Alanis Isn’t Angry Anymore
Conservatives don’t care a bit about Alanis Morissette. They should.

By Tom Hoopes, editor, National Catholic Register
March 20, 2002 9:40 a.m.

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.