare Alanis with Britney Spears. Very similar initial career trajectories.

Debbie Gibson would be the more direct comparison. Debbie Gibson snapping and going on a mall concert killing spree.
posted by GuyZero at 8:04 AM on June 12, 2015 [3 favorites]

1995 wasn't a bad year for music

I'm still waiting for this wave of 1995 nostalgia/Mad Max enthusiasm to result in someone doing an oral history/retrospective of the California Love video but so far I've seen nothing. Get on it, internet!
posted by almostmanda at 8:05 AM on June 12, 2015 [7 favorites]

She's also really, really fun live. Amazing audience interaction, and the times I've seen her she's obviously been having a whale of a time onstage, which is infectious.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 8:05 AM on June 12, 2015

Not buying it, fffm. When I was around the age she was around Too Hot etc., I had an opportunity for something gross like that and turned it down because even then, I could see it was inherently gross. Teenaged girls aren't necessarily that blind.
posted by cotton dress sock at 8:05 AM on June 12, 2015

I can assure you, she was never viewed as "Canada's pop princess" - that's a huge stretch.
posted by davebush at 8:06 AM on June 12, 2015 [1 favorite]

I can only assume is her native Canuck accent coming out as she negotiates the trickier parts of the vocals

Oh god the alleged Canadian accent.

I don't hear it, but then again of course I wouldn't. It's possible that she has a slight Ottawa Valley accent although she doesn't sound like my relatives from the area who have a pretty distinctive accent.
posted by GuyZero at 8:06 AM on June 12, 2015

Yep, Nevin you should probably not generalize your experience to the rest of us. I'm a little younger than you, grew up on the other coast, and JLP was huge to me and my female friends. My guy friends were all into Dylan and The Beatles - I'd be seriously surprised and impressed if they listened to any women or female-fronted bands. If you asked them, I'm sure they would sound exactly like you.

JLP was one of the last tapes I bought and used to switch between Dookie and JLP while doing the dishes. It was so satisfying to hear a woman's anger.
posted by hydrobatidae at 8:06 AM on June 12, 2015 [4 favorites]

Anyway, back in the early 90's there were a number of popular female acts - PJ Harvey, Bikini Kill, Sleater-Kinney, Sonic Youth with Kim Deal, Juliana Hatfield, Bjork, Babes in Toyland...

I think we have different definitions for the word "popular" - Bjork was by far the most popular of these but the popularity she had was more as a token weirdo than as a mainstream force. And Kim Deal was in the Pixies, Kim Gordon was in Sonic Youth.

Jagged Little Pill sold tens of millions of albums (33 mil by 2009, according the FA.)
posted by dirtdirt at 8:07 AM on June 12, 2015 [6 favorites]

Yeah, I think a lot of people are against Jagged Little Pill because it was popular and not as necessarily "as good" (for some definition) than other "better" acts from the same time. And while that may be true from my perspective as well, what's important is that it was popular at all and as popular as it was.

And I do think it was important, especially for women and men slightly younger than myself. And I think that's awesome.
posted by MCMikeNamara at 8:09 AM on June 12, 2015 [6 favorites]

Debbie Gibson was different, because the pop she sang was the pop she actually wrote. And it was good pop, for my money. (Alanis' own songs were good too, it was just that issue of inauthenticity that bugged my 90s self.)
posted by cotton dress sock at 8:14 AM on June 12, 2015 [1 favorite]

It occurs to me that when you encounter a bunch of pop music significantly after the fact, the cultural landscape of that music tends to be obscured.

So, for instance, when I'm listening to music from about 1980 - 1988, it's all basically a giant jumble of eighties stuff - sure, I can distinguish the social position of, like, a Madonna track from that of an Arthur Russell number, but there's a huge amount of stuff in the middle where it's all, like, Orange Juice and Scritti Politti and Manic Street Preachers and Big Audio Dynamite and the Jam and Kid Creole and so on and I have no real idea how much of which the average person would have heard, what was considered critically respectable, how accessible it all was, etc.

So I imagine that the differences that are so readily apparent for me between Alanis Morrissette and Bjork and PJ Harvey are not immediately obvious if you weren't there. (I mean, they're obviously different musically, but they are all "female musicians who had at least some pop success at roughly the same time and an interested but not subculturally obsessed person might easily have heard their songs".)
posted by Frowner at 8:14 AM on June 12, 2015 [8 favorites]

Girlfriend: This is why white girls need Beyonce. The last thing you want to do is remind your ex of the mess he left when he went away. Same problem with Adele.
posted by Parasite Unseen at 8:17 AM on June 12, 2015

Popularity of the name "Alanis" in the U.S.
posted by Kabanos at 8:22 AM on June 12, 2015 [7 favorites]

And really, you can see how superior music access is today - there's no reason that a girl right now could not get into old nineties music and listen to Alanis Morrisette and Bikini Kill and Lush and L7 and The Blue Up? and Huggybear and Mazzy Star and Madonna, whereas in the nineties it would have been really difficult to listen to a similarly broad range of music from the late seventies and eighties (especially music by women! when I think of the endless trouble I went to in looking for old eighties compilations of small label stuff by women, Diamanda Galas, etc!

Definitely this is a much, much better era to be a girl listening to music.
posted by Frowner at 8:22 AM on June 12, 2015 [12 favorites]

>I think it has more to do with her teenybopper pop roots.

I don't think this is the rebuttal you believe it to be.

Well there is a distinct difference between the bubblegum anthems of her Alanis days and the sound of Jagged Little Pill. It's a 180.

Anyway, I'm not arguing that Jagged Little Pill wasn't popular. And I'll readily admit that I was a music snob back in the day.
posted by Nevin at 8:22 AM on June 12, 2015 [1 favorite]

Debbie Gibson was different, because the pop she sang was the pop she actually wrote

You might want to learn more about Alanis before tarring her with the brush you're using. She has written or co-written every song she's ever released.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 8:30 AM on June 12, 2015 [2 favorites]

I'm referring to the bubblegum pop stuff. Or did she write Always Too Hot?
posted by cotton dress sock at 8:30 AM on June 12, 2015

I kinda liked Alanis in the pop star stage, because I liked Debbie Gibson (who wrote her own songs), but I also liked a lot of other bands too. As a Canadian her age, I loved that she'd been on You Can't Do That on Television.

When I was in university, friends were writing me to tell me she was appearing at Zaphod's. I couldn't believe that could be possible. I'd heard rumblings that she was making a come back when I was living there, but, when I went back to university on the West Coast, I was shocked to hear she was at the club where I did Blue Fuck shooters.

Soon enough, I had a copy of JLP. I was living with a guy and he hated, hated, hated JLP with a passion. I was the first of my friends to get really into it, but, pretty soon, everybody at my West Coast university seemed to know it. Now I realize how much of that resentment from my boyfriend had to do with his value system - it's only as an adult that I look back and can see how much misogyny I put up with before he turned physically violent. Alanis Morissette fit well with my developing feminist strength and I played that album a ton after he became violent and I left. My friends played that album for me to help me get through leaving, which meant turning away from my family's value system (that I had sinned and that I should marry and stay) and instead not seeing myself as a slut, but as a strong woman who was moving on. So Thank U.
posted by Chaussette and the Pussy Cats at 8:31 AM on June 12, 2015 [18 favorites]

I think it was taken seriously, but perhaps those people above a certain age did not fully respect it in the way that whatever generational representative of the angsty/awkward teen experience does not tend to sit well with the older crowd.

Yeah, that could be it. I was too old to appreciate it by then. I think Joshua Tree was the big, big hit when I was in high school.
posted by Nevin at 8:33 AM on June 12, 2015 [1 favorite]

What I remember about the album the most is the hidden track; I had JLP on one evening (and let me be honest, I was in university when it came out, but the raw emotion/anger in You Oughta Know was awesome and resonated with me as a young man coming out of some rough breakups). Anyways, I had the tunes going while I was doing something on the computer - probably playing a game when I should've been writing a paper - and the last track finishes (which is an alternate version of You Ougtha Know) and I just sit in the silence for a moment, clicking away at whatever I am doing, planning to change the CD in a moment or two (I was probably playing Civ and was in full grip of Just One More Turn). And then the "Your House" a cappella hidden track that I had no clue existed starts up, which is just like this amazingly awesome coda to the song. Or maybe it's not, maybe it was just the sheer joy of discovering a hidden bit of music on the CD; I never shared that discovery with anyone because I didn't want to ruin that feeling by learning that everyone else already knew about it, and here's nubs finally figuring it out.
posted by nubs at 8:34 AM on June 12, 2015 [7 favorites]

I'm referring to the bubblegum pop stuff. Or did she write Always Too Hot?

In 1991 MCA Records Canada released Morissette's debut album, Alanis, in Canada only. Morissette co-wrote every track on the album with its producer, Leslie Howe.

...

In 1992, she released her second album, Now Is the Time, a ballad-driven record that featured less glitzy production than Alanis and contained more thoughtful lyrics.[22] Morissette wrote the songs with the album's producer, Leslie Howe, and Serge Côté

(wikipedia)
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 8:36 AM on June 12, 2015 [2 favorites]

Looking back as someone who worked at a hipster record store when JLP came out...I really think part of my skepticism about the album was that it was on a major label, quite honestly, and her collaborator had such strong Industry Establishment cred. I didn't know about her pop past until later on, but at the time people like me were very concerned about "authenticity" (because we were very young, and a lot of super weird manipulative shit was happening with bands signing to major labels and whatnot) and I think my snap assumption was "this girl is being POSITIONED for fame, not out there scrabbling for it, pass".

From the vantage point of not even that many years later I had a better understanding of the actual world, and developed an appreciation for Alanis as an artist. But the major/indie thing was a serious shibboleth at the time this album came out and probably a lot of young women like me felt like somehow JLP could not possibly be from the same place of the soul as artists who had an indie pedigree, even as they were all scooped up by major labels too.
posted by padraigin at 8:36 AM on June 12, 2015 [9 favorites]

Ok, she wrote it. Which further undermines the flip turn into leather pants (speaking from the 90s here, again).
posted by cotton dress sock at 8:38 AM on June 12, 2015

The 180 from the bubblegum pop to Jagged Little Pill is what makes it so artistically significant! The teen pop doesn't undermine the value of JPL at all. I don't think Alanis could have made JLP without her experiences as a teenager.
posted by stowaway at 8:39 AM on June 12, 2015 [2 favorites]

A friend of mine booked musical acts for a tiny student pub in Kingston, Ontario when we were all in school, and he remembers passing on Alanis juuuuuust before "You Oughta Know" broke because he didn't think she'd draw enough of a crowd.
posted by The Card Cheat at 8:39 AM on June 12, 2015 [2 favorites]

That's exactly it for us oldies, padraigin. Ani Difranco was a contemporary of hers, for e.g.
posted by cotton dress sock at 8:40 AM on June 12, 2015 [3 favorites]

But the major/indie thing was a serious shibboleth at the time this album came out and probably a lot of young women like me felt like somehow JLP could not possibly be from the same place of the soul as artists who had an indie pedigree, even as they were all scooped up by major labels too.

I agree. The whole "alternative" and "slacker" ethos was big back then, even if it was just marketing.
posted by Nevin at 8:42 AM on June 12, 2015 [3 favorites]

Love her. She's one of those rare woman artists who sings from a woman's pov, rather than the patriarchy-sanctioned woman's pov (lookin at you Katy Perry).

You Oughta Know is my karaoke favorite. You'd be surprised how many people in the crowd really get it, and it shows in their faces. Even after all these years. But Hands Clean is by far my fave.
posted by St. Peepsburg at 8:45 AM on June 12, 2015 [5 favorites]

Ani Difranco was a contemporary of hers, for e.g.

Ani Difranco would have been more popular with my social circle back in the early 90's than Alanis Morissette. Difranco frequently played UVic, and the shows always sold out.
posted by Nevin at 8:50 AM on June 12, 2015

I may have been coming from an entirely different perspective than many people here, but discovering JLP was a BFD for me. (Granted, I was also in middle school.) It was one of the most transgressive, slightly scary, overall awesome things I had ever heard. In my Southern U.S. city, there was an aura of mystique and judgey disapproval around the album - people were all "don't let your kids listen to this!" I still remember hearing You Oughta Know and realizing it tapped into some things I didn't even know I felt and holy shit, I wanted to hear it again. I now realize it was an important jumping off point for my own nascent feminism - for that I will be forever grateful, even if I now know that maybe it isn't really ironic.
posted by bookgirl18 at 8:54 AM on June 12, 2015 [3 favorites]

The year If you told me in 2015 we'd be discussing.... wait...:
Alanis Morissette

You are a rocking maniac
You are a singing hyena
You are a rock star in Jesus' name
You can really rock Saddam Hussein's ass

If you told me in 1991 we'd be talking Alanis Morissette For Serious, I'd be confused.

In 2015 apparently Billy Ray's spooge fertilised an egg, was born, raised, (days spent in West Pilly: Not sure) had a career as a Disney "Princess" and is now a pot-promoting gender-queer poster child.... and made "bangerz" a real word.

Is 1990 me confused?
Hell, yes.
posted by Mezentian at 8:54 AM on June 12, 2015 [2 favorites]

Ok, she wrote it. Which further undermines the flip turn into leather pants (speaking from the 90s here, again).

Are you saying it's not possible for an artist to do something that feels true to them at the time, and then at a later time do something that also feels true to them? That artists can't change?

I feel like her first album was (as I said) a bunch of people seeing dollar signs, and she was probably pushed into a mould. Extruded Audio Product. Then she turned around and wrote something that was authentically hers.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 9:03 AM on June 12, 2015 [1 favorite]

I'd be more sympathetic to the claim of JLP's lack of authenticity if Alanis hadn't spent the past 20 years proving herself. Digging your heels in on it now seems a little pointless.
posted by almostmanda at 9:07 AM on June 12, 2015 [8 favorites]

I still remember hearing You Oughta Know and realizing it tapped into some things I didn't even know I felt and holy shit, I wanted to hear it again. I now realize it was an important jumping off point for my own nascent feminism - for that I will be forever grateful, even if I now know that maybe it isn't really ironic.

I said this somewhere else already, but part of my experience with Alanis Morrissette absolutely included the realization that she was, for other girls, what riot grrl and woman-fronted punk in general had been for me--that distillation of your sense that something isn't quite right about how the world treats you because you're female, put into words. Then I was like, feminism by whatever means necessary, even if it has to sneak into the Billboard Top Ten and thus be rendered utterly uncool forever (or until I get over my dumb youthful prejudices against popular things).
posted by padraigin at 9:07 AM on June 12, 2015 [6 favorites]

And also, in hindsight I wonder why I (and my cohort) never applied the same standard to Tori Amos? She had a shitty cheeseball past, she was on a major label. But somehow we had no trouble accepting her as an authentic voice of feminine power and I can only think that maybe it had something to do with her being a bit older than Alanis, and maybe not being associated from the jump with older male producers.
posted by padraigin at 9:11 AM on June 12, 2015 [2 favorites]

I'd be more sympathetic to the claim of JLP's lack of authenticity if Alanis hadn't spent the past 20 years proving herself. Digging your heels in on it now seems a little pointless.

Yeah, it's probably unfair, but those were my feels back then. It's just a thing that stuck, from way back when, when the context was such that it seemed to matter.
posted by cotton dress sock at 9:11 AM on June 12, 2015 [1 favorite]

For convenience: Too Hot - Alanis Morissette

yes, the wonders of the tx81z's lately bass, used on yet another dance pop song

they weren't exactly coming up with something new on that one
posted by pyramid termite at 9:15 AM on June 12, 2015

padraigin: "And also, in hindsight I wonder why I (and my cohort) never applied the same standard to Tori Amos? She had a shitty cheeseball past, she was on a major label."

You probably felt bad that she kant read.
posted by Chrysostom at 9:18 AM on June 12, 2015 [3 favorites]

And also, in hindsight I wonder why I (and my cohort) never applied the same standard to Tori Amos?

she didn't have a shitload of top 40 hits
posted by pyramid termite at 9:24 AM on June 12, 2015 [1 favorite]

Alanis Morissette is an artist I continue to follow to this day. I look at her listed discography on Wikipedia and then look at my iTunes listings for her music and am surprised to see that I own pretty much all her albums. They don't always resonate with me, but there is ALWAYS something interesting enough going on with what she is doing that I end up buying it.

In the mid-90s, I was in an acoustic guitar coffee house duo with another guy, and we did a sort of folksy cover of You Outta Know with the lyrics unaltered. It gave me some odd Militant Queer pleasure to sing lines like "are you thinking of me while you fuck her" to audiences in my tiny hometown.
posted by hippybear at 9:25 AM on June 12, 2015

I am not a flag-waving Alanis fan, but Jagged Little Pill is a great album. That half the songs were successful singles, and I may be wrong, but I believe that she easily could have recorded more filler material and stretched this album into two albums worth of singles.
posted by 4ster at 9:26 AM on June 12, 2015 [1 favorite]

cotton dress sock: “Ok, she wrote it. Which further undermines the flip turn into leather pants (speaking from the 90s here, again).”

This is a funny thing, isn't it? I remember when Jagged Little Pill came out. The hippy-ish girl I had a crush on at school absolutely adored that album, and was telling everybody how great it was. We would get together with our guitars at lunchtime and sit in the hall and play Grateful Dead covers. I was already a little embarrassed by the album, because even as a young one I know – this isn't really cool! It's clearly pop! My authenticity senses tingled every time I heard that produced studio band play their version of grunge behind her. But I didn't have the heart to tell my crush, which was probably for the better. Still, I had the basic tenets of the cult of authenticity down. I told everybody who could listen how awful I thought dance / electronic music was, how I thought it wasn't "real" because it wasn't organic and human, or some such nonsense. I liked Phish and the Clash a whole lot, which people thought was incongruous even though it makes sense to me.

Later in the 1990s, when I went to college, I found my voice, and I was a lot more comfortable saying things were utter crap when I felt they were crap. That is, after all, the young man's inheritance in the United States. When my then-girlfriend's friend played me one of her favorite Alanis songs, which happened to be a live cover of the Police's "King of Pain," I recoiled in horror and sneered that that's not even an Alanis Morissette song at all anyway. But that was already near the end of an era in a certain way.

This was the thing about the 1990s that I notice young people born in that decade are blissfully free of: we identified ourselves by the music we listened to, to a ridiculous degree, to a degree that is only possible when music is a commodity to be procured with at least a modicum of effort. We pretended then that the music you made an effort to find out about and discover and listen to and buy said a whole lot about who you were – most supremely, purity in the exchange, in the whole relation between the artist and the listener, is the greatest indicator of the superiority of one's listening choices. Authenticity.

Strange how foreign authenticity is now that we have such a free exchange of information and music, isn't it? I met a guy a few weeks ago who has pristine first-pressing vinyl copies of the first four Can albums; that's nice and all, but I've listened to them more than he has, and I know those records better than he does. Am I more authentic? Or is he? Who the hell knows. I could go on Wikipedia right now and recite some details about Can that he never knew. The veil has fallen away from all the markers we used to trust as reliable indicators of musical devotion, and they've been revealed to be utter pretentious crap.

I look back on Alanis Morrisette now and see something utterly different than what I saw in the 1990s. In the 1990s, she was an interloper, an invader into my world, the authentic world, the world of actual rock or legitimate post-punk or something like that. (This world only just happened to be mostly male; but that was just a coincidence, wasn't it?) She was inauthentic, trying to hide her pop pedigree by adopting the fashionable alternative rock veneer. But now, looking back on Alanis Morrissette, I see a woman who was always a pop star, but who always tried to inject herself into what she did, and who successfully melded pop with rock elements in a way that was interesting. I still am not the biggest fan of Jagged Little Pill in world – but part of growing up is realizing that people can like different things, and who the hell cares if other people like this stuff. They're allowed. It is interesting for what it is, which is a sort of post-hi-nrg rock synthesis.
posted by koeselitz at 9:29 AM on June 12, 2015 [29 favorites]

And also, in hindsight I wonder why I (and my cohort) never applied the same standard to Tori Amos? She had a shitty cheeseball past, she was on a major label.

To be fair, Y KANT TORI READ sold only about 7000 copies, per Tori in an interview. Alanis was certified platinum. Most people thought that Little Earthquakes was Tori's first. Not surprising that she didn't get judged much that way--same as Gaga never got judged for the one album she released as Stephanie.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 9:30 AM on June 12, 2015 [1 favorite]

fffm: Sure, an artist can change. Her switch from dance pop to what I think I then called Nirvana lite just didn't conform with the artistic/values trajectory expected of properly "indie" artists, as Frowner and Padraigin explained (better than I can).
posted by cotton dress sock at 9:30 AM on June 12, 2015

I seem to recall that she won Best New Artist or something at the Junos in 1995 or so and that she had to go on a big campaign to them to convince them she was a new artist and not the old artist. I haven't seen this written up in years.
posted by Chaussette and the Pussy Cats at 9:31 AM on June 12, 2015

(Koeselitz too)
posted by cotton dress sock at 9:31 AM on June 12, 2015

Yeah, it's probably unfair, but those were my feels back then.

Exactly.
posted by Nevin at 9:32 AM on June 12, 2015

> Jagged Little Pill was the album for teen angst when it came out.

Not even teen! JLP was the album I chose as my "I will never listen to this again" album in the months before my mom died, when I was driving back and forth between DC (where I lived) and Baltimore (where my mom was). The rawness of the emotion on that album was perfect for those drives, since I needed to keep it together every other moment. No matter what else she does or doesn't do, I'll always be grateful to her for creating that record.
posted by rtha at 9:33 AM on June 12, 2015 [2 favorites]

Also, a propos of nothing except for the fact that I have to mention Neil Cicierega every time I get a chance, just out of respect for his abilities as a cultural historian intent on deconstructing the things I grew up with by juxtaposing them in ways that are at turns offensive and provocative, I should point out that "You Oughta Know" works rather well with the Full House theme song.
posted by koeselitz at 9:44 AM on June 12, 2015

I'd been planning to do an FPP about the 20th anniversary of the short-lived Canadian RPM "alternative" charts with youtube links for everything, but that period of Canadian music is so poorly archived on youtube that it's just too depressing to post. There's the mega-successful acts with their VEVO accounts, and then there's everything else, ripped from 8-hour VHS and uploaded in 2006 in the lowest possible resolution. (There really ought to be an online Videofact archive. Hell, maybe there is. Is there?)

I guess I could dump that abandoned FPP in here if anyone wants. (It took forever.) Warning: It's gigantic, and, again, some very crappy video quality for like 80% of it.

Anyway, relevant point being, while compiling that, I was reminded how nebulous and undefinable the term "alternative" was back then, at least in Canada; it lumped together some very strange bedfellows. There's what I think of when I think of "alternative" -- rock bands with loud guitars -- but sprinkled in amongst them are all those Lilith Fair female singer-songwriters that sort of slid past me in junior high. For the most part, the two groups don't have much in common at all. The only sense I can make of it is an early crossover: Jagged Little Pill.
posted by Sys Rq at 9:50 AM on June 12, 2015 [9 favorites]

YES POST THAT PLEASE
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 9:54 AM on June 12, 2015 [4 favorites]

Only post that if every third link is the Spoons' Romantic Traffic.
posted by GuyZero at 9:55 AM on June 12, 2015

Only post that if every third link is the Spoons' Romantic Traffic.

That came out in the eighties! (It's possibly the most eighties thing that ever eightiesed, actually.)
posted by Sys Rq at 9:58 AM on June 12, 2015 [2 favorites]

For the most part, the two groups don't have much in common at all.

Not aesthetically, no. I'd say it really came down to the indie vs. big label distinction (artificial though it may have been)/perceived authenticity whiff test, as others have said.

You should totally do that post.
posted by cotton dress sock at 10:17 AM on June 12, 2015 [1 favorite]

There's also the "writes own songs/plays own instruments" fallacy, in which artists are judged for how much agency they have over their work based on how much they create their own material. Paradoxically, artists like Hanson and Debbie Gibson were deemed inauthentic (in spite of creating their own material) where Charlotte Gainsbourg would probably be seen as authentic even if her album dropped in the early/mid aughts.
posted by pxe2000 at 10:32 AM on June 12, 2015 [2 favorites]

Sys Rq you are an immortal giant among tiny, mortal people.
posted by GuyZero at 10:40 AM on June 12, 2015 [2 favorites]

ermagerd Sys Rq

The first half of that list threw me so thoroughly into a highschool flashback that I just developed a pimple
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 10:40 AM on June 12, 2015 [11 favorites]

Sys Rq - that's my life! Thank you so much!

Notable for how few women (3?) there were and how much Celtic (>0)
posted by hydrobatidae at 10:40 AM on June 12, 2015 [1 favorite]

Notable for how few women (3?)

I count like 6 or 7 plus The Cowboy Junkies with Margo Timmins... but it's certainly not anywhere near an even split.
posted by GuyZero at 10:43 AM on June 12, 2015 [1 favorite]

psst Ashley MacIsaac

He's a twofer: Celtic and gay!
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 10:44 AM on June 12, 2015 [1 favorite]

and now I have fallen down a rabbit hole of Our Lady Peace and ROCKING OUT
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 10:45 AM on June 12, 2015 [3 favorites]

well, that's a lot of music to check out - except for the hip tracks, which i'm already well familiar with - (can't figure out why they've never caught on in the US)
posted by pyramid termite at 10:46 AM on June 12, 2015

Thanks, guys. I don't wanna hijack the thread, though; the Alanis stuff is worth talking about. Consider that comment just some contextual backround of the environment at the time.
posted by Sys Rq at 10:49 AM on June 12, 2015

and now I have fallen down a rabbit hole of Our Lady Peace and ROCKING OUT

I'll be waving my hand, watching you rock out, watching you scream!

I'm assuming this "rocking out" endeavor involves screaming? Also, I'm American, I only know one Our Lady Peace song but damn do I love it.
posted by Mrs. Pterodactyl at 10:52 AM on June 12, 2015 [2 favorites]

(I counted unique female artists not songs. But forgot/didn't know about Timmins).

Just going back to Alanis, there really weren't a lot of female alternative Canadian artists besides her. I was never into singer-songwriters and my Haligonian roots wouldn't let me be a Sarah McLauglan fan.

Another thing to mention to Americans who may not realize this but because of CanCon rules, Canadian artists get A LOT of play on the radio. So although any of these songs may never have sold a ton of records, they were really familiar through the radio.
posted by hydrobatidae at 10:53 AM on June 12, 2015 [1 favorite]

I was never into singer-songwriters and my Haligonian roots wouldn't let me be a Sarah McLauglan fan.

Oh God, the first (I think? Maybe second?) girl I ever kissed was while slow dancing to Sarah McLachlan alone in my basement. What an earnest pain in the ass I was. She wasn't into me. I really don't blame her.
posted by Mrs. Pterodactyl at 10:58 AM on June 12, 2015 [2 favorites]

I remember being in the car with my dad the first time he heard "You Oughtta Know." He is the caricature of a Texas Oilman, born in the 40s, and he literally pulled the car over, tuned out the bass to better hear the words, and had a grin across his face the whole time like he'd been waiting to hear something like that for decades.

That song hit like hell.
posted by Navelgazer at 11:01 AM on June 12, 2015 [10 favorites]

This was the thing about the 1990s that I notice young people born in that decade are blissfully free of: we identified ourselves by the music we listened to, to a ridiculous degree, to a degree that is only possible when music is a commodity to be procured with at least a modicum of effort.

I've been thinking about this a bunch lately, too, in a slightly different context, so it's interesting to encounter a different spin on an idea. I think you're right about the importance of effort, but I was thinking about it independently of that. I was thinking about being a teenager pre-internet, growing up in a fairly homogeneous suburb, and how important music videos were to our sense of identity. Do you remember The Wedge, Canadians? (Remember Simon, the "authentic" host?) That half hour was like being thrown a lifeline is our small tiny corner of the world: here are other ways of being.

completely unrelated: remember DJ Phresh Phil on YTV? Holy shit that guy was the best
posted by neuromodulator at 11:07 AM on June 12, 2015 [3 favorites]

The Wedge was where the real alternative lived, yes. (I came up in the Sook-Yin years.) Also Much East and Much West.

That's where you'd be more likely to see Alanis Morissette than Alanis Morissette.
posted by Sys Rq at 11:12 AM on June 12, 2015 [1 favorite]

I remember being uncertain of JLP until I accepted that it was a fun cathartic album.

I hate how it turned into this either/or thing. I loved (and still love) Liz Phair. She also had to deal with indie assholes undermining and sexualizing her and she's more than happy to talk about that in interviews.

It's sort of funny to see these (boring to me) authenticity arguments again as an old and see so much more clearly the ways the world dismisses the preferences young women simply because.
posted by mandymanwasregistered at 11:14 AM on June 12, 2015 [3 favorites]

Like wtf there is only room for one rocking alternalady? I want whole armies stomping along in their Docs! Mini-backpacks (or maxi-pad bags, as my friend called them) make more sense now that we have smartphones to put in them.
posted by mandymanwasregistered at 11:19 AM on June 12, 2015

Nevin I am with you 100%!! If that makes you feel any better. I'm the same age as Alanis Morissette and not a single one of my peers took her seriously at all. SFU in the 90s, though, so maybe it was a left coast thing.

>I said this somewhere else already, but part of my experience with Alanis Morrissette absolutely included the realization that she was, for other girls, what riot grrl and woman-fronted punk in general had been for me--that distillation of your sense that something isn't quite right about how the world treats you because you're female, put into words. Then I was like, feminism by whatever means necessary, even if it has to sneak into the Billboard Top Ten and thus be rendered utterly uncool forever (or until I get over my dumb youthful prejudices against popular things).

Padraigin--that's a great perspective that had never occurred to me. I was of the L7, 7 Year Bitch, Fifth Column, God is my Co-Pilot, Diesel Queens, Huggy Bear, etc. ilk so pop music--even angry pop music--wasn't going to appeal to me. Also, frankly, the shopping mall popstar history was never going to wash.

I don't know if it's even possible to listen critically to music that made a big impact in your youth and early adulthood. I can't appreciate Alanis now, because I hated her then. On the other hand, lately I've been listening the FUCK out of Liz Phair ('s first two albums) and Boss Hogg and they still sound super fresh and relevant to me, middle aged and out of touch as I am.
posted by looli at 11:20 AM on June 12, 2015 [3 favorites]

psst Ashley MacIsaac

He's a twofer: Celtic and gay!

In few weeks he's headlining at the Scottish Festival I'm organizing. I'm just a wee bit excited.
posted by Jalliah at 11:21 AM on June 12, 2015 [1 favorite]

SFU in the 90s, though, so maybe it was a left coast thing.

Back then probably the only university outside of Quebec more left-wing than UVic. I believe SFU faculty was dominated by Marxists.
posted by Nevin at 11:22 AM on June 12, 2015

I'm just a wee bit excited.

A "wee" bit? Really?
posted by GuyZero at 11:26 AM on June 12, 2015 [1 favorite]

>Back then probably the only university outside of Quebec more left-wing than UVic. I believe SFU faculty was dominated by Marxists.

That was true of some departments, notably Comms and Soc/Anth, which had all been together as one big interdisciplinary department with Psych, I think, in the 80s. But even by the end of my undergrad, though, Comms was doing a joint major with Business and it changed the tone of things considerably. By the time I was in grad school it seemed even worse--but in retrospect was probably just fine. There're still some lefties in Communcations, though. Not just the old guard, but new faculty from my co-hort who were taught by the old guard.

Glebe High in Ottawa (and some of the other schools, too, probably) still play Alanis's recording of O Canada every morning. (As part of a rotation with other versions, I'm told.)
posted by looli at 11:30 AM on June 12, 2015 [1 favorite]

I googled him. Apparently it's PJ Fresh Phil.
posted by neuromodulator at 11:30 AM on June 12, 2015

That half hour was like being thrown a lifeline is our small tiny corner of the world: here are other ways of being.

Who am I kidding, it did matter, it mattered a lot.
posted by cotton dress sock at 11:33 AM on June 12, 2015 [1 favorite]

also cfny and brave new waves on cbc
posted by cotton dress sock at 11:36 AM on June 12, 2015 [2 favorites]

No way. Kim Deal had left the pixies at this point and she was with the breeders. WAYYY better than Alanis, but definitely not as popular.

Whoops, sorry about getting my "90's Kims" mixed up. Safari was an awesome album.
posted by Nevin at 12:05 PM on June 12, 2015

No. I don't care if you didn't like JLP, but you can't say Alanis wasn't authentic, influential, and important. Maybe she wasn't important to you. Obviously she made a huge impact on us. Don't come in here and act snooty.
posted by domo at 12:05 PM on June 12, 2015 [7 favorites]

Speaking of the radio, my favorite part of the "You Oughta Know" success here in the states was the male disc jockeys' clear discomfort as they played it. The song was always, always bookended by disparaging comments, and the morning show idiots mined it for material for months. (This behavior was echoed by most of the guys I knew at the time, in my infinitely regrettable early 20s -- snide remarks, insults about Alanis's appearance/how lucky the ex in song was to be rid of her/etc., plus straight-up diving to switch the station.) What's it's to you, I asked. It's just a song. "I just don't like it," was the usual whine.

Man, I had forgotten about this. I mean, I'm a guy who definitely owned JLP and played the hell out of it, and I know this was there (there's something about the young male mind that just returns a syntax error when presented with a young woman who isn't there to be ogled for his gratification. Obviously a lot of young males never manage to fix that bug, either.)

But my buddies and I, we listened to it over and over, all the way through. We studied that shit.

This was the thing about the 1990s that I notice young people born in that decade are blissfully free of: we identified ourselves by the music we listened to, to a ridiculous degree, to a degree that is only possible when music is a commodity to be procured with at least a modicum of effort. We pretended then that the music you made an effort to find out about and discover and listen to and buy said a whole lot about who you were – most supremely, purity in the exchange, in the whole relation between the artist and the listener, is the greatest indicator of the superiority of one's listening choices. Authenticity.

Do the kids today no longer use music as subcultural signpost? What do they use, then? For a century, music was the defining element of social groups, in so many ways (my favorite museum exhibit I've ever been to was around 20 years ago at the Victoria & Albert, and was the history of fashion through the 20th century, all set up in to-scale dioramas. As you might have guessed, that meant it was actually a history of musical subcultures in the 20th century, and it was phenomenal.)
posted by Navelgazer at 12:07 PM on June 12, 2015 [1 favorite]

Yeah, I think it depends a lot on what groups of kids your talking about, but my guess is that social media, gaming and online communities are more relevant in kid's lives than musical subcultures.

But my own experience was pretty specific. As a teen in the 90's, music was a way to escape from my peers rather than bond with them; to escape the tyranny of popularity in general. It would have been hard for me to imagine, as a shy Morrissey-loving wallflower in 1995, that in 20 years the hipster music snob would be seen as an oppressive cultural figure, but I understand why that happened.
posted by ducky l'orange at 12:24 PM on June 12, 2015 [1 favorite]

Also having grown up with Celtic kitchen parties in the East Coast where he'd play - the guy parties(d - not sure anymore) like a maniac. Single-handedly shed the "fiddlers are squares" vibe for an entire generation of us.

The beer tent is only 100ft from the stage he'll be on. I don't know if he'll be partying but I know that I/we/and tons of others will be partying.
posted by Jalliah at 12:49 PM on June 12, 2015

One of the best things about having married a Canadian and moved to Canada is the constant conversation where Shepherd expresses complete shock and disbelief about my lack of CanCon knowledge. A song will come on the radio and he will be like, "OH MAN, remember these guys? I used to have this album!" "Who is this?" "You're kidding, right???" "No, seriously, who you are talking about?"

I have spent nearly six years learning all about your old CanCon, Canadians. I am way up to date on current CanCon, but again, only because I live here now.

Anyway, JLP is a great album that still holds up. I have no time for a male audience lecturing me and women of that generation what our idea of female musical authenticity should have been/should be.
posted by Kitteh at 1:07 PM on June 12, 2015 [5 favorites]

I never really cared for Alanis. I mean, I was sort of a fan from her CDTOTV days, and JLP was better in my estimation than Hole's "Live Through This" was, but it still wasn't really my thing.

The woman I was seeing in those days was really into Alanis and Tori and all that, and even went to Lilith Fair (she always called it breastfest, which made it hard for me to google the actual name) a bunch of times with her friends. I was explicitly not invited, so I took in a few raves and enjoyed some long weekends playing videogames and drinking beer. And, as I had discovered Paul Oakenfold and Orbital and Tiesto and such, wasn't really that interested in going, anyway.

Personally, I don't think JLP has held up that well over time. Conversely, much of Sarah McLachlan and Tori Amos' work that I didn't much care for then has sort of grown on me. The mid-90s were kind of a strange time - the last time everything was much like it was when I grew up, before the internet changed everything.
posted by Pogo_Fuzzybutt at 1:07 PM on June 12, 2015

Navelgazer: “Do the kids today no longer use music as subcultural signpost? What do they use, then?”

Well, for one thing, "subculture" isn't exactly what it was in the 1990s. I mean, I could write a whole lot about the arc of culture, about the rise of television-mediated monoculture and its fifty-year reign, about the fact that in the 1990s we were still seeing a lot more of a strong, firm mainstream, particularly in the fact that the handful of networks and record companies (and breweries!) were still in control of the vast majority of entertainment transactions. It took about a decade and a half for corporate culture to swallow punk and digest it into something it could work with, but by the time Kurt and company wandered onto the scene they were ready, and thus "alternative rock" was born. But a lot of us were still fighting that battle. There was music you just couldn't hear if you weren't in the right circles. My alt-rock education happened by following connections in REM b-sides and covers and stuff – and even that was only possible because I already had the internet by the time I was doing that a decade and a half ago. REM themselves, they did it by hanging out at an actual record store, with actual music geeks, and their knowledge was limited to the stuff they heard in hushed tones from people who'd just got this latest EP from a New York group or this guy who knows a guy who saw this amazing band in concert.

That world is gone now. That world where who you know, and what music you can listen to, is limited by your luck and your dedication – it's been replaced by one where that stuff is all a lot easier. I don't say the current generation simply doesn't use music as a subcultural signpost; but I gather that they're more aware that you can't exactly say you like to list to (say) real indie rock and have it mean something social and political.

This is, incidentally, probably why us gen-xers came to hate hipsters so very much. It's because we thought these signifiers were something you should have to earn. A guy who casually puts on that rare single or this awesome mix, without adjusting his life around it? A girl who can even listen to things semi-ironically, appreciate the songwriting chops of Michael McDonald without caring about the fact that we're supposed to regard that stuff as traitor music? – Well, that's preposterous. It's nonsense, and an affront to all of us who worked our butts off for our music collections.
posted by koeselitz at 1:14 PM on June 12, 2015 [9 favorites]

There's a weird vibe with people who are really into music that you expose people to 'better' bands and then they will turn against their current crap tastes to the obviously better music. But that's not true. Sure, I didn't go to independent or even big record stores (Sam's) and I didn't even listen to college radio. But my undergrad roommate put Tori Amos on repeat and my bf insisted that I listen to what'shername with the apparently perfect break-up album. And you know what? I still don't really like them. It's not exposure. I just like different stuff. So try not to look down on me too much for my poor undeveloped tastes. I'll keep listening to Alanis.
posted by hydrobatidae at 1:28 PM on June 12, 2015

That world is gone now. That world where who you know, and what music you can listen to, is limited by your luck and your dedication – it's been replaced by one where that stuff is all a lot easier. I don't say the current generation simply doesn't use music as a subcultural signpost; but I gather that they're more aware that you can't exactly say you like to list to (say) real indie rock and have it mean something social and political.

A missing piece here: an awful lot of information was dispersed alongside - and virtually only alongside - music. The vast, vast majority of my political education was intimately linked to alternative music stuff - not because of the music itself, for the most part, but because the record shop was where you got the fanzines and small press publications that dealt with police brutality, feminism, labor issues, queer issues, etc.

If you were well connected and already knew what you were looking for, of course, you got your information other ways. But if you were just some kid from the suburbs, it went "record shop, fanzines, book reviews in fanzines, small independent bookstores, more zines and small press magazines and books". I found out about bell hooks, Eric Foner and lots and lots of queer stuff through Things Associated With Music. An awful lot of activist scenes had major overlap with music scenes without having major overlap with other scenes.

So now, for instance, you can certainly get your politics via music-associated-stuff, but you can get them other ways too, because of the internet. You don't have to luck into fanzines and alternative comics to find out about the history of gentrification and about Jane Jacobs, for instance.

I will always remember how back in the early nineties some of my friends asked me about how I knew all this political stuff (by which they meant "had heard of NAFTA, the Zapatistas and the WTO")...and it was straight up because I had read some zines which had directed me to some alternative bookstores, and because I'd been at a coffee shop/show space which had flyers up for a couple of protests.

It wasn't just "defining yourself because you had to work to find music that you liked"; it was that music carried a lot along with it than it does now.
posted by Frowner at 1:34 PM on June 12, 2015 [11 favorites]

I add that I think now is better in this regard - there was a lot of powerful and interesting stuff that I got to experience because of punk rock, but it was sheer, sheer luck.
posted by Frowner at 1:36 PM on June 12, 2015

I could write a whole lot about the arc of culture, about the rise of television-mediated monoculture and its fifty-year reign, about the fact that in the 1990s we were still seeing a lot more of a strong, firm mainstream, particularly in the fact that the handful of networks and record companies (and breweries!) were still in control of the vast majority of entertainment transactions

Another thing is that the rate of cultural change has slowed somewhat, at least musically.

JLP was 20 years ago now, 2015 to 1995. 20 years previous from 1995 was 1975.

The top 2 songs of 1975 were Captain and Tennille, "Love Will Keep Us Together" and Glen Campbell, "Rhinestone Cowboy".

Hm, maybe this isn't making my case here because I feel like those songs could be on the verge of coming back into vogue. I feel like disco finally made a comeback via watered-down EDM but whatever.

My point is that I think there are a lot more 1995 albums that sound fresh today then there were 1975 albums that sounded fresh in 1995. I mean, my daughter puts Morrisey up there with bands like Panic At The Disco and I can hardly imagine having liked a 25-years-earlier (1970!) artist in 1995.

(I think you can make a case for seminal artists - the Beatles or James Brown - but most of the pop music of that time didn't hold up)

I'm not sure if I can really articulate or enumerate the reasons for this or even if I truly know them but I think Alanis holds up not only because of her qualities as a musician or a writer but because en masse people's tastes have changed relatively little.
posted by GuyZero at 1:36 PM on June 12, 2015 [2 favorites]

Now is better in terms of raw accessibility, but it's also overwhelming. I need filters for filters, even.
posted by cotton dress sock at 2:44 PM on June 12, 2015 [1 favorite]

Oh man, that Moist single took me right back. Thanks Sys Rq.
posted by Rumple at 2:48 PM on June 12, 2015

I can hardly imagine having liked a 25-years-earlier (1970!) artist in 1995.

Led Zeppelin? Black Sabbath? Pink Floyd? All very, very popular in 1995.
posted by Sys Rq at 2:49 PM on June 12, 2015

I feel like disco finally made a comeback via watered-down EDM but whatever.

I've said it before and I'll say it again:
house:disco::birds:dinosaurs.
Neither went away, they just evolved.
posted by flaterik at 2:52 PM on June 12, 2015

Led Zeppelin? Black Sabbath? Pink Floyd? All very, very popular in 1995.

So I had this big carve-out for "seminal" artists like how, say, the Beatles and James Brown remain relevant because they were, you know, amazing. But I feel like Alanis is not in that category and yet still holds up because musical tastes, en masse, have not changed as much.

But it's a hard argument to put together because, as you point out, it may not actually be totally true.
posted by GuyZero at 2:57 PM on June 12, 2015

Not just you, flaterik, it's pretty well known that disco begat house begat techno begat trance etc etc

and that has led inexorably to Martin Garrix so we may as well pack it in
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 2:59 PM on June 12, 2015

But it's a hard argument to put together because, as you point out, it may not actually be totally true.

I know what you mean though, and it is mostly true. But at the same time, ABBA Gold came out in 1992 and went a jillion times Platinum around the world. (It actually went Diamond in Canada, meaning more than 1 in 30 Canadians own it.) Not much pop music sticks, but for whatever reason, some of it really, really does.
posted by Sys Rq at 3:03 PM on June 12, 2015

It was good for young, conservative, cis het male me to hear righteous anger in a woman's voice, and to hear it everywhere.

...and all I really want
Is deliverance
A way to get my hands untied
And all I really want
Is some justice...

And precisely because JLP was everywhere and the best thing on the radio, it never occurred to me that it was anything but natural for women to respond to mistreatment with justified rage.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 3:34 PM on June 12, 2015 [5 favorites]

A better title to this post would have been 'Jagged Little Sales'.

I think Jello Biafra coined that one.

Alanis' Label's folks worked tirelessly to hide the fact that she was a product. It convinced a lot of people. But make no mistake - she was the turning maneuver that started the corporate counter-offensive against music in the 1990s.
posted by Jessica Savitch's Coke Spoon at 3:47 PM on June 12, 2015

Jessica Savitch's Coke Spoon: “Alanis' Label's folks worked tirelessly to hide the fact that she was a product. It convinced a lot of people. But make no mistake - she was the turning maneuver that started the corporate counter-offensive against music in the 1990s.”

Ah, these delightful 90s buzzwords! We could have fun dismantling them all. She was a "product"? She was a person – a person groomed to be a pop star, but nonetheless a person. The "corporate counter-offensive against music"? Sure, the mid-90s was ground zero for the corporate co-option of punk's ethos, but punk's ethos is not the same thing as "music," except by some standards that are difficult to really hold to nowadays. The truth is that music is music whether it's a "corporate product" or not. Sometimes music that is a "corporate product" is actually quite good. It's still always made by actual live human beings, and Alanis Morrissette's music was made, yes, by actual live human beings.
posted by koeselitz at 4:00 PM on June 12, 2015 [6 favorites]

Alanis' Label's folks worked tirelessly to hide the fact that she was a product.

Cite? Multiple labels turned her down, she's been on a couple of different ones, and as someone else said above she's spent the last 20 years proving herself over and over.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 4:03 PM on June 12, 2015 [1 favorite]

(I think you can make a case for seminal artists - the Beatles or James Brown - but most of the pop music of that time didn't hold up

which is why so many musicians today slavishly imitate it - there's not much in rock and roll now that wasn't done in the 70s and 60s - there's not much in hip hop that wasn't done before the 90s - the good artists put the pieces together a little differently, but it's still the same pieces

i'm not even sure that women responding to mistreatment with justified rage is all that new - it really has been done before

there were even rumblings of discontent in 1964
posted by pyramid termite at 4:07 PM on June 12, 2015

RIP Night Lines.
posted by Poldo at 4:33 PM on June 12, 2015 [2 favorites]

i'm not even sure that women responding to mistreatment with justified rage is all that new

Well, both those songs were written or co-written by men, for what that's worth.
posted by Rumple at 4:59 PM on June 12, 2015

respect was written by a man, too - it's not just the song - it's what you bring to it
posted by pyramid termite at 5:07 PM on June 12, 2015 [1 favorite]

Wow, quite a thread. Just wanted to say thanks for bringing me back to You Oughta Know. Goddamn that is as visceral as music gets. And that's what music is about.
posted by raider at 6:56 PM on June 12, 2015

Jagged Little Pill was the only thing ever stolen from me by a hiker. He was French Canadian and not the only northbounder staying for free in my home. Heck, when we played Scrabble he got to use my OSPD dictionary exclusively because of his language differential. I forgave him and bought it again. Heck, I'd keep him over again... it was snowy winter.
posted by maggieb at 7:56 PM on June 12, 2015 [3 favorites]

Coincidentally, I listened to some of Jagged Little Pill last night. It didn't cross my mind that those songs are two decades old now; they still sound fresh. In contrast, I just listened to some of her pop songs on youtube, and they sound so incredibly dated. Yet they were recorded just a few years before Jagged Little Pill! Authenticity is timeless.
posted by mantecol at 8:09 PM on June 12, 2015 [1 favorite]

Jagged Little Pill was the first "adult" CD I owned. A friend of mine bought it for me for my birthday when I was in 4th or 5th grade. I remember turning down the volume when I knew the swearing in You Oughta Know was coming because I didn't want my parents to hear.

That CD was stolen a couple years later by the mother of another friend. I left it in their CD player accidentally and she listened to it and liked it. So she asked if she could have it and I, a child of twelve or so, couldn't comprehend the situation and spurted out "OK...". I'm still kinda bitter about that.
posted by downtohisturtles at 8:09 PM on June 12, 2015 [2 favorites]

People's experiences with You Oughta Know in karaoke are interesting. My own experience is that there are a good handful of songs from the late 80s - early 90s that women LOVE to sing at karaoke, and if you watch the crowd when a woman sings it, you can watch men's eyes glaze over as they realize what the song is. A lot of them are "softer" rock kind of stuff (e.g.. Brass in Pocket) , but given the number of people that still love, say, Nirvana, it astounds me that very few men seem to relate to the raw energy that exudes from the song. We're even seeing some of it in this thread.

Watching men's reactions to "women's" songs in karaoke is one of the things that convinced me that sexism is alive and well in a very mainstream everyday way, actually - women hear and respect men's voices all the time, but the reverse is not true. It's extremely rare to hear an authentic angry woman's voice in the mainstream, and so of course she's mocked for it. I was in middle school when it came out, but it doesn't surprise me at all that DJs mocked the song - my take on it is that it was very threatening to them for some reason and they had to distance themselves from it.
posted by zug at 8:33 PM on June 12, 2015 [9 favorites]

I lived in Ottawa from 89-92 and went to the same school as her (twin) brother Wade, two years my senior. I remember once she came to see him in the white cabrio mentioned in the article and it made quite the kerfuffle amongst us grade 9-10 kids. Until Jagged Little Pill came out I was convinced that nobody outside of the CHRO callsign knew who she was.
posted by furtive at 10:22 PM on June 12, 2015 [1 favorite]

she was the turning maneuver that started the corporate counter-offensive against music in the 1990s.

What does that even mean?

Here's 'Too Hot' live from 2014, and knowing a bit more about her Canadapop days puts that cover of 'My Humps' in some context.

1995 was ultra-early web for me, and with that came a kind of unfiltered exposure to North American music culture for the first time: narrowly filtered because the web was a narrowly-drawn space, but there nonetheless. Music itself still came through CDs and radio, still on different release cycles, but that was converging. And that's the context for 'All I Really Want', which is very 1995, but more than just 1995, because Jagged Little Pill is arguably the first really big album of the era when young people were visiting and making websites.
posted by holgate at 10:31 PM on June 12, 2015 [1 favorite]

Did this get mentioned yet - I just read that JLP is the 11th best selling album OF ALL TIME. ALL TIME.

Which is insane. It outsold Sgt. Peppers and The Wall. And #9? Shania Twain. #12? Celine Dion.

1/4 of the 12 best-selling albums of all time are by solo Canadian women. Which is nuts.
posted by GuyZero at 11:55 AM on June 13, 2015

It's all the raw seal livers and the igloo acoustics.
posted by Rumple at 12:00 PM on June 13, 2015

Nah, Canadian women eat seal hearts.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 12:20 PM on June 13, 2015

Decidedly so.
posted by Rumple at 12:43 PM on June 13, 2015

Oh, well played.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 12:48 PM on June 13, 2015

Igloo Acoustics is the name of my new band.
posted by hippybear at 2:46 PM on June 13, 2015 [2 favorites]

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