Jagged Little Pill

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  The Music Slut Committee

  Steve

  "Enter: Alanis Morissette. Abandoning her Canadian dance-pop roots, she drops Jagged Little Pill right smack dab in the middle of the decade and manages to capture so much of what people were feeling. Damn near every song hits on some emotional truth, and they do it SO WELL. Alanis tackles female sexuality with You Oughta Know, (Is she perverted like me? Would she go down on you in a theatre?...//… Every time I scratch my nails down someone else's back, I hope you feel it). She tackles feminism, specifically in the entertainment industry but, not coincidentally, at large in Right Through You, (You took me for a joke, you took me for a child, you took a long hard look at my ass and then played golf for a while…//…You took me out to wine, dine, 69 me but didn't hear a damn word I said). Religion? Forgiven has you covered, (We all had delusions in our head, we all had our minds made up for us, we had to believe in something, so we did). It’s even got a wonderful Generational Trauma song in Perfect that has so many brilliant lines I can’t pick just one. But most notably, we have songs about relationships. Songs about hurt. Songs about emotional intelligence. Songs about gender roles and expectations. Songs about the self. And to wrap it all up, we have Hand in My Pocket and You Learn that celebrate the journey through all of that. Life is imperfect and messy. It is painful and complicated and full of sadness and hurt. And that can be funny! It can be weird! Isn’t it ironic?

  This is not to say, of course, that nobody had written albums that were About Important Things before. Obviously not. But when I throw on some Roger Waters Protest Joint, I know that not only is it About Something, but it was constructed brick-by-brick to be About Something. A lot of work went in to making sure we all know that it is About Something. That’s fine, nothing wrong with that. But where Jagged Little Pill feels different is that so much of the album’s lasting poignancy seems to be almost…incidental? Alanis is singing from the heart here, absolutely, but I’m not sure just how much she, or anyone else involved in the record, realizes just how tapped into the culture at large this record is. She set out to write a meaningful banger album, but she ended up writing The Album of the Decade. And I almost think that’s better. There is so much raw authenticity here, so much unfiltered emotion, so much zeitgeisty analysis. It’s a cross-section of a decade where finally starting to think about themselves in a very different way. And, with 9/11, we lost that. We’re back at war, ambling around the Middle East for nearly two decades, and now this album of introspection is just a jagged little time capsule.

  There’s another side to this record, of course. It’s not just that I like the songs and it’s not just that I relish in it from an academic standpoint. It’s also, accidentally, the soundtrack to my marriage.

  In the week or so leading up to the wedding, once October 14th was showing up on the 10-day forecast, we saw the same thing: 50% chance of rain. What a prickly little number, no? A coin toss, maybe yes, maybe no. And for ten fucking days, right up to the 2PM deadline when we had to make a decision, 50%. So, when there is an artist whose most famous single lyric is “It’s like RAAAAAAAAAIN on your WEDDING DAY,” of course we’re going to listen to that song on repeat. Maybe by inviting the possibility into our heads, it wouldn’t happen. That would be ironic! But there’s only so many times you can listen to just one song for ten straight days, so we looped the whole album. Again and again and again. And so those last panic-fueled days of making sure everything was just right, Alanis was there. I’ll never forget laying in the hotel bed that morning, angry that I didn’t sleep a goddamn wink, listening to Melissa take a shower, the muffled sounds of the album swirling around with the sound of running water. It was this beautiful moment of quiet comfort." - Alex

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