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 agged
Little Pill was her first album (first, after two throwaway
Debbie Gibsonesque false starts), and Alanis wasn't just angry,
she made femme-rage imitators all the rage. But their anger couldn't
touch Alanis's.
Her anger was
the kind that makes people's blood boil. Anti-Alanis sites sprang
up on the Internet. Writers traded witty putdowns of her shrieking
singing style and penchant for mispronouncing words.
The Washington
Post recently wondered why Alanis gets so many people so upset.
The writer concluded she was the "Hillary Clinton of pop,"
which is a nice turn of phrase, but not quite to the point. Conservatives
don't care a bit about Alanis (they should). Alanis made liberal
hedonists upset because she was angry about all the right things.
She was angry
that a man once told her he would love her until he died, "but"
— as she fantasizes about pointing out to him while he's on
a date with someone new — "You're still alive, and I'm
here, to remind you of the mess you left when you went away."
That song — the song with vulgar sexual references and the
Really Bad Word in it — was "You Oughta Know," and
it is an unparalleled critique of the sexual revolution and how
it has left people like Alanis (who was born in 1974) emotionally
crippled.
The singer
of that song has been lied to and betrayed in the most powerful,
primordial way — by promises of forever-love consummated by
sex — and she's not about to pretend that the sexually freed
man's view of the matter should be normative. She even begrudgingly
acknowledges the old-fashioned way of promising forever-love consummated
by sex. "I'm sure she'd make a really excellent mother,"
she sneers about the new date.
The song has
all the insistent sting of a Christian's conscience. It hurts as
bad as St. Paul.
And unfortunately,
it may also be a good indicator of what college women have been
going through.
The Independent
Women's Forum last year released the results of a poll of 1,000
campus women attending 11 of the more elite colleges in the country.
In the survey,
40 percent of the women said they had experienced a "hookup."
"Hookup" is a nonspecific word preferred by young people
who have been carefully formed as intellectual relativists. It can
refer to any number of casual physical encounters — no more
first, second, and third base. One in ten of the women had hooked
up more than six times.
At the same
time, 83 percent of the women polled called marriage a major "life
goal"; 63 percent said they'd like to meet their husband in
college.
Women no doubt
felt Alanis's anger and pain. They were used to men who teased their
desire for lifetime love in order to gain nighttime access to their
bodies.
Alanis became
the mid '90s Miss Thing — and offered plenty to think about.
On the first album, Alanis had a way of deepening the clichéd
gripes of her generation. The teenybopper dance star railed against
the pop din when she asked, in one inspired bit, "Why are you
so petrified of silence? Here, can you handle this?" —
then suddenly stopped the music. In another track, she fantasized
about destroying the creepy record-company people who ogled her
on her way up (the AntiLewinsky). In still another, she chafes at
a wimpified boyfriend: "I don't want to be your babysitter,
you're a very big boy now."
The album did
strike its generous share of false notes — don't get me wrong.
Fundamentally, for instance, her celebration of independence is
made a bit suspicious by the fact that she co-wrote the songs with
Russ Ballard, the pop-profound hitmeister who wrote "Man in
the Mirror" for Michael Jackson. And her anti-Catholic song
rails against a Catholic experience that sounds made up (a heavy-handed
emphasis on the confessional? in 1980s Canada?).
Still, in Jagged
Little Pill a thoughtful singer aimed for honesty, raised the
significant issues of a generation, and shattered sales records.
Not bad.
Alanis's next
album, Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie, showed what happens
when honest people with good questions don't meet anyone interested
in providing real answers.
You get your
first clue by just looking at the CD. Depicted on the disc is a
woman (apparently Alanis) totally naked and in a fetal position.
Tip to parents: This is not a sign of sound emotional health.
The songs have
suddenly become stream-of-consciousness babblings that show off
her tendency to not fit the syllables of her lyrics with the melodies
of her songs.
One song, "Unsent,"
is a sort of companion piece to "You Oughta Know." In
a series of letters to ex-lovers, she now understands that men don't
like commitment, and that it's okay. She even tells one: "I
realize that you're in a relationship with someone right now and
I respect that" but "if you're ever single in the future
and you want to come visit me in California…"
It's a sign
of things to come. And they do. The entire third album, Under
Rug Swept, is like a companion piece to "You Oughta Know."
If her first
recording was about confronting the bad men who done her wrong,
her latest one is about endlessly dealing with their memory. In
song after stream-of-consciousness song, Alanis stumbles around
in her own brain running into people who aren't supposed to be there
anymore. Listening to it is like taking a tour of the crematory
in Lafayette, Ga.
In the song
"Hands Clean," which is getting reluctant radio airplay,
she explains all there is to know about the "You Oughta Know"
guy — how he was an older, manipulative man; how he told her
not to tell anybody. But she has become a sort of aloof observer
of her own life. Not mad anymore: just fixated.
On "Flinch"
she asks, "How long can a girl stay haunted by you… how
long can a girl be tortured by you?" and the listener flinches.
"21 Things
I Want in a Lover" is a promising song title, bringing hopes
of Paul Simon's "50 Ways to Leave Your Lover" cleverness.
But then the song has almost no sense of humor and reveals Alanis
to be a woman with impossibly high expectations and extremely bad
syntax. "Do you have a big intellectual capacity but know that
it alone does not equate wisdom?… Are you both masculine and
feminine? Politically aware?... funny… self-deprecating…
like adventure… thriving in a job that helps your brother?"
Then it dawns
on you. No wonder she's had such bad luck with men. She's exactly
the type of woman whose demands for a special kind of man were so
aptly answered by Bob Dylan's immortal phrase, "It ain't me,
babe."
And then —
it dawns on you again. This is the natural consequence of the sexual
revolution. It's a man's dreamworld, a woman's nightmare. Men get
sex. Women — conflicted, wanting permanence but no longer allowed
to insist on it — merely get screwed.
Alanis, at
one happy time, used to yell to the world about how wrong that is.
Now she merely ruminates about how troubling it is. She rejected
the confessional. Now she spends all her time confessing in public.
She has seen again and again that men are jerks. Now she expects
them all to be saints. She has gone from angry to conflicted, crystal-clear
to confused, wildly successful to… we'll see.
Like the examples
in her song, it's all very ironic. And sad.
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