That’s what “Ironic” is about (also hush up, the song is in fact ironic)-“Life has a funny way of sneaking up on you,” she mutters at the end, which explains all that laughing in the possibly schizo video you described, Sophie. Alanis is, like, living! She is an idealist! Kurt Cobain saw life as a sick joke because nothing mattered she saw it as a sick joke because everything does. It’s easy to see her as a part of the grunge flood, and her angst is indeed very of its time-who other than Eminem and the dudes of mall-metal have had a hit album as angry as this since then? But when I listened to it recently, I was surprised and kind of thrilled to find it wasn’t the deliciously one-note blast of aggression that my memory had slotted it as.
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I have a hard time coming up with mainstream singers who have as much comfort sounding totally ugly. This wasn’t self-indulgent confession for the sake of it Alanis wrote anthems, straight bangers, with the hooks ready to be wailed at arenas or, yes, car rides. Throughout the album, she sounds totally unfiltered, even though making something as effective as JLP takes high-level creative vision. Apologies both to the rock-and-roll credibility committee and to the gods of overused comparisons, but the precedent that might most be apt is Joni Mitchell not in the way she sounds but in the thing she does, crafting phrases upon phrases that tumble out in totally original and yet conversation-aping ways. I have a hard time of coming up with mainstream singers who have as much character and verve and comfort with sounding totally ugly as she does (Fiona Apple carries the torch but can barely be called mainstream these days). It was fun, first and foremost, because of that voice, that phrasing. I just knew it was a lot more fun to listen to than the Bob Marley best-of compilation that my mom and dad otherwise had in rotation (sorry, Bob). I don’t really think I knew what Alanis was screaming about doing in that theee-at-urrr with her ex. Jagged Little Pill was the kind of culture-conquering CD that was in every Ford Windstar, poppy and straightforward enough to seem sonically appropriate for family road trips. Graham-like moment buried in the memory banks somewhere with regards to this album. Kornhaber: I bet a lot of people have a Mr. It’s hard to think of another female artist who’s made a rock album like this one, let alone a record that’s so angry, so unabashedly sexual (“Every time I scratch my nails down someone else’s back I hope you feel it”), and so inventive. (At the end it appears there’s only been one Alanis all along, so maybe it’s all about multiple personality disorder and I’ve been misinterpreting it all this time, but never mind.) Even Alanis herself acknowledged the record’s potency as a kind of female call to arms in the video for “Ironic,” which features a bunch of Alanis clones screaming along to the lyrics on a road trip and grinning at each other. Its lyrics practically beg to be quoted in ALL CAPS. Instead, it tapped into a kind of poetic female rage that I don’t think anyone has vocalized quite as well since. It doesn’t have the affectedness of Britpop or the brittle plasticity of ‘90s R&B.
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But it’s amazing listening to it 20 years later, because unlike so much of the music from that time, it isn’t dated. The release of Jagged Little Pill on June 13, 1995, happened to coincide with the beginning of my teenage angst, as did that very inappropriate singsong right by the location of the Battle of the Somme. The Rare Experimental Musician to Embrace the Spotlight Spencer Kornhaber Graham) and we were all too embarrassed to vocalize things like, “AND ARE YOU THINKING OF ME WHEN YOU FUCK HER” in front of him. Imagine 50 13-year-olds all screaming along to “You Oughta Know,” but then abruptly stopping any time it got to a vaguely sexual part, thanks to the fact that the trip was chaperoned by our youngish drama teacher, Mr.
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Gilbert: When I think about Jagged Little Pill, I mostly flash back to a history trip I took in junior high to visit the French battlefields of World War One (stay with me here).
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To mark the record’s 20th anniversary, Sophie Gilbert, Spencer Kornhaber, and Megan Garber discuss what it meant to them then, and how it sounds two decades later. But beyond its commercial success, the album ended up having a profound impact on music, both in the second half of the ‘90s and beyond, as well as entering the canon of music that defines a generation. On June 13, 1995, the Canadian singer-songwriter Alanis Morissette released Jagged Little Pill, an alt-rock landmark of a record that, despite modest expectations, ended up selling more than 30 million copies and winning four Grammy Awards.