Alanis Morissette

Before she was the voice of a furious generation, Alanis Morissette was exactly the opposite: a little teen pop star in Canada, tidy and likeable, a manufactured product.

And at some point she decided to burn all of that down in order to sing what she really felt, with nothing sweetened.

The result was one of the most important records of the nineties, and the proof that millions of people had been waiting for a woman to say out loud what could not be said.

The one who disowned herself

She was born in Ottawa in 1974, and as a teenager she was already famous in her country with a danceable pop of carefully managed image, which won her awards and which she would later disown. She managed to release two albums that only came out in Canada.

She went to Los Angeles looking for something else, and there she met the songwriter and producer Glen Ballard—a man who had even worked with Michael Jackson—who helped her find a darker, rockier and far more personal sound.

She signed with Maverick, the label Madonna had founded a few years earlier along with Freddy DeMann and Ronnie Dashev. And in 1995 she released "Jagged Little Pill".

What happened next was an earthquake.

A door kicked open

"Jagged Little Pill" sold more than thirty-three million copies worldwide, was the best-selling pop album of the whole decade according to Billboard, and won the Grammy for Album of the Year in February 1996, on a night when it took four.

But the numbers are the least of it. What that record did was open a door.

Its first single, "You Oughta Know", was a ferocious letter of spite, sexually explicit, loaded with rage, aimed at an ex who had treated her badly. Flea and Dave Navarro, of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, play on it.

Never before had a woman sung her fury and her desire that rawly on commercial radio.

Alanis showed, on a giant scale, that women get as angry as men, that they desire, that they want revenge, that they are not always sweet and tidy.

And it was not all rage: "Hand in My Pocket" had humour and hope, "You Learn" was about learning from pain, "Ironic" played with the turns of life. All of it said in that unmistakable voice of hers, emphatic, exasperated, unfiltered.

The rebellion against herself

There is what makes her great, beyond the sales.

Until then, the female pop that reached the masses was, generally, polished, pleasant, digestible. Alanis blew it up with the opposite: rage with no make-up, the wound on show, desire stated without detours, black humour, the ugly true things you were supposed to keep quiet.

She gave a whole generation of women permission to be furious out loud, to name what went unnamed. In that same decade, others had been telling uncomfortable truths and paying a much higher price for them.

And the detail that makes her braver still: she had been the perfect teenage product, and she chose to destroy that prefabricated image in order to show herself whole, without a net.

Singing like that did not come free. It was a rebellion against herself, against the docile girl the industry had manufactured.

What came next

And here is what many people forget: Alanis is not just "Jagged Little Pill".

What she did afterwards is the most interesting part of her story, because instead of repeating the formula that had made her a millionaire, she went inwards.

That whole period left her broken—she spoke later of having suffered post-traumatic stress—and to heal she travelled to India in 1997.

Out of that trip, out of meditation and a spiritual search, came "Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie", from 1998: more experimental, more introspective, less rage and more questions. It brought "Thank U", a song of gratitude and nakedness very different from the fury of before, and it sold four hundred and sixty-nine thousand copies in its first week, a record for a female artist that stood until 2000.

The girl of ferocious spite had become a seeker.

Her own path

From then on she did not look back.

In 2002 she released "Under Rug Swept", which she wrote and produced on her own—taking total control of her work—and which was number one in a dozen countries. On it is "Hands Clean", an uncomfortable song about a relationship in her teens with an older, powerful man, which ran years ahead of conversations the world would only have later.

She made more records through the 2000s and 2010s, went back to the top of the Canadian charts, explored even ambient and meditation music, and went on writing from wherever she was at each stage of her life: motherhood, therapy, spirituality.

In 2019, "Jagged Little Pill" was turned into a Broadway musical that landed fifteen Tony nominations and won two.

And alongside that she became a respected voice on mental health, speaking without shame about her own struggles. She has sold some sixty million records, but, more than that, she built a thirty-year career that never sat still in the character who made her famous.

The sound of the door

She should be remembered as the woman who made rage sound like a liberation, and who then had the courage not to stay there.

She took the furious, the wounded, the untidy—everything a woman was supposed not to show—and turned it into one of the best-selling records in history. And when the world expected her to repeat that move for ever, she went off to look for something else.

If you put on "You Oughta Know", "Hand in My Pocket" or "You Learn", you are not going to hear nineties nostalgia: you are going to hear the sound of a door being kicked open, for every woman who had been told to be nice.

But if you stop at that record, you miss the whole artist. The one who sang fury at twenty and questions at thirty, the one who produced herself, the one who went from Ottawa to India and back, and who thirty years on from that earthquake is still writing from wherever she is, never going back to being the tidy girl the industry wanted to sell.

This text mentions that the artist has spoken publicly about her struggles with mental health. If you or someone you know needs it, asking for help is an act of strength: in Chile you can call *4141, the suicide prevention line of the Ministry of Health, available 24 hours a day.

Sources

Alanis Nadine Morissette (Ottawa, Canada, 1 June 1974), singer, songwriter, producer and actress. She began as a teen pop star in Canada, with two albums released only in that country, before reinventing herself towards alternative rock. After moving to Los Angeles she worked with the songwriter and producer Glen Ballard and signed with Maverick, a label co-founded by Madonna along with Freddy DeMann and Ronnie Dashev. "Jagged Little Pill" (13 June 1995), her international debut, sold more than 33 million copies worldwide; it was the best-selling pop album of the nineties according to Billboard and won the Grammy for Album of the Year at the ceremony on 28 February 1996, one of the four statuettes it took that night. Her singles include "You Oughta Know" (with Flea on bass and Dave Navarro on guitar), "Hand in My Pocket", "Ironic", "You Learn" and "Head Over Feet". She has won 7 Grammy Awards and 13 Juno Awards, and has sold around 60 million records. She recounted having suffered post-traumatic stress as a result of the "Jagged Little Pill" era and travelled to India in 1997; out of that period came "Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie" (1998), with "Thank U", which sold 469,000 copies in its first week, a record for a female artist until 2000. It was followed by "Under Rug Swept" (2002, written and produced by herself, number one in around twelve countries, with "Hands Clean"), "Flavors of Entanglement" (2008), "Havoc and Bright Lights" (2012), "Such Pretty Forks in the Road" (2020) and the ambient music project "The Storm Before the Calm" (2022). The Broadway musical based on "Jagged Little Pill" (2019) received 15 Tony nominations and won two: best book (Diablo Cody) and best featured actress (Lauren Patten). Externally authored text, edited and verified for Rebobinados. Readings of the meaning of her work are offered as the author's interpretation. No song lyrics are reproduced, for copyright reasons. Information drawn from The Canadian Encyclopedia, Billboard, CBC, CTV News, Wikipedia and other press coverage.