I’ll never forget riding in my mom’s car as a high school student in the late ‘90s, and hearing a male DJ on the radio introduce the Alanis Morissette song “Unsent” by commenting snidely that “someone should tell Alanis that not everything she writes in her diary needs to be turned into a song.” I laughed along at the joke, but on another level I felt alarmed. If we were all mocking Alanis for sharing her words with the world; for having the self-indulgent audacity to think that her private thoughts and feelings were worthy of the public, what did that mean for me? Like so many women and girls do all the time, I laughed at the joke because I didn’t want to be the butt of it.
To be undeservedly fair to the sexist ‘90s DJ, though, “Unsent” is a lot. It’s four glorious minutes and ten seconds of Alanis’s most personal reflections on her past relationships, naming each ex-boyfriend one by one, i.e. “Dear Lou, we learned so much,” and “Dear Marcus… You got me seriously thinking about spirituality.” The whole thing feels very TMI, but that’s what I love about Alanis. The unabashedly confessional foregrounding of personal detail that characterizes so much of her work ranges from the cringe-y to the profound, but it’s empowering by virtue of how it claims space for an unapologetically complicated, messy female experience—its assumption that duh, of course the world should care. It reads like therapy homework or a NaPoWriMo prompt—”write an angry letter to each of your exes”—but Alanis doesn’t see any reason why her personal catharsis shouldn’t also be on the radio. As a teenager, Alanis’s music often made me feel all at once like maybe she was no good—like the DJ said—but also like, hey, wait, the poems that I wrote in notebooks hidden in my bedroom were maybe not that bad.
Alanis doesn’t see any reason why her personal catharsis shouldn’t also be on the radio.
After some success as a pop singer in Canada, Alanis Morissette burst onto the global music scene in 1995 with “You Oughta Know,” the hit single off of her groundbreaking album Jagged Little Pill: a scathing takedown of a cheating ex-lover. “I’m here / to remind you / of the mess you left when you went away,” proclaimed the song’s unforgettable chorus. This raw honesty and emotional intensity became a hallmark of Alanis Morissette Songs, setting her apart in the pop-rock landscape.
Alanis’s songs fearlessly shared intimate details about ex-boyfriends and power-abusing record executives alike, sometimes still hot with rage, and always unflinchingly vulnerable. This unapologetic approach was new and, for many, unsettling. While Morissette has never officially confirmed who “You Oughta Know” is about, it was famously rumored to be Full House’s Dave Coulier—a fact that was widely regarded at the time as laughably absurd (Joey Gladstone, really?) but is actually pretty disturbing when you consider that he was 35 when the song was recorded, and Morissette was just 20.
This power dynamic and the potential for abuse in relationships with men are recurring themes in Alanis Morissette songs. In “Right Through You,” she confronts a lecherous music industry gatekeeper with biting lyrics: “You took me for a joke / You took me for a child,” and “You took me out to wine, dine, sixty-nine me / but didn’t hear a damn word I said.” Similarly, her 2002 song “Hands Clean” reflects on a secret teenage relationship with a much older man, poignantly capturing his manipulative perspective: “If it weren’t for your maturity, none of this would have happened. / If you weren’t so wise beyond your years / I would’ve been able to control myself.” The chorus, “Oooh this could be messy,” cleverly subverts the predatory words of an abuser into a rallying cry for young women to embrace their own messy truths and speak out. With Alanis, it always gets a little messy. That’s the beauty of it.
The Confessional Power of Alanis Morissette’s Lyrics
There’s a persistent, and often sexist, history of critics and audiences conflating the speaker in writing by women with the author herself. However, in Morissette’s case, she has been remarkably open about the personal roots of her work. Before creating Jagged Little Pill, Alanis worked with music industry professionals who didn’t encourage her songwriting. Yet, in a 2015 interview, she revealed that she always considered herself a lyricist, and once she began writing for Jagged Little Pill, her lyrics naturally took on a “hyper-autobiographical” quality. “Only I could write these stories,” she asserted.
Morissette has acknowledged that her own life experiences serve as the wellspring for many of her songs. But ultimately, the degree to which they are strictly autobiographical is secondary to their impact. The true power of Alanis Morissette songs lies in their unwavering focus on female experiences and perspectives. They articulate everyday observations and emotions that resonate with countless women but are often dismissed as trivial or unworthy of artistic expression. Her music boldly places a complex and emotional female speaker in a position of authority, a stance frequently denied in a patriarchal culture that often demands women suppress their feelings to be taken seriously.
Personal writing by women is often seen as indulgent, while personal writing by men is more often lauded as high art.
This double standard is further highlighted by Lori Saint-Martin in Confessional Politics: Women’s Sexual Self-Representations in Life Writing and Popular Media, who notes, “The realm of the personal and sexual has always been literary for men (Saint Augustine, Rousseau, Michel Leiris, Henry Miller) and confessional for women (Colette, Erica Jong, Anais Nin).” This bias permeated the critical reception of Alanis Morissette songs. Even ostensibly positive reviews often carried a condescending undertone. In a 1995 Rolling Stone profile, David Wild dubbed Morissette “queen of this year’s pop culture prom,” describing her live performances as “less like a concert than modern-rock group therapy.” Similarly, AllMusic’s Stephen Thomas Erlewine wrote that “Her bitter diary entries are given a pop gloss that gives them entry to the pop charts.” And who can forget the endless debates about whether the scenarios in her hit song “Ironic” were actually ironic? These criticisms, while sometimes veiled as humor or analysis, often served to diminish the artistic merit and emotional impact of her work.
Jagged Little Pill: A Soundtrack for a Generation’s Outrage
The brash vulnerability and confessional nature of Alanis Morissette songs frequently drew sexist critiques, mirroring the dismissive radio DJ anecdote from the beginning. Yet, her music resonated powerfully precisely because of its timing and its raw emotional honesty. Morissette herself may not have explicitly framed her expression of anger as overtly political, but it’s undeniable that her shift from bubble-gum pop to emotionally charged confessional rock was deeply intertwined with the burgeoning feminist movement and the cultural reckoning with women’s experiences in the 1990s. The immense popularity of Jagged Little Pill was, in part, a direct reflection of a culture ready, even hungry, to hear women articulate their repressed anger and frustrations—a generation of women becoming increasingly aware of systemic inequalities.
Jagged Little Pill was released just a few years after Anita Hill’s groundbreaking testimony during Clarence Thomas’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings, and Rebecca Walker’s subsequent coining of the term “third wave feminism.” In her seminal 1992 article for Ms., Walker powerfully argued that the hearings served as a stark assessment of women’s credibility and power in society. “He was promoted,” Walker declared, “She was repudiated. Men were assured of the inviolability of their penis/power. Women were admonished to keep their experiences to themselves.” The court’s dismissal of Hill’s account became a chilling example of a culture that systematically devalued women’s narratives of injustice and pain. From the dismissive treatment of Hill to the similar vilification of Christine Blasey Ford decades later, and extending to the condescending reception of confessional women artists like Sylvia Plath and Alanis Morissette, the pervasive message to women was clear: their stories were best kept silent. Walker concluded her Ms. essay with a powerful call to action, urging other women, “Let this dismissal of a woman’s experience move you to anger.”
Twenty-five years after the release of Jagged Little Pill, we’re feeling a cultural déja vu.
The raw emotion and truth-telling essence of Alanis Morissette songs continue to resonate profoundly with contemporary activism, particularly movements centered on women’s historically discounted experiences of sexual assault and abuse. The parallels between the 1990s and the past several years are striking. Both eras have witnessed a “year of the woman“: a surge in women elected to public office, fueled by national conversations around high-profile sexual misconduct cases and a rising tide of women’s outrage and resistance. In the wake of Hill’s testimony, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1991, expanding legal recourse for victims of workplace sexual harassment, and feminist activism led to the widespread implementation of anti-sexual harassment programs in workplaces across the country. Similarly, the Women’s March and the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements marked a long-overdue cultural shift in the collective tolerance of sexual misconduct. Yet, despite these advancements, fundamental change remains elusive. Twenty-five years after Jagged Little Pill shook the music world, we find ourselves in a state of cultural déjà vu.
This enduring relevance is powerfully underscored by the Jagged Little Pill musical, which premiered on Broadway in December 2019. Written by Diablo Cody and featuring iconic Alanis Morissette songs from the 1995 album and beyond, the musical centers on The Healys—a seemingly perfect suburban Connecticut family grappling with hidden struggles. The show confronts themes of sexual assault and trauma head-on, emphasizing the crucial importance of trusting women’s voices as a catalyst for dismantling a culture of pervasive misogyny and victim-blaming. The musical’s positive reception signals a degree of cultural progress in acknowledging the themes Alanis explored decades ago, at least on a surface level. In his New York Times review of the show, Jesse Green aptly describes it as a summation “of our world’s worst ills but also the way song can summon resistance to them.” While the public embrace of art that confronts sexual misconduct is encouraging, the play also serves as a potent reminder of the long road ahead. The presence of alleged predators in positions of power, from the White House to the Supreme Court, underscores the ongoing struggle.
It’s no surprise that confessional women artists like Morissette have been so frequently patronized by cultural gatekeepers.
In a meta-theatrical moment within the Jagged Little Pill musical, the character Frankie performs “Ironic” as a creative writing piece in class. When her classmates critique her work for its lack of technical irony—a clear nod to the relentless criticism leveled at Morissette’s lyrics for the same reason—a new student, Phoenix, defends her: “You’re obviously a great writer,” he states. “Their only defense is to be super literal.” This scene encapsulates the pervasive patronizing of confessional women artists like Morissette by cultural gatekeepers. Throughout history, women have harnessed their anger and personal narratives to expose societal inequities. The consistent dismissal of their voices is not accidental; it stems from a calculated understanding by those in power that “in the fury of women lies the power to change the world,” as Rebecca Traister argues in Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger, a book exploring the numerous social movements ignited by women’s collective outrage.
Before the global pandemic disrupted live music, Alanis Morissette was poised to embark on a tour celebrating the 25th anniversary of Jagged Little Pill, coinciding with the release of her new album Such Pretty Forks in the Road. I had eagerly anticipated seeing her at the Xfinity Theater in Hartford, Connecticut—formerly Meadows Music Center—the same venue where I experienced my second-ever concert in the summer of 1996, with Radiohead opening for her. I attended with my older sister and her friends, a transformative period in my own life: recently heartbroken from my 8th-grade boyfriend and on the cusp of starting high school. I even revisited that first heartbreak recently, writing a poem about him, simply because, why not? Our first kiss unfolded in a local two-dollar movie theater. When he ended our brief romance, he delivered the news over a cordless phone in my bedroom, uttering the unforgettable line that relationships are like books; “you can like the beginning but you might not like the end.” I mourned for weeks, until, inevitably, a new boy entered the picture. It was a profoundly earth-shattering experience, and yet, utterly ordinary in the grand tapestry of teenage life. And if I possessed Alanis’s courage and lyrical prowess, perhaps I too would sing about it on the radio.
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